With collaborators within the OCC! Goes Global we are welcoming to an online two-weekend interdisciplinary winter school inviting early career researchers (master’s students in their advanced thesis phase, Ph.D. students, and postdocs) to explore climate change and its consequences of loss and damage,  for those interested in environmental justice, climate justice, environmental humanities, environmental history, media studies, political ecology, literature/ storytelling. The winter school is for those interested in interdisciplinary research and direct action,  urban climate justice movements, the role of mainstream/counter-hegemonic imaginaries within climate change policies, and  would like to contribute to the Atlas of the Other World with their original research and creative works. The school is free of tuition.

Organized by

Environmental Humanities Laboratory, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology),  Sweden 

in collaboration with 

Istituto di Studi sul Mediterraneo (CNR-ISMed), Italy

Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Wayne State University, USA

University of Cincinnati, USA 

Instituto de História, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

NTNU Environmental Humanities, ​​Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway

College of Staten Island, City University of New York, USA

Namibia University, Namibia

ARCò Architecture and cooperation, Italy 

Department of Architecture, University “Federico II” Napoli, Italy

Department of Contemporary History, Faculty of Bachelor and Arts & Research Group STAND (South Training Action Network of Decoloniality), University of Granada, Spain

Call for Applications

If you prefer to read the Call for Applications as PDF, you can click here.

We live in an age of loss. Breaking off ice shelves, vanishing landscapes, destroyed cultural heritage, and abandoned homes due to social, cultural, economic, political, and ecological conflicts of all sorts. The problem with loss is its intricacy with emotions, feelings, and personal attachments. Rightly so, ecological economists have spoken of the incommensurability of values in their analysis of environmental conflicts, stressing the clash between different regimes of knowledge. 

Thereby, it is not surprising that loss remains poorly theorized and even more scarcely addressed in contemporary climate politics, particularly when it comes to the local scale. 

One way to move forward in tackling loss and damage is knowledge co-production and situated participatory research with communities most likely to experience loss. In fact, the focus on loss and damage unfolds the mainstream rhetoric on win-win strategies and moral efforts towards a superior common good; the reality of climate change is that of unequal distribution not only of harms but also of benefits.

As loss and damage issues remain understudied, so the consequences of climate change on the city also are neglected in the literature. Scholars have worked on the impacts of climate change in rural communities and on their strategies of adaptation, leaving unexplored the same problems in the urban environment.

OCC! project ( Formas-funded) explores the grassroots social innovations in the urban environment and their relationships with municipal initiatives. Science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin argued that we live in a crisis of imagination; many have said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than imagining another world. OCC! wishes to ignite an imaginative exploration into the future through a creative writing exercise, imagining how would the place where you live look like in year 2200?

In order to build capacity and provide spaces for mutual learning on these themes, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, in partnership with scholars from the Institute for Studies on the Mediterranean, Wayne State University, University of Cincinnati, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro,  ARCò Architecture and cooperation, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Namibia University,  University “Federico II” Napoli, and the City University of New York are inviting early career researchers (master’s students in their advanced thesis phase, Ph.D. students, and postdocs) for an interdisciplinary winter school which will include perspectives from the broadly defined fields of environmental justice, climate justice, environmental humanities, environmental history, media studies, political ecology, storytelling and cli-fi among others. The training school will include both lecture format and group-work sessions (a more detailed description of the school is below). The objectives of the course include; Acquiring knowledge on urban climate justice movements; being able to analyze how different social/ethnic groups are unequally affected by climate change, and reflecting on the role of mainstream/counter-hegemonic imaginaries for enhancing climate change policies.

A key aspect of the winter school is also to contribute to the online open-access database The Atlas of the Other Worlds which is part of the OCC! project. In this database three types of materials are gathered; entries on municipal/regional/local initiatives to tackle climate change; entries on grassroots initiatives to tackle climate change and short creative stories imagining a city/town 200 years from now. Each student is requested to contribute with at least one entry (ideally two) to the Atlas of the Other Worlds, as their final assignment. Before working on the final assignment, each student must discuss the selected entry with the coordinators of the school. The entries will be revised and if accepted published in The Atlas. To know more about the project, its Atlas, and the kind of entries we are looking for, contact armiero@kth.se. 

Students admitted to the school will:

• receive a certificate signed by the coordinators of the school stating the amount of work done during the course (equivalent to 3.5 ECTS);
• publish their final assignments as part of the OCC! Atlas, pending approval by the coordinators of the school.

PLEASE NOTE that for this first edition of the school, we will not be able to provide official ECTS to the students. Each student will need to ask their university for a validation of the CFU, if needed.

The online winter school has no tuition fee.

Application

To apply for the winter school, please send the following by 10th of December 2021 to armiero@kth.se: 

1. Max. 2-page CV
2. Max. 1-page motivation letter 
3. 250-word abstract on the final assignment. For the final assignment, you are supposed to write one or two entries for the OCC! Atlas. The entries can be:

• Entries on municipal/regional/local initiatives to tackle climate change (for instance: the city of xxx promoting cycling as an alternative to private car mobility)
• Entries on a grassroots initiative to tackle climate change (for instance: an urban gardening project in a working-class neighborhood in xxx) 
• Short creative stories imagining a city/town in 200 years from now (this is a creative writing exercise, imagine your city in the year 2200)

Please do not hesitate to contact us in case you wish more information about the kind of entries we wish to gather. The selected participants will be notified by 15 December 2021. For further information, please contact: armiero@kth.se

Confirmed Lecturers with respective fields of expertise

• Marco Armiero ( KTH Environmental Humanities Lab, Sweden & Istituto di Studi sul Mediterraneo (CNR-ISMed), Italy) environmental humanities, and political ecolog
• Alessio Battistella (ARCò –  Architecture and cooperation, Italy) sustainable architecture, and community development 
• Gilda Berruti, (Department of Architecture, University “Federico II” Napoli, Italy) urban studies and governance 
• Ashley Dawson (College of Staten Island, City University of New York) urban studies, and resilient design
• Robert Gioielli (University of Cincinnati, USA) race and sustainability, environmental institutions, and urban environmental history
• Hanna Musiol (NTNU Environmental Humanities, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway) literary studies, transmedia storytelling, and human rights
• Maria Federica Palestino (Department of Architecture, University “Federico II” Napoli, Italy) urban studies and governance 
• Elena Past (Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Wayne State University, USA) Italian cinema, and environmental media studies
• Lise Sedrez (Instituto de História, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) ​​latin american history, history of disasters, and urban environmental history
• Bruno Venditto (Istituto di Studi sul Mediterraneo (CNR-ISMed)  & Namibia University)  migration, development, and economics
• Antonio Ortega Santos (Department of Contemporary History, Faculty of Bachelor and Arts & Research Group STAND (South Training Action Network of Decoloniality), University of Granada, Spain) environmental conflicts and socioenviromental vulnerability

Description of the school

OCC! training school will all be online and will include online lecture sessions, seminars, and laboratory activities.

For more information about the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, please visit: https://www.kth.se/en/abe/inst/philist/historia/ehl