Outreach

At IRI THESys, science communication aims not only to disseminate, but to connect and integrate stakeholders from society, academia, policy and beyond. Through various methods such as events, exhibitions, press work, IRI THESys works to increase awareness, engagement and participation with transformation research. IRI THESys also collaborates with the university-wide communication initiative Open Humboldt which connects Humboldt University researchers to a wider audience with projects such as the new sustainability portal Humboldts17. To check out some examples of past outreach events from IRI THESys, see THESys Public Lectures and  Member Lectures below.

Public Lectures

At THESys Public Lectures, internationally renowned guest speakers are invited to share their research both to the IRI THESys community and the general public. Experts discuss key components of transforming human-environment systems towards sustainability. Many of our public lectures are available on our YouTube Channel.

Member Lectures

THESys Member Lectures give THESys Members the opportunity to present their work in the context of IRI THESys. The lecture series acts as an internal stage where Members present their research interests and questions, methodological tools and data, conceptual framework and theories to their colleagues.

Prof. Dr. Hermann Lotze-Campen (PIK)

Modelling land use change in the context of climate change and sustainable development

Land use change is a core element of sustainable human development and provides multiple linkages between many Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This talk showed how different trade-offs and synergies between various SDGs can be assessed with complex computer models. Furthermore, it provided the basis for an open discussion about coherent policy instruments for managing sustainable land use in the future.

Dr. Stefan Schäfer (IASS)

Knowledge and Governance in the Climate Regime

The project Stefan Schäfer presented examines how dominant attempts to represent and govern the complex phenomenon of a changing climate are rooted in, and themselves in turn shape, ideas about “singular” things: The single planet Earth, the single CO2 molecule, and the single global market. In his talk, he traced how these ideas produce specific sameness and difference judgments and how the primacy of these judgments is problematic and contested in global governance—from the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 via its extension in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the “failure” at Copenhagen in 2009, and the most recent adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015. Schäfer paid particular attention to the role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in this history. The talk concluded with a reflection on the promises of the Paris Agreement, tendencies to decentralize authority in contemporary politics, and the advancing emergence of geoengineering onto mainstream scientific and political agendas.

Prof. Dr. Torsten Meireis (Berlin Institute for Public Theology)

Avatar. Ethics and the Culture of Sustainability

Using the popular movie ‘Avatar’ as an example, the talk elaborated on three theses: ‘Sustainability’ is a cultural entity, a notion consisting of concepts, symbols and images (1). Culture is never just an instrument or an element but also a pool or horizon of concepts and images as well as an agonal arena – this is also true in the context of sustainable development (2). Cultural and, among it, religious articulation can’t replace political and technical efforts to achieve sustainable development, but it has to go along with those (3).

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Photo Credit: Elisabeth Eichler, Santtu Laine and Karolina Spolniewski, 2015