Dear APECS and National Committee Members,
Greeting from the distant future of 2022! Wherever you are in the world, the APECS Science and Diplomacy Project Group hopes you had a wonderful new year’s celebration and are full of fresh inspiration and ideas for the future.
We are writing to inform you of an opportunity we are arranging for all APECS-affiliated ECR’s. Beginning this February, our PG will be hosting a bimonthly reading group to explore and discuss the possibilities and challenges of “Anthropocene” thinking. This group will facilitate dialogue and applied interdisciplinary theory in pursuit of solutions to the major challenges facing the fragile social-ecological systems of the Earth’s cryospheres.
Engaging with “planetary social thought”, as authors Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski urge us to do, can strengthen the connection between the geo- and biosciences, social sciences, and humanities by drawing together deep earth history, the history of science, diverse epistemologies, and more-than-human imaginaries. Through this reading group, ECR’s will have the opportunity to contribute to a conversation still dominated by senior academics whose generational stake in immanent planetary change differs from ours substantially. Subsequently, the reading group will aim to generate a final product of a co-authored paper on a mutually-agreed upon subtopic that is of interest to all participants. The reading group will run from February 2022 till July 2022, meeting twice a month, during which time a plan to develop and create a paper will be established. If you are interested, please fill in this Google form and we will reach out before the end of January.
Painted by Martin Wittfooth
