Intellectual Lab: Humans and Environmental Change
The Academic Coordinator of the Intellectual Lab: Julia Lajus, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of History.
The lab focuses on interdisciplinary research that is engaged, both intellectually and in practice, with environmental change as it relates to humans and society. It encourages the students to think about the ecological challenges of today as being rooted in the past and tightly connected with the history of human society, and helps them to master the basic toolkit of historical research – including finding and evaluating sources, creating and critiquing context, building and dissecting narratives – in order to elaborate solutions to practical problems of the environmental policy-making.
The lab theoretically relies on the environmental governance approach which emphasizes the connection of people to the ecosystems in which they live and stimulates embedding the environment in all levels of decision-making and action. Environmental governance also pays attention to collective decision-making on the environment as a multi-actor and multi-level process, and new ways of regulation and collaboration in an increasingly complex, risky and globalized world. This approach cultivates common human responsibility for the environment and can providea fruitful ground for an effective problem-solving activity in the lab.
Students will be offered to:
- analyze problem situations in the human-nature relationship, both on the global and on the local scale
- present their own historically informed solutions to specific cases, which would take into account both the needs of human development and the environmental sustainability.
The range of problem situations can be wide, including adaptation of cities to climate change, building nuclear power plants close to recreation zones, extracting mineral resources in protected areas, the use of gene modification to maintain biodiversity, and other topics. As a result, the students will develop their collective projects aimed at problem solving and defend them publicly.
Description of the Lab
Laboratory Programme
Supervisor of the Lab and tutors
Associate Professor, Department of History
Research Fellow
Research Fellow
Research Fellow
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