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SAMKUL-Samfunnsutviklingens kulturell

SUSTAINABILITY: Exploring a post-mechanistic turn in human and biological sciences as a cultural prerequisite for future sustainability.

Awarded: NOK 0.25 mill.

A background for the project proposal was the project OVERHEATING: the three crises of globalisation (SAI, UiO). Headlines for these crises were 1) environment/climate, 2) economy/finance, 3) identity, culture and religion. Common to all of them are issues of threatened sustainability or reproducibility. The SUSTAINABILITY project wanted to see if a more dynamic (emergentist) and radical interdisciplinarity could contribute to a better understanding of the crucial concept of sustainability. The project's main activity was a 3-day (27-29th of June 2016) international workshop on sustainability and radical interdisciplinarity featuring leading scholars from evolutionary biology (Terrence Deacon (UC Berkeley), David Sloan Wilson (SUNY Binghamton)), political economy (Kalle Moene and Desmond McNeill (UiO), Carlo Aall (Vestforsk)), and anthropology (Tim Ingold (U of Aberdeen)). Our main empirical example was the initiative REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in developing countries) presented by Lars Løvold director of Rainforest Foundation Norway. Chairs and transdisciplinary hosts were Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Henrik Sinding-Larsen Dept. of social anthropology, UiO. The project also produced a public meeting at Litteraturhuset where we shared our findings, a follow-up project proposal to the RCN-program KLIMAFORSK, and edited films from the workshop and the public meeting for distribution through NRK-Kunnskapskanalen and the project web-pages: http://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/projects/sustainability/index.html A report/journal article analyzing sustainability and the theme of interdisciplinarity as discussed in the videos is planned for publication in 2018.

A background for the proposal is the project OVERHEATING: the three crises of globalisation (Social Anthropology, UiO). Headlines for the crises are 1) environment/climate, 2) economy/finance, 3) identity, culture and religion. Common to all of them is threatened sustainability or reproducibility. To obtain a more holistic approach to global issues of sustainability, the applicants want to arrange an international and interdisciplinary workshop. The workshop will begin by exploring sustainability through a new possible common theoretical ground across the social sciences and biology based on recent advances within social anthropology, economics and evolutionary biology. These theoretical advances may represent a turn from a more mechanistic to a more organic world-view. We see a trend of changes in emphasis: from structure to process, from elementary particles to elementary dynamics, from hierarchies to networks, from unilateral control to synergistic entanglement, from given individuals to emergent individualities, from external design to endogenous development, from evolution to co-evolution. As long as the left side of this list of binaries is considered as unquestionably primary, then a reductionist and mechanistic approach to sustainability as well as many other issues dominated by natural science could continue unhindered. If the right side was strengthened, then the balance of power between human and natural science might change. We see these conceptual changes as an important cultural prerequisite for a more sustainable societal development. The second part of the workshop will test the new theories against sustainability issues in Norwegian aquaculture. The project will produce a research proposal for a follow up project on sustainability and interdisciplinary dialogue, possibly within the upcoming HAV21 program. An outcome will also be a public meeting (at Litteraturhuset) as well as a collective scientific paper based on the experiences of the workshop.

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SAMKUL-Samfunnsutviklingens kulturell