P000191, Time & Sustainability, 1.5 Hp
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Syllabus

Level

Third cycle

Subject

Other social science

Grading Scale

One-grade scale

The grade requirements within the course grading system are set out in specific criteria. These criteria must be available by the course start at the latest.

Course language

English

Entry Requirements

Objectives

1. Interrogate and understand how temporal assumptions shape their own practices and their discipline’s approach to research
2. Use diverse tools to notice and make visible competing human and multi-species temporalities at play in sustainability transitions and transformations
3. Support participants to critically reflect on the way that timing mechanisms and practices inform academic and social debates about sustainability issues
4. Consider how to work creatively with a repertoire of tools to diagnose how time is at play in your own research study and open up new areas for working with time in your own research.
5. Become comfortable and familiar with working in interdisciplinary teams, recognising and learning from diverse perspectives and methods.

Content

Achieving sustainable transformations is an interdisciplinary challenge demanding both scientific and social scientific expertise. Ecologists and climate scientists will need to work and act alongside political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists and environmental communications specialists if they are to achieve the sorts of social and practical changes needed to protect and regenerate thriving ecosystems. Despite this, students from all fields rarely get a chance to work in a sustained fashion alongside those from different disciplines.

This course will create an exciting interdisciplinary learning community bringing together students from Ecology and Environmental Communications/Humanities (in the main), with those working in adjacent fields across Sweden. They will come together to address a rapidly growing new research topic that is becoming critically important across sustainability debates in all disciplines: the question of TIME.

While spatial differences are well understood in the field of sustainability transitions, less attention has been given to how time – more specifically, how different time frames, timing mechanisms, timing processes, time measures, rhythms and temporal narratives – influence both research practices and political decisions. Indeed, despite the fact that key sustainability conflicts are characterised by temporal conflicts – the mismatch between ecological and political time frames, the divergence in plant and pollinator timing as a result of climate change - time remains poorly understood in Ecology and Environmental Communication/Humanities. This matters because timing decisions have the potential to create significant negative impacts for those whose voices are rarely heard – the ecosystems whose existence is threatened and the marginalised communities whose livelihoods are at stake.

This new topic, which is rapidly developing internationally, is therefore particularly relevant to students who have an interest in how conflicts and tensions arise in sustainability debates and how these might be addressed in new ways. It will be of significant interest to those whose research engages with stakeholders – such as municipalities, industry partners, policy makers, community activists, farmers, citizen scientists – as well as living ecologies – soils, land, water, insects, animals.

Examination Formats and Requirements for Passing the Course

- Attendance at all sessions and active participation in group discussions.  - Contributing one concept/word/example to the collective glossary - Contribution to the joint presentation on day 5 - There will be an expectation to listen to one podcast and read two documents before attending the course and to participate in group dialogues and presentations throughout the three days.

Responsible Department/Equivalent

Department of Ecology

Supplementary information

Other Information

This summer school is supported by the Society for Transformative Conversations, the August T Larsson Guest Professorship at SLU, the British Academy Times of a Just Transition Programme, and the Centre for Anthropocene History at KTH