Tue, January 24th
Reframing the Role of Research for Society – An Invitation to the BRIDGES Coalition by the Club of Rome
From 14:00 to 16:00 under Journée internationale de l'éducation
Organised by The Club of Rome in collaboration with the BRIDGES Coalition
How can research best address the challenges we face today? Academia, more specifically academic research as it exists now is losing the ability to address the crises of today. And the issues we face are linked to the limitations of our ways of thinking and understanding our place in the world. Hence addressing them requires convening all sources of knowledge and creativity.
A transformation in the pathway of research can only happen when transdisciplinary models of thinking and community-driven research initiatives are considered to be the mainstream.
Les BRIDGES Coalition for Sustainability Science supported by UNESCO is an outstanding initiative by a large number of partners working together towards the reframing of research to serve humanity in ways attuned to the magnitude of the challenges.
The Club of Rome invites you to a joint session with BRIDGES as an introduction to the work being done and a discussion on what comes next.
Wed, January 25th
The learning dimension of youth climate action: a cross-regional examination
From 13:00 to 14:30 under Transformons l'éducation ⚙️
Organised by the BRIDGES Coalition in partnership with People & Planet Project/Imvf and in collaboration with UNESCO
This event will explore the learning dimension of climate action to help meet the needs of young people’s efforts to address the climate crisis. The discussion will engage with the public based on findings of two recent reports on youth and climate change focused on European and Arab States.
Through this cross-regional examination, this interactive discussion will shed light on shared and varying opportunities and challenges amongst youth for climate action. According to the ‘European Youth and Climate Change: A Community Baseline’ (People&Planet, 2022), three in four young European citizens believe that protecting the environment is critical, but they do not necessarily access sufficient resources to address the climate crisis.
Meanwhile, the ‘Regional Report on Knowledge for Youth-led Climate Action in the Arab Region’ (UNESCO, 2022) — which examines the intersection between youth climate action and knowledge — draws attention to youth climate actors’ need for more localized information originating from the Arab region, to accelerate their climate action efforts. Youth are calling for more support to make the impact they envision.
This event is co-led by the authors and teams that produced these reports, as chaired by the BRIDGES Coalition.
Thu, January 26th
The learning and knowledge needed, seen from the Future
From 15:00 to 16:30 under Imaginons nos futurs 🔮
Organized by Future Earth in partnership with BRIDGES and in collaboration with the Earth Politics Centre, Université Paris Cité, and CERDI (Clermont Auvergne University – CNRS)/European Centre of Excellence on Sustainability.
What learning and knowledge do we need to defend and create a desirable future? And how can society address these needs?
In this session, we invite you to imagine living in a desirable future in the year 2050. A future in which the major transitions which are required to halt climate change and mass extinction have actually already happened. Looking back at the year 2023, we ask what additional knowledge and learning processes have made these transitions possible.
This session is organized by Future Earth in partnership with BRIDGES and in collaboration with the Earth Politics Centre, Université Paris Cité, and CERDI (Clermont Auvergne University – CNRS) / European Centre of Excellence on Sustainability.
Experiences of Transdisciplinarity
From 17:00 to 18:30 under Célébrons la société apprenante 💡
Organised by BRIDGES (Catharsis/Phgd & Apheleia)
Transdisciplinarity isn’t just a method or a paradigm. It’s an experience of new assemblages of knowledge. The transformative experiences and practices of transdisciplinarity are the raison d’être of Catharsis, a member association of the international BRIDGES coalition.
In this session, designed for a broad and diverse audience interested in the patterns of individual and collective learning embedded in transformative transdisciplinary experience, Catharsis will be showcasing two of its partners – Hagrath and the TRIALOGOS project of Apheleia, the European Network for Culturally Managed Landscapes – in order to show how their ongoing work exemplifies the learning challenges of transformation.
The TRIALOGOS project aims at reinterpreting the knowledge embedded in the practices observed or registered within balanced eco- and anthroposystems, in order to transform it into tools and processes ready to be used by capacitated actors interested in advancing a new logic of sustainability in the context of contemporary societies.
Hagrath is developing a programme of transformative experiences, working closely with artists, designers and distinctive places, that enable audiences (managers, scientists, activists) to experience transfo
rmation and thus imagine the conditions in which their institutions and practices can in turn be transformed.
This session is sponsored by the BRIDGES Coalition, of which Catharsis and Apheleia are member organizations.
Fri, January 27th
What language do the things of the world speak?
From 17:00 to 18:00 under Célébrons la société apprenante 💡
Organised by UNESCO-BRIDGES at University of Wales Trinity Saint David
Inspired by the question above, this session adopts a New Materialities and Sensory Anthropological approach to think about human relationships with the environment and consider the distance intellectually placed between people and the rest of the physical world. Many claim that the current level of environmental damage is only possible because humanity continues to imagine they walk on, rather than are, the world.
This session takes as axiomatic that current methods that understand the world as a bank of resources need to change and uses short, playful activities to think about the value of paying attention and what ‘hearing’ nature might both look like and do to practice. Using a selection of understandings associated with water, air and plants, this session will draw on Ingold (2022) and Marder (2013) to stimulate discussion on how paying attention redraws understandings of the world and can transform your understanding of how to be human.
The Kogi and MUNEKAN MASHA
From 18:00 to 19:00 under Célébrons la société apprenante 💡
Organised by UNESCO-BRIDGES at University of Wales Trinity Saint David in collaboration with Tairona Heritage Trust
The Kogi and MUNEKAN MASHA: The epistemological basis of learning the unexplainable and teaching the incomprehensible across a chasm.
Munekan Masha is the name of a project devised and designed by the Kogi people of Colombia. The project requires conventional environmental scientists learn Kogi conservation methods. Using ethnographic fieldwork methods to determine how these vastly different ways of approaching the environment might be able to work together, anthropologists will draw out the assumptions and biases that each group carries with regards indicators of environmental health and what constitutes signs of regeneration or dis-ease.
This project explores fundamental questions about how landscape health is understood, conceived and encouraged and by drawing different ways of approaching the environment together hopes to find novel, collaborative solutions to revitalising degraded landscapes.
Listen Up to My Climate Story: Document and Share Yours
From 20:00 to 21:30 under En scène, Learning Planetizens!
Organised by U Penn Program In Environmental Humanities, sponsored by BRIDGES
“Listen Up to My Climate Story: Document and Share Yours” is an online workshop at the 2023 Learning Planet Festival organized by the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities and sponsored by BRIDGES.
My Climate Story (MCS) is a public storytelling project that recognizes climate change data as stories about the people and places we care about. These personal experiences of climate change provide valuable additions to the quantifiable science as we continue to struggle to comprehend and to take action on the climate crisis. You don’t need a lab coat to collect climate data. In this 90-minute online interactive session at the Learning Planet Festival, and in collaboration with BRIDGES, the MCS core team, students and teachers from Philadelphia (USA), will introduce the project’s mission and goals and guide participants in crafting and sharing their climate story.
The project’s curriculum, designed for ages 12-17, and its storytelling workshops, workbooks, and storytelling prompts, available in fifteen world languages, support participant teachers, students, and others to train their imagination. It’s the most important tool we have to address the climate crisis. Reflecting on the changing world we, unevenly and unfairly, have made, participants are encouraged to document and share their stories via the project’s social media channels in the growing Climate Story Bank, a publicly available repository of local stories documenting personal experiences of climate change, including individuals’ emotional responses.
