Projects

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

  • Ecocide

    This 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 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

The concept of ecocide raises fundamental questions regarding the way we think about responsibility and the duty of care. How do we determine who is responsible and how do we hold them to account? How do we acknowledge human and non-human victims?

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

    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

  • 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 

Stories have always been a powerful way of engaging people. I am convinced that stories can play a role in encouraging more sustainable behavior

  • Imagining More-than-Human Communities

    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

  • Consumers on the March

    The 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

Science fiction is often seen as a childish form of entertainment that offers us an escape from pressing issues. But it can also stimulate the collective imagination by mapping out pathways to desirable futures – or warning us for scenarios we may wish to avoid.

  • 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

  • Green Media Studies

    Green Media Studies seek to contribute to the understanding of the interconnectedness of media representations, media use, media impact, and media technologies in regards to addressing the climate crisis and imagining sustainable futures.”

    Participants: Joost Raessens, Stefan Werning, Judith Keilbach, Eggo Müller, Marijke de Valck

Deeply historically embedded questions about social and cultural norms, political power relations and institutional dynamics are crucial to understanding why the transition to a more sustainable society proves so difficult.

  • 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.

    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

Exploring complex human-environment interactions is crucial for understanding both the causes and consequences of social and economic development.

  • Imagining Climate Engineering

    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

  • 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

Artefacts, monuments, and museums are affected by the climate crisis. Our engagement with historic heritage must therefore increasingly focus on the future

  • Textile Lab

    In the 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

  • 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?

    Participants: Judith Keilbach, Anne Helmond