“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 fourth 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 last semester (winter 2020/21) can be found here.

At Angewandte, we are selecting guest lectures with a focus on political and socioeconomic topics as well as experiences from outside of academia. Typically, lectures will be 90 minutes long including discussion (17:30-19:00). 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 sustainability, 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. We will ask you to comment and scribble on an assigned part of the physical copy of E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful over the course of the semester.  You then share the work you've done and your thoughts on the book 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. Try to be critical, ironic, creative and illustrative!

We are looking forward to the following guest lectures:

15.03.2021: Prof. Dr. Werner Zollitsch (BOKU) - Animal farming in the context of Sustainable Development

22.03.2021: Prof. Dr. Michael Hensel (TU Wien) - Embedded Architectures: En Route to intensive Architecture and Environment Integration

12.04.2021: Prof. Dr. Georg Gartner (TU Wien) - Visualizing the Sustainable Development Goals: Cartography and Climate Change

19.04.2021: Eva-Maria Holzinger, BA (Climate Walk) - The Climate Walk: Transdisciplinary research from the idea to implementation

26.04.2021: Mag. a Lisa Bohunovsky (BOKU), M.Sc. - Do we learn, teach and research right? The role of universities for Sustainable Development

03.05.2021: Dr. Mathias Kirchner (BOKU) - Climate Change (&) Economics: Selected insights & critical appraisal

10.05.2021: Mira Kapfinger, DI (Stay Grounded) - Green flying? On the social-ecological transformation of air traffic

17.05.2021: Manuel Grebenjak (Research and Degrowth) - Degrowth as a way out of the ecological crisis

14.06.2021: Richard Bärnthaler, M.Sc., MA,  Veronika Heimerl, MSc. & ao Prof. Dr. Andreas Novy (WU Wien) - Future-fit economies: Challenges of a social-ecological transformation (https://zoom.us/j/93054155595)

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

1) Your contribution to the collective commenting of Small is Beautiful ("The future is collective"), consisting of a) scribbles in the book and b) a short presentation in one of the two sessions on the book (31 May and 7 June)

2) Your presence in a certain amount of guest lectures as well as the final reflective session on 21.06.2021 (alternative: written reflection)

3) Some small assignments about the guest lectures (yet to be defined)

 

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

Please note: Due to the current COVID-regulations, we will start the course via ZOOM and hope to come back to Angewandte at a later point during the semester.

For the online lectures via ZOOM, external listeners  are explicitly welcome to join. The ZOOM link for the talk by Richard Bärnthaler, Veronika Heimerl and Andreas Novy on 14.06.2021 is: https://zoom.us/j/93054155595

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.