Climate change is a social issue! Reframing and shaping climate’s narratives, geographies, histories, and politics

Summary

Climate change and sustainability are social issues, to a large extent perpetuated by social, political, and economic systems that shape and govern our access to resources, livelihood possibilities, and capacity to change, as well as to utilise old and new technologies and livelihood practices in order to mitigate and adapt to new realities. Furthermore, the way we talk about and frame these issues also shapes how we conceive of solutions and our abilities as individuals and communities to act.

Cambridge Zero and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) invite you to the Symposium ‘Climate change is a social issue! The symposium will bring into focus the impact and contributions the social sciences, arts, and humanities have had on climate and sustainability-related discussions, ranging from engaging communities and practitioners to instigate climate action; (re-)framing climate and environmental narratives, solutions, and technologies; allaying emotions of anxieties, grief and loss; contextualising the ‘place’, geographies, and politics of green transitions and climate-related negotiations; to creating usable and applied histories and archaeologies. Changing our understanding of climate change and sustainability issues, how they arose, and how they can exacerbate unjust transitions is a huge endeavour that is hard to quantify and hardly recognised, but has potentially huge social impacts.

The symposium will feature a number of keynote presentations from senior Cambridge academics, and we are inviting submissions from Early Career Researchers (Cambridge Postdocs, PhD and Masters students) to present their research. The symposium aims is to highlight the necessity of social science, humanities, and arts research around climate change as well as to strengthen collaboration cross-disciplinary collaboration including with STEM disciplines, business, and others, in order to make social, policy, economic, and technological advances more impactful at local and national scales.

If you have specific accessibility needs for this event please get in touch. We will do our best to accommodate any requests.

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