The Centre for Environmental Humanities has received funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to hold three workshops on key terms for effective interdisciplinary environmental research: resilience, justice, and transitions. In line with NERC’s Environmental Solutions agenda, our work will be focused on two environmental challenges that are salient in Bristol and the West of England: pollution (including carbon and biodiversity loss) and extreme weather events. These sessions will bring together researchers from disciplines including earth sciences, biology, engineering, history, cultural studies, neuropsychology, and law, as well as non-academic partners from the ClimateCultures network and local community organisations. We are also planning engage creative partners such as writers and artists to find new formats for interdisciplinary conversations, so that we do not simply ‘talk past’ each other. Building on previous knowledge exchange initiatives such as Bristol Method+ and the Bristol Advisory Committee on Climate Change, the workshops will seek to answer three principal questions:
1. What are the obstacles to effective interdisciplinary conversations around the key terms of justice, resilience, and transitions, and how can they be overcome?
2. How can better interdisciplinary understandings of these terms help local communities take action on pollution and extreme weather events?
3. How can these new understandings be shared with other relevant stakeholders, such as local authorities and funding bodies?
The outcomes will include a co-authored methodological paper, and a toolkit addressing how research funders, local authorities and other relevant stakeholders can support community initiatives and impact-focused interdisciplinary research in relation to the local challenges of pollution and extreme weather events. The precise format and design of the toolkit will emerge from discussions in the workshops, but may build on models such as the business model canvas. We will also work with creative partners to produce a proof-of-concept version of an online multi-perspective glossary of key terms for environmental research and engagement, to be hosted on the ClimateCultures website.
Any solutions or effective responses to climate change impacts will need large diverse groups of people to come together. For solutions to be found, active communication across different disciplines is needed – and this is not always easy! With this in mind, the workshops will be structured so as to include a variety of distinct activities, including presentations from academic participants, discussions led by community partners, and creative brainstorming sessions. There will be a particular focus on how to bring high level theories of justice, resilience and transitions into day to day work, and conversely how insights from the practices of non-academic organisations can inform interdisciplinary scholarly debate. How, for instance, do academic discussions of behavioural change relate to actual social practice?
We hope the workshops will at least begin to answer these questions. Watch this space for more details of the project, which will run from January – March 2022 (PI Dr Paul Merchant, Co-Is Professor Daniela Schmidt and Dr Alicia Gonzalez-Buelga).
