Projects

Our researchers participate in various national and international interdiscipinary projects and research networks:

Ongoing

RICE – Reimagining Constitutional Ecology 

How can Europe and in particular the EU constitutionally ensure sustainability, equity, and democratic resilience within planetary boundaries, which is necessary for the survival of human beings and future generations? Pathways to Sustainability Signature project RICE brings together insights from law, philosophy, history, economics, and the arts to explore how we might reshape the values and assumptions that underpin European governance.

Participants: Carolina Sanchez-Jaegher

Tackling the Polycrisis 

Global challenges cannot be seen in isolation; they cross-affect each other and what we are dealing with is a polycrisis. Real change, i.e. a move beyond extractivist, exploitative global governance, must be systemic change. This interconnected problem seems so enormous and the global socio-cultural, politico-economic organization so resilient, that systemic change sometimes feels out of reach. From that starting point, the Pathways to Sustainability Incubator team proposes to focus on three socio-economic, cultural-symbolic vectors that continue to drive and uphold the polycrisis: (racial) capitalism, patriarchy, and (neo)colonialism (CPC). The incubator reverses the question of sustainability: what makes CPC so ‘sustainable’ as a system and enables it to block real transformation?

Participants: Birgit Kaiser, David Henig, Kathrin Thiele

Warfare Ecologies 

The Pathways to Sustainability Incubator Warfare Ecologies addresses the overlooked environmental impacts of war, before, during, and after conflict. It tackles critical gaps in knowledge, accountability, and resistance by combining remote sensing, interdisciplinary research, and community collaboration to expose ecological harm, support justice, and envision sustainable, post-conflict futures. 

Participants: Thijs Jeursen

The Politics of Environmental Action

What happens when you bring together historians, social scientists, and environmental scientists to explore the deep political roots of environmental decision-making? By examining past and present ideologies, this Pathways to Sustainability Seed project led by dr. Frank Gerits focusses on how worldviews impact environmental policies, scientific research, and activism. Outcomes include interdisciplinary workshops, a case study on Dutch NGO Milieudefensie, and a PhD project on environmental politics, fostering collaboration between academia and environmental advocates.

Participants: Jeroen Oomen, Roberta Biasillo, Frank Gerits

  • PITCH: Petroculture’s Intersections with The Cultural Heritage sector

    EU Horizon Europe project PITCH, which is led by Professor Dolly Jørgensen at UiS, brings together ten academic and cultural sector organisation partners in six countries. The team is researching petrocultures–a term used to describe how social imaginaries, economic discourses and understandings of modernity are shaped by petroleum. PITCH will investigate how petroculture is reflected in current heritage practices and how to reinterpret cultural heritage through a petroculture frame. 

    Participants: Gertjan Plets

  • Ecologies of Violence: Crimes against Nature in the Contemporary Cultural Imagination

    This ERC-funded project Ecologies of Violence (EcoViolence) explores how culture reflects on responsibility in ecological violence and how it makes visible the deep historical links that tie eco-violence to other histories of violence, especially colonialism and genocide. EcoViolence brings together research in cultural memory studies, new materialism, and ecocriticism to develop an innovative ecological model for the study of violence, its memory and representation.

    Participants: Susanne Knittel, Ifor Duncan, Sofia Lovegrove Pereira, Tom van Bunnik, Salomé Lopes Coelho 

  • Anders Utrecht

    A group of researchers from Utrecht University interested in ecological and sustainable ways of organising society and the economy are starting a project called 'AndersUtrecht'. This project aims to build a network of initiatives that work on ecological sustainability and social change in and around the city of Utrecht.

    Participant: Dan Hassler-Forest

  • Terra Critica

    Terra Critica is an international and interdisciplinary research network in the critical humanities. Its aim is to reexamine critical theory and critique under the conditions of the 21st century – given our immanent, terran existences, globally entangled across flows of capital, people, and ideas and living in ecological and economical multidependences. It has been supported by Utrecht University and the NWO-Aspasiafunds.

    Participants: Birgit Kaiser, Kathrin Thiele

  • Liternatuur

    On this website we review literature that can give us answers to questions such as: How have people thought and written about the relationship between humans and nature in recent years? Can literature contribute to creating more awareness and behavior change regarding the climate crisis? 

