Aims – UM(WELT)DENKEN

1. Transforming Disciplines

Our doctorate program Rethinking Environment provides a space for meaningful intellectual conversations across a broad range of disciplines from the humanities and social sciences – and a few of our advisors and Ph.D. students have their academic roots in the natural sciences. Ambitious and complex, this interdisciplinary network moves well beyond Academia and seeks close relations to NGOs, practitioners, business companies, museums, and public institutions. It is only by interacting fruitfully with the non-academic world that Rethinking Environment can be inspirational and contribute to a more sustainable, common future.

Our vision is thus fundamentally optimistic, but we are aware of the challenges attached to this unusual academic endeavor. For instance, a conversation between a human geologist, a literary studies scholar, and a historian can lead to frustration when vocabularies are not shared. Because certain terms have distinct disciplinary meanings — such as “sustainability”, “narrative”, “experience” —, our fields are punctured by tensions, ambiguities and misunderstandings. Therefore, Rethinking Environment entails an open and determined attitude to listen to other disciplines and to include multi-perspective and contradictory views in one’s own background. Such an approach is academically challenging because it must maintain the existing disciplinary forms of knowledge and expertise while actively enriching them with the insights, themes, and approaches from other fields. Rethinking Environment includes a radical re-adjustment of existing academic landscapes: to make them more permeable, less fixed, and heading toward new, as yet unknown horizons.

2. Transforming Science

In many societies and nations world-wide, there is a new consensus that, in order to avoid further ecological degradation and disaster, societies must undergo large-scale socio-ecological transformation processes. But what does “transformation” really mean, in this context? Rethinking Environment is not only about transforming disciplines but also aims at re-thinking established discourses of transformation, most of which have a strong grounding in the natural sciences.

Ecological transformation is inclusive: it becomes visible in offshore wind farms, it is called for by global protest groups, it takes place within individuals who change the way they interact with non-human species. Transformation is, thus, linked to concrete and multifaceted human actions requiring reflection, analysis, and evaluation. Our doctorate program takes on this task by combining various disciplines in one research project, and by emphasizing the dialogue between all the research projects involved.

This multidisciplinary approach is bound to change not only the disciplines involved but also the way we perceive environmental science as a research area dominated by physical, biological, and information sciences. With a focus on the cultural aspects surrounding various phenomena such as landscape degradation, large-scale agriculture, or marine debris, and an approach from the viewpoints of Human Geography, Philosophy, Ethnology, or Environmental Ethics, Rethinking Environment seeks to inspire the environmental sciences, creating a partnership with a shared transformational spirit.

The picture shows our doctorate students saving a bird that flew against a window.

Kirsten Twelbeck

3. Transforming Practice

To actively care for the environment is something we aim to do consistently, as scholars in the Environmental Humanities. The IDK Um(Welt)Denken is built on the premise that being an expert entails a particular set of duties and obligations to serve the common good, including a critical stance when fundamental democratic norms are under attack.

We envision ourselves as working together with the communities that we, as academics, are a part of. Cooperation and outreach are key terms in our self-definition as a group of researchers who work in transformation studies: building lasting and sustainable relationships between science and socio-cultural practices is an integral part of doing, rather than just being academics. This is why Rethinking Environment cooperates very closely with Munich’s Deutsches Museum and the Biotopia Museum; its network includes a large group of Bavarian and international NGOs, public institutions, civic initiatives, and private companies.