CHCI-Mellon Global Humanities Institute Grant Awarded for a Summer Institute on “Climate Justice and Problems of Scale”
CHCI is pleased to announce the award of a grant to the University of Texas Humanities Institute to collaborate with five other CHCI member institutions on a project concerning “Climate Justice and Problems of Scale.” The grant, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will fund a Global Humanities Institute (GHI) in the Summer of 2021. This will be the fifth Global Humanities Institute funded through the CHCI-Mellon partnership.
Since 2012, CHCI, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has advanced multiple forms of international, collaborative research designed to foster new knowledge and new networks. Building upon the first phase of this project (2012-2017), in which 26 member centers and institutes contributed to four distinct projects, and with the support of a new grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CHCI launched, in 2017, the Global Humanities Institutes, a new program for a second generation of international collaboration. In the first phase of this new initiative, CHCI selected two pilot projects, now involving 10 centers and institutes from all parts of the world that will convene two Institutes in the summer of 2019—one on the “Challenges of Translation” to be held in Santiago, Chile, the other on “Crises of Democracy” in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Last year, we invited humanities centers and institutes to propose their own themes and two teams are now working on Institutes to be held in Summer 2021—the first one on “Migration, Logistics and Unequal Citizens in Contemporary Global Context” in Taiwan and the second on “Childhood and Social Suffering in Global Africa” in Tanzania.
The other CHCI institutions collaborating with The University of Texas Humanities Institute include the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (University of Pretoria), the Sydney Environmental Institute (University of Sydney), the Center for American Studies and Research (American University of Beirut), the Institute for Humanities Research (Arizona State University), and the Humanities Center (Carnegie Mellon). The director of the CHCI-affiliated humanities center and two or three environmental scholars from each participating university are collaborating in planning the GHI’s activities.
The Summer 2021 Global Humanities Institute is scheduled to be held at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and will convene 18 senior scholars along with 18 early-career scholars from around the world for a 10-day conference. It will also include keynote addresses from renowned scholars in the field. “The University of Texas Humanities Institute is honored to lead an international group of humanities scholars investigating how people are responding to the scale of climate change. Global collaborations on the impact of climate change and problems of scale are more important than ever at this unprecedented time,” said principal investigator Pauline Strong, professor of anthropology and director of the Humanities Institute.
The Global Humanities Institute will explore climate change as a social, historical, and cultural force that transforms all lives but does so in an uneven and often unequal fashion. Behind the Institute is the premise that problems of scale make it difficult to understand the differing ways in which climate change affects individual lives, specific communities, and the earth. Seeking to cultivate scale literacy, the Institute will generate more nuanced and holistic understandings of the relationship between the effects of climate change and the intensification of injustices in the social, political, and cultural spheres. These inquiries are grounded in the understanding that a diverse array of factors--including geography, race, ethnicity, gender, age, ability, and economic position--influence the ways in which individuals and groups experience and react to the impacts of climate change.
The Institute will consider the following research questions, among others: (a) How do matters of scale fundamentally shape understandings of climate change and its effects at specific times and places? (b) How can we build “scale literacy” to identify the sources and attributes of climate injustice? (c) What new narratives, activist frameworks, and planning strategies might promote collective action to mitigate climate change, more evenly distribute the impacts of climate disruption, and work towards climate justice?
Preceding the Global Humanities Institute, representatives from the six partner institutions will hold a virtual global planning meeting to discuss the agenda for the Institute and collaborative activities that will be held on the partner institution’s campuses. In the months following the GHI, members of the planning group will reconvene at the University of Sydney to discuss outcomes and possible publications.
Contact:
Pauline Strong
Director of the Humanities Institute
(512) 471- 9056