Professor Dr Steven Hartman (University of Iceland) and Professor Joni Adamson (Arizona State University)
January 19, 2023 | 17.45 [5.45 pm] GMT+1 | via zoom
To register and receive the zoom link for this event, please contact Claudia Veltman (claudia.veltman[at]uni-koeln.de)
In this online public lecture, Professor Steven Hartman (University of Iceland) and Professor Joni Adamson (Arizona State University) will discuss their collaboration with UNESCO in the creation of BRIDGES, the humanities-driven Sustainability Science Coalition of UNESCO’s Management of Social Transformations (MOST) programme.
Anchored both in and outside UNESCO, the BRIDGES Coalition is a major strategic undertaking in the co-design and co-production of research, education and public action in support of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) internationally. Though anchored in the humanities, BRIDGES is designed to go beyond this domain; it is aimed at broadening sustainability science by bringing multiple forms of knowledge and engagement, including local and indigenous knowledge as well as the arts, qualitative social sciences, to bear in efforts to meet the challenges of the global sustainability agenda. In his part of the talk, Professor Steven Hartman will underscore new initiatives and new capacities that BRIDGES is working to realize in integrated knowledge production with a strong humanities anchoring. Emphasis will be placed on efforts under way to connect different domains of science, humanities and the arts with non-academic communities of knowledge and practice that based on transdisciplinary modalities of knowledge production.
The network of HfE Observatories, founded in 2013, is working globally to innovate humanities-led projects and transform educational possibilities and practices for the next three critical decades. In her part of the talk, Professor Joni Adamson will describe exemplary projects, such as the trans-Observatory From Syndemic to Symbiosis project and a recent co-organized Global Humanities Institute held at the University of Pretoria supporting early-career faculty, to illustrate how HfE is drawing on anticolonial, antiracist, feminist, and multispecies scholarship, and knowledges developed both inside and outside of academia, to co-design community-led solutions and alternatives for survivable, thrivable futures. Furthermore, the HfE’s work in coalition with the UNESCO BRIDGES Sustainability Coalition will be highlighted.
Professor Steven Hartman (Faculty of History and Philosophy, University of Iceland)
Steven Hartman is Founding Executive Director of the BRIDGES Sustainability Science Coalition in UNESCO’s Management of Social Transformations programme, based at Arizona State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and Flagship Hub of BRIDGES established there in 2022. He is also Visiting Professor in the Faculty of History and Philosophy, University of Iceland. Steven’s work addresses integration of the humanities in global change research, and collaboration among social and human scientists, artists, education specialists and civil society in efforts to meet sustainability challenges of the present and foreseeable future.
Professor Joni Adamson (Department of English and Environmental Humanities, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University)
Joni Adamson is President’s Professor of Environmental Humanities and Secretary General of the Humanities for the Environment Global Network based at Arizona State University’s Global Futures Laboratory. Her environmental humanities organizational activities over the years have included service as the 2012 president of ASLE, the largest EH organization in the world, and as Founding Director (1998-2011) of the Environmental Justice Caucus of the American Studies Association (ASA-ECC). She co-edits the Routledge Environmental Humanities book series and is the author and/or co-editor of nine books and special issues, including Humanities for the Environment, Keywords for Environmental Studies, Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies, and American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Ecology. She was the 2019 Benjamin N. Duke Fellow at the National Humanities Center of the US.