Beyond crisis/Beyond normal will be an essential meeting place for Social Sciences and Humanities scholars broadly working under the umbrella of sustainability.
The conference will explore aspects of sustainability across everyday life, politics, technology, art, and innovation through a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives.
This conference is relevant for researchers from Social Sciences and Humanities, and for other researchers and stakeholders interested in exploring what the social sciences and humanities can offer to debates about this topic.
The program will be available in summer 2023.
The conference will be held at DIGS, Krambugata 2, in the centre of Trondheim.
We live in times characterized by environmental, social, and economic turmoil. The global temperature is rising, while the loss of biodiversity is accelerating. Social, economic, and spatial inequalities are increasing, and socio-political polarization makes compromises across diverse interests difficult.
As words like “shifts”, “transitions” or “transformations” are increasingly becoming household concepts in mainstream policy making, the social sciences and humanities (SSH) can and should play a pivotal role both in making sense of the conditions that we live under, and in formulating ways forward for contemporary societies.
Beyond crisis/Beyond normal will be an essential meeting place for SSH scholars broadly working under the umbrella of sustainability. The conference comes at a crucial juncture for contemporary societies. On the one hand, immediate crises and war color key debates. On the other hand, one must re-think what new normals we might produce on the other side of these crises.
The conference recognizes the need to move beyond mere technological solutionism, to fundamentally probe what it could mean to live in just and sustainable societies and how these can be achieved. This entails grappling with difficult questions such as how societies should be organized, why it is so difficult to break out of extractive fossil fueled capitalism, how to deal with and make sense of controversies and trade-offs, as well as probing what justice might entail.
The conference will explore aspects of sustainability across everyday life, politics, technology, art, and innovation through a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives. The conference seeks to enable new academic conversations, strengthen ties between SSH communities, and increase the collective impact of SSH research, perspectives, and conversations on broader societal developments.