“Lectures for Future“ is a lecture series with guest lecturers from various universities and research institutions, most of them part of the Scientists4Future, working on the most pressing societal and ecological challenges and their potential solutions. The lectures series is taking place for the third semester in a row, everytime at several higher education institutions, each of them with their own unique programming. More information on the initiative and the programs of the summer semester 2020 can be found here.

At Angewandte, we tried incorporating the student feedback from last semester and selected guest lectures with a focus on political and socioeconomic sustainability issues as well as experiences from outside of academia. Typically, lectures will be 90 minutes long including discussion (18:00-19:30) and will start after the student presentations of Raworth's work (see below). As the lectures address quite diverse topics, we will also dedicate time to clarifying open questions and contextualizing the content against the backdrop of a bigger picture of Sustainable Development, thus establishing a "golden thread" for the course.

As we do not want you to only be listeners but also creators, we have come up with an additional element for the course:

"The future is collective"

There are nice comments by famous authors on their own books, which are as old as the printed books themselves. Some seminal books contain very creative scribbles by other authors, for example Vladimir Nabokov's notes on Franz Kafka's Methamorphosis. The discovery of these annotated books is a kind of "archaeology of reading". “Don’t scribble on books!” they say, but that is exactly what we will do together. Based on our reflections and ideas on sustainability for the future, we will write a little bit of history. When we talk about the future, it is important to define when (and where) we apply this term. The chapters of Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics will be assigned to teams of two or more students, which will be asked to comment and scribble on a chapter of the book within one week of the semester and share your work with the rest of the course in a short presentation. At the end of the semester, we will have collectively created a beautiful book that contains comments by all students of the course. For Kate Raworth, the visualization of economics is primordial. Try to be critical, ironic, creative and illustrative!

All lectures will take place via ZOOM. We are looking forward to the following guest lectures:

09.11.2020 (via ZOOM): Michael Soder, PhD (Arbeiterkammer Wien / WU Wien) - The social and distributional dimension of the climate crisis

16.11.2020 (via ZOOM): Prof. Dr. Giuseppe Delmestri (WU Wien) - Denial and the climate crisis: Why are mature men so angry at Greta?

23.11.2020 (via ZOOM): Dr.in Renate Christ (International Panel on Climate Change - IPCC, retired) - Climate science for decision-making: key findings of the IPCC and how they are reflected in climate policy

30.11.2020 (via ZOOM): Mag.a Katharina Felidae Reich ("interacting lectures", freelance artist)  - Can art be sustainable? And is it resilient?

07.12.2020 (via ZOOM): Dr.in Barbara Kump (WU Wien) - How to mobilize managers for organizational change toward sustainability?

14.12.2020 (via ZOOM): Dr. Patrick Scherhaufer (BOKU) - Civil disobedience as a modus operandi for societal change?

11.01.2021 (via ZOOM): Sara Hintze, PhD (BOKU) - Animal welfare: an important part of sustainable development?

18.01.2021 (via ZOOM - two lectures):

Dr.in Doris Schneeberger (WU Wien) - Tackling climate change and pandemics by expanding our moral circle: anti-speciesism and longtermism

Prof. Dr. Jens Blechert (Universität Salzburg) - Sustainability and pro-environmental behavior from a psychological perspective

To pass the class, you are required to fulfill three criteria:

1) Your contribution to the collective commenting of the book ("The future is collective")

2) Your presence in 5/9 sessions with lectures (all except the course introduction on 12.10.)  as well as the final reflective session

3)One to two reflective assignments about guest lectures of your choice throughout the semester

 

Grading will be scaled A-C for CDS-students and 1-5 for all other students.

Please note: Due to the new COVID-regulations, for the time being the course will take place via ZOOM.

For the online lectures via ZOOM, external listeners  are explicitly welcome to join. ZOOM links will are published here shortly before the respective lectures.

Please note: The course is worth 2.0 ECTS (not 1.0), to receive them please also register for the course with the same name hosted by Carlos Toledo.