    Participant: Geert Buelens

  • The Deep Transitions Lab

    The lab is a platform to accelerate systems change to help tackle the crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and ever-growing inequality. Through the experimentation, learning and research programmes with investors it aims to plant the seeds of change in the broader financial industry and subject the systems at work in our current society to a sustainable revolution. It is part of the Deep Transitions transdisciplinary research project that strives to understand how the unsustainable systems our societies are built on emerged, and how they can be unmade. 

    Participants: Johan Schot, Jack Davies

  • Greening the digital society

    Digital technologies and artificial intelligence are regarded as indispensable allies in the fight against climate change. At the same time, these technologies also have a negative impact on the environment. What is the relationship between digital technologies and global warming? In what ways do digital technologies contribute to both reducing and accelerating climate change? And what might good environmental governance look like in the digital society? This Special Interest Group explores these questions.

    Participants: Judith Keilbach, Anne Helmond, Rianne Riemens 

  • STRATEGIES

    STRATEGIES — Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries — is a Horizon Europe funded project that supports Europe’s game industries in realising their potential as drivers of sustainable innovation, contributing to achieving the goals of the European Green Deal and delivering an economy that works for people.  

    UU/NEH participants: Joost Raessens and Stefan Werning

Finished

  • Ecocide

    This Pathways to Sustainability Signature project explores how the concept of Ecocide can create breakthroughs in biodiversity protection, with a keen eye for indigenous and non-human rights. Project Ecocide is an interdisciplinary collaboration with academics from the Faculty of Law, Economics and Governance, the Faculty of Humanities, the Faculty of Geosciences, and the Faculty of Science, as well as activist groups. Next to establishing an Utrecht Knowledge Hub on Ecocide, the project will also produce policy briefs, and create mock-trials - performative and creative tribunals using real examples.

    Participants: Susanne Knittel, Eggo Müller, Carolina Sanchez

  • Whose Ocean?

    The ocean is crucial to life and climate, but its voice is barely heard in law and policy decisions. While the UN specifically speaks about “our ocean”, it is completely unclear who the “our” refers to. This Pathways to Sustainability Signature project will produce a charter and organise an assembly to give the ocean a meaningful voice in international and national discussions, bringing together academics, with artists and writers. 

    Participants: Stephen Snelders, Susanne Ferwerda, Jos Philips, Birgit Kaiser

  • Studiotopia

    Art meets Science in the Anthropocene (2019-2022) is an initiative that aims to increase collaborations between cultural and research institutions, academia, innovation centers, creatives and citizens.

    Participant: Sven Dupré

  • Consumers on the March

    The NWO VIDI research project ‘Consumers on the March: Civic Activism and Political Representation in Europe, 1960s to 1990s’, funded by an NWO Vidi grant awarded to Liesbeth van de Grift, examines the contribution of consumer organisations to increased public participation within the European integration project. 

    Participants: Liesbeth van de Grift, Alessandra Schimmel, Koen van Zon

  • Imagining Climate Engineering

    The European Union Horizon 2020 Marie Curie project Imagining Climate Engineering looks at the ways climate engineering researchers view their scientific craft, and the ways they imagine climate engineering as part of a solution to climate change.

    Participant: Jeroen Oomen

  • Imagining More-than-Human Communities

    In this Centre for Unusual Collaborations (CUCo) project, a group of unusual collaborators from Utrecht, Wageningen and Eindhoven who are all working on the relationship between humans and other animals in society and culture, want to explore how more-than-human communities have been imagined in the past, and where they are being lived out in the present.

    UU participants: Kári Driscoll, Kathrin Thiele

  • Textile Lab

    In the ERC project 'Race to the Bottom? Family labour, household livelihood and consumption in the relocation of global cotton manufacturing, ca. 1750-1990' we investigate how and why households choose to make their labor available to the textile industry. 

    Participant: Kate Frederick

  • Reading Zoos in the Age of the Anthropocene

    Reading Zoos in the Age of the Anthropocene is a three-year research project supported by a VENI grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), which studies how the relationship between humans and the natural world is changing in the age of the Anthropocene.

    Participant: Kári Driscoll