Four research missions for the Humanities' contribution to the green transition

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Environmental humanities provide crucial knowledge about the structures of everyday lives and the resources needed to make human behaviour sustainable.

From research on values, communication, and cultural practices to historical traditions, belief systems, and aesthetics, the humanities collaborate to ensure popular engagement, green education, and new visions for a sustainable future.

Green funding

The environmental crisis is anthropogenic. It is created by human activities, and it needs to be solved through human agency as well. To innovate and embrace sustainable lifestyles, we need comprehensive green solutions: social, cultural, and technological.

Dorthe Gert Simonsen, Associate Dean for Research and Impact

Research centres

Centre for Applied Ecological Thinking (CApE)

CApE’s aim is to draw on the humanities’ great reservoirs of knowledge of ethics, imagination, and cultural values to respond to the imminent crisis.

Centre for Sustainable Futures (CSF)

CSF’s overall ambition is to generate and disseminate humanities-based research on climate change, socio-environmental crises, and loss of biodiversity. 

Interview

Events

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Global sustainable development is only achievable on a collective, local scale. [...] Taking part, however, requires comprehension, the provisioning of which, through education, must therefore be at the forefront and centre of all future endeavours.

Bo Fritzbøger, Sustainable Development of Denmark in the World, 1970–2020, A Critical Introduction

Research projects

OIKOS. A Cultural Analysis of Care and Crisis in the 21st Century

This project investigates the nexus of care crisis and environmental crisis. 

WASTE: Consumption and Buddhism in the age of garbage

The project includes six ethnographic studies that explore the generation of, sorting, and caring for waste in five Buddhist communities in India, Nepal, Japan, Bhutan, and the Christmas Islