The event takes place every first Thursday of the month during the semester from October through December and from February through June and is open to PhD students at the Lucerne School of Art and Design (HSLU), the National Institute of Design (NID), and other interested guests and PhD students from other universities.
Upcoming Event
Ludwig Weh “Environmental Futures— towards critical-transformative perspectives”
Thursday, 5 October 2023
12:00—13:15 (CET)
3:30 pm—4:45 pm (IST)
As an emerging field spanning sustainability research, human ecology, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and futures studies, environmental futures describe structured forms and ways of how people envision possible, probable and desirable images of human-nature relationships. There is a growing moral imperative for researchers to involve in ecological policymaking beyond the mere description of declining ecosystem health. This demand for a new ‘involving science communication’ creates novel roles and fields of activities for researchers formerly bound to strictly academic settings. This lecture takes the position that modern research and education need to establish continuities across a variety of no longer functional dichotomous distinctions, including human—nature; science—society; academic—non-academic; Western—non-Western; theory—practice; science—art. Scholars need to be literate and capable in facilitating multi-epistemic, multi-stakeholder and multi-method settings catering to audiences producing different types of knowledge from their diverse ways of knowing. And they need to translate scientific knowledge into accessible, ethically substantiated design interventions for mindfully transformative reframing of human-nature relationships towards desirable images of environmental futures.
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Ludwig Weh is a research fellow in the “Futures and Innovation Unit“ at the Fraunhofer Center for International Management and Knowledge Economy IMW.
Ludwig has a background in basic biomedical research with advanced education in the fields of applied social sciences and futures studies. He has been focusing on aspects of praxis relevance, participation and democratization of research processes, on transformative research and education as well as on science ethics and knowledge discourse at science-society interfaces.
Rooted in his thesis on ‘Future scenarios as tools of participatory science communication’ in sustainability research, Ludwig has developed epistemic and methodical premises for investigating environmental futures and human-nature relationships from a strongly interdisciplinary perspective. In this, he worked with concrete forms of participation in multiple-stakeholder processes building and applying ecosystem scenarios; based on epistemological premises, he developed an experimental framework for ecosystem scenario processes.
Most recently, Ludwig has been researching aspects of knowledge management and transfer, as well as roles of researchers in transdisciplinary research, as determining factors for the effectivity and integration of such practice-oriented processes. From an integrated STS and futures studies perspective, he is interested in how scientific knowledge can be translated effectively at science-society interfaces, and which methods are suited to support this.
A zoom link for the event will be emailed with the registration confirmation. For questions and further information: esi@hslu.ch
