Networks
At the Heisenberg professorship of Global Environmental History and Environmental Humanities we have research relationships to the following networks:
Network of Environmental History (IEK) International Doctorate Program „Rethinking Environment“
Network Environmental History
The Um-Welt (german word play focusing the environment in our surroundings) is around humans every day-to-day life. It is over, under, around and in us. In the environmental history, it counts as a historical basic category and opened the research of past attributions of meaning, events and structures of the ever changing relationship between humans and the rest of nature.
Environmental history at the university of Augsburg reaches from the antiquity to the present, from the historical recording of climate change, eating habits and contamination to the ecological economics of the Enlightenment. It is equally regional and global.
The Network of Environmental History regularly meets at the Institute of European Cultural History (IEK). If you are interested in the historical exploration of the interrelationship between humans and the rest of nature, you are very welcome.
International Doctorate Program "Rethinking Environment"
In German, Um(Welt)Denken is a wordplay combining the term “environment” (Umwelt) with the verb “rethinking” (umdenken). The project’s name comes from the need to rethink human relationships with the world we, as a species, inhabit. A partnership between Augsburg University and the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, the international doctorate program (Internationales Doktorand:innenkolleg – IDK) Rethinking Environment brings together young scholars and experienced experts from various fields to explore new ways of approaching the ecological transformation of society.
The international doctorate program "Rethinking Environment: The Environmental Humanities and the Ecological Transformation of Society" is promoted by the Elitenetzwerk Bayern.
Research Project "Deadly Dreams"
The Deadly Dreams research project is a transdisciplinary social and cultural historical network studying environmental poisons in everyday life, between 1850 and 2024. They study peoples’ cultural relation to environmental poisons over time, and at a variety of arenas within private, professional, and political life.
Deadly Dreams is an environmental humanities research network, headed by professor May-Brith Ohman Nielsen, who is professor for history at the university of Agder and professor for historical didactics at the university of Karlstad.
The primary objective of the Deadly Dreams research project is to contribute with new and advanced knowledge from the humanities and social sciences that can help historicise, understand, and handle the challenges posed by the ubiquitous environmental poisons. The research network includes more than 11 scientific institutions and more than 20 researchers. Together they represent 14 different fields of research.
Working Group "Social Resilience"
The working group “Social Resilience” handles the dynamic research field of social resilience which researches the ability of individuals, communities and societies to cope with challenges and adversities and recover from them.
Main points are the necessity of integrating ideas for resilience from different disciplines and the research of processes of resilience especially for cases in which science and scientific evidence play a major role.
The working group, founded in 2022, consists of multidisciplinary researchers from 11 disciplines (communication science, computer science, economics, geography education, history, human geography, law, political science, psychology, sociology and theology) who offer their perspectives to conceptualise and investigate social resilience in socio-scientific dilemmas.