Climate change, rising resource competition and global inequality pose tremendous challenges to contemporary societies around the globe and urgently require fundamental processes of transformation to sustainable practices and global justice. Proxy and local wars as well as numerous political and economic tensions make modern development even more risky and complicated. These transformations require significant technological, institutional and cultural innovations and the creation of societal acceptance to such innovations. Historical research contributes valuable knowledge about the complexities, conflicts and impediments of such transformations as well as experiences of successful cases and best practices.
This panel will offer historical research about cases and examples in all relevant domains around the globe. Topics of interest comprise historical cases of technology and transformation in resource extraction, distribution, availability and consumption, for example in the development and use of natural resources, energy transition, mobility turnaround, shifts in production, changes in consumption etc. The panel has goal to enable comparative discussion of local and global narratives about this transformation and the versatile roles of technology in it.
The panel series specifically aims at connecting and integrating the following themes:
- The problem fields in question – sustainable development, resource security and global justice – are closely linked, but usually investigated separately, often in different disciplines. It is one goal of the panel series to integrate discussion and encourage the development of cross-disciplinary research approaches.
- For successful transformation on global scales, perspectives of the Global South and the Global North need to be negotiated and developed together. Hence, we aim at inviting scholars around the world to this panel series and share and discuss perspectives from different world regions, cultures and experiences of transformation.
- To better understand the challenges of transformation, we wish to cover and combine a broad range of research approaches ranging from material histories of change and innovation to investigations of values, narratives and symbolic representations of transformation.
Interested scholars of all relevant fields are invited to contribute. Please send your paper proposals (abstracts of papers with max. 150 words, name, affiliation, short biography of participants) until 15 November 2023 to matthias.heymann@css.au.dk.