Both advocates and critics of accelerated climate action and energy transition criticise the procedures and outputs of mainstream climate science. Climate philosophy highlights ideal analyses with little direct application in real world politics and activism. Social and political scientists offer uncertain answers on how change might be supported. Around us the impacts of climate change intensify, and responses within and beyond energy systems continue to fall short of the challenge, while public discourses fragment and polarise in a ‘post-truth’ political climate, in which research findings can be co-opted or misinterpreted to political ends. Some politicians and academics, and many activists, argue that we face a ‘climate emergency’.
For climate and energy researchers, what does it mean to be ‘engaged’ with the issues, publics and activism in an era of ‘climate emergency’? Is it possible or even desirable to avoid ‘taking sides’?
This virtual workshop will tackle these and related timely questions:
How should researchers respond to a climate emergency?
What value do activists see in different types of research, what do they want from the research community and how and why does this vary?
What does research credibility, legitimacy and independence mean for academics and activists?
What does engagement mean for activists and academics?
How can researchers constructively examine the pros and cons of the ‘climate emergency’ framing?
What models of engagement by activists and communities with researchers have proved most productive? How might these models need to evolve?
How might we redefine ‘research impact’ to include benefits for communities and activists when funders tend to measure it in terms of commercial or national policy relevance?
How can researchers mobilise funding and access relevant stakeholders, while being committed to necessary environmental and social change?
The workshop will involve presentations from researchers and networks struggling with these questions. The workshop will involve 20-30 participants, roughly equally drawn from academia and activism, and from the UK, France, and Quebec, as partner regions in the Engage project.
The workshop will take a virtual format comprising 3 half days spread across three consecutive weeks in May 2021. Participation will be free of charge.
Sessions will run: 1-5pm UTC (2-6pm CET, 8am-1pm EST) on 12th, 20th, 26th May 2021.
The programme will include short presentations, sharing both academic and activist experiences of practice in engagement on climate and energy issues, plenty of time to discuss learning from the cases, breakout sessions designed to challenge our preconceptions and presumptions about engagement, and group working to elaborate principles and support mechanisms for effective engagement. Our aspiration is that the workshop will generate a sketch of a joint opinion style paper to be developed and submitted for publication (with all participants as co-authors).
The convenors will be actively soliciting some case presentations, but also welcome proposals for any interested potential participants.
Let us know if you'll be attending!
To register your interest as a participant and presenter if relevant, please email us (click below) with a brief note of your relevant experience in academic activist collaboration and if you want to be considered for a presentation slot, a note of the example/specific case of engagement you’d like to discuss, with reference to one or more lesson you would want to share from that example).
Please note we anticipate that participants will commit to attend all three sessions, and complete short online surveys before and after the sessions.
The GDRI ENGAGE is an international research group about Climate-energy, engaging social sciences, it is supported by the French National Research Center (CNRS). ENGAGE contributes to an international network of social sciences laboratories in partnership with NGOs with the following objectives:
to develop an involved positioning of social sciences on energy-climate issues, known as "committed sciences", open to strengthened collaborations with civil society, and NGOs in particular;
to increase the contribution of social sciences to expert and strategic processes, particularly international ones, in ways that do not sacrifice their reflective contribution, and
to continue the work of structuring social sciences–energy community in France in order to increase its internationalization and its capacity to interact with other scientific communities.