Upcoming events:

• 2025 Winter Session: Workshop on “Expertise and politics in climate change knowledge”
  27-28 February 2025, Department of Linguistics, Philosophy and Theory of science, Gothenburg University, Sweden.
  Call for papers | Program

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• 2025 Summer Session: “Theorising Sustainability Transitions: Knowledge actors, pathways and concepts”
  (CfA to be announced by 15 January 2025)
  20 July– 28 July 2025, NSU Summer Session, Finland
  

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Past events:

• Invited PhD summer school/circle: “Act, React & Reflect: Meta-perspectives on climate change knowledge”
  29 July – 5 August 2024, Løgumkloster Højskole, Denmark
  Programme

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About Circle 7: Act, React & Reflect: Meta-perspectives on climate change knowledge

This three-year study circle is a continuation of the successful 2024 invited circle and PhD summer school.

The aim of this circle is to explore the challenges, posed by the need to take on the multiple interlocking challenges caused by climate change, for our conventional ways of producing and thinking about knowledge. In processes ranging from the production of increasingly sophisticated climate data and modelling, through anticipatory models and governance of its societal effects, theorizing about possible and desirable transition pathways and policy measures, to mobilizations by activist as well as climate deniers, boundaries between researchers and stakeholders are being blurred and the role of science (natural and social) in society is being renegotiated.

The notion of a transition to a sustainable society raises questions about previously established roles of academic research and researchers in democratic societies. Scientific knowledge claims are not only motivating global societal transformation. Their implications have also increasingly become the subject of political debate, where an increasing number of scientists have taken on activist roles. These developments challenge an established understanding of science as non-partisan and value-free, as well conceptions of the relation between expertise, politics, and forms of governance.

This study circle aims to provide a space to reflect on this situation and the questions it raises and what it all might entail in a Nordic+Baltic and global context. We focus on the role of knowledge as it is used to ACT on climate change towards sustainable societal transitions in different context and by different actors, how REACTION is formed and organized, producing or harnessing knowledge to deny climate change or obstruct political change, and on REFLECTION on the role of knowledge production and knowledge agents in relation to climate change and sustainability transitions.

The overarching aim of the study circle is to establish and grow a Nordic-Baltic research network centered on meta-perspectives on climate knowledge. In the democratic, non-hierarchical and bottom-up spirit of the study circle, we hope to facilitate an organically growing network, linking young researchers and other actors in the region.

The format is centered on in-depth discussion of papers submitted primarily by junior scholars. In addition, we invite senior scholars and keynote speakers, as well as practitioners and stakeholders, and collaborating partners in joint workshops and outreach activities.

Six themes run through the three-year circle. We devote each session to one of these themes, while we also invite contributions focusing on other subthemes.

• Experts and expertise. The theme involves the role of experts as knowledge brokers, the role of scientists and expertise in policy processes and in the public sphere, and contested climate expertise. We further invite rethinking the role of expertise and academic knowledge in the post-truth era. For example, it is well known that a common tactic of climate deniers is to undermine public trust in climate expertise (Oreskes & Conway, 2012). At the same time, overconfidence in the ability of experts to reduce complex political questions to technical puzzles can lead to real problems of legitimacy and confidence in public policy (Wynne, 2003). Balancing between the extremes of repressive technocracy and “anything goes” post-truth, questions about the role of experts in the climate crisis connect our ideas of what knowledge and society is and should be (Durant, 2011).

• Planning, markets, and economics. The challenges invoked by the need for increasingly ambitious and radical societal transformation to meet the Paris agreement include reconsidering the role of economic growth and neoliberal assumptions (Mirowski, 2014). As increasingly highlighted both by more ambitious policies to address grand societal challenges (Kuhlmann & Rip, 2018; Schot & Steinmueller, 2018) and the degrowth literature (Warlenius 2023), and underlined by the geopolitical demise of neoliberalism, free markets and economic growth are no longer taken-for-granted primary societal goals. We invite both theoretical and empirical reflection on the role of planning and competition in the economy, the planning and governance of transition processes, and the production and use of academic economics knowledge.

• Academic engagement and activism. This theme encompasses various topics related to researchers’ use of climate science communication and its reception by various audiences, academic researchers’ modes of societal engagement (Perez Vico, 2018), ranging from policy experts and think-tank collaboration to academic activism as a mode of engagement, research communication as activism (Graminius, 2023), and the role and use of research-based knowledge of climate and transitions in social movements, labor unions and civil society (Frickel, 2004; Frickel et al., 2015; Hess, 2022).

• Climate denial and obstruction. A range of actors and movements are outright contesting climate knowledge and expertise, whether through outright denial of climate change, or through obstruction and delay of climate transitions (Oreskes & Conway, 2012). We invite reflection on theoretical and empirical approaches on epistemic engagement and contestation employed in cases of denialism, for example in social media discourse, mobilization against renewables, organized think tank campaigns, and political mobilization against transition policies.

• Theorizing sustainability transitions. We welcome contributions that address and theorize socio-technical transition processes. Topics may include critical engagement with the sustainability transitions literature (Köhler et al., 2019; Markard et al., 2012), theoretical contributions engaging with the role of data and knowledge, culture and ideology, or future visions and imaginaries in transition processes. We invite critical engagement with dominant theoretical perspectives (Geels, 2011), as well as introduction of novel theoretical and conceptual contributions to transition theory.
  
• Boundaries in knowledge production. Climate and sustainability sciences are inherently interdisciplinary fields. An increasing policy focus on grand societal challenges and “mode II” science-society interaction creates both opportunities and challenges related to construction, negotiation and contestation of epistemic boundaries (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1994; Nowotny et al. 2011). We encourage reflection on the significance of boundaries and boundary work (Lamont & Molnár, 2002) and inter- and transdisciplinary challenges in climate- and transition-related knowledge production, through issues relating to the evaluation and impact of inter- and transdisciplinary research (Lamont, 2012), to reflections on the nature of inter- and transdisciplinary climate knowledge.

ECTS credits for PhD students. Through NSU, participants in our summer and winter sessions will be granted ECTS credits for active participation (with preparation, presentation and discussion of papers). More detailed information will be provided in each sessions’ CfP.