Changing Nature – Changing Sciences? The challenges of global environmental change research for the social sciences and humanities
The focus of the joint ISSC-CIPSH symposium will be to further stimulate and advance debate about the social sciences and humanities contributions, challenges, and capacities to advance global environmental change research.
The symposium will be jointly organized by the International Social Science Council (ISSC) and the Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies (CIPSH), at the ISSC General Assembly. it will draw together the work of ISSC programmes in this area i.e. IHDP, IRDR and CROP (programmes that have strong partnerships with scholars and institutions in the majority world) and will explore the substantive and methodological issues and epistemological assumptions of the notion of “global sustainability” that arise as efforts are made to meet the challenge of working across the sciences and the north-south divide in a more integrated way. It will also highlight current important social science and humanities knowledge gaps and priorities and how these best can be addressed.
The symposium will examine issues of sustainability related to processes of globalisation, inequality, migration, food security, economic growth and development, cultural diversity, human rights, and social justice. These will be viewed with regard to factors likely to shape the future: from the challenge of addressing the linked issues of eradicating poverty and managing climate change, to population and migration change, to new technologies, demographic change, societal preferences and attitudes, the policy and regulatory frameworks and forms of governance. The symposium will also address the issues of scale, including opportunities for intervention at both the micro and macro level.
Finally, it will consider the ethical dimensions of global environmental change, as well as the interrelations between science, power and politics that can help us understand and overcome societal inaction despite the growing scientific evidence about global environmental change and consumption patterns that threaten to undermine human well-being, development goals, and the preservation of planetary life-supporting systems.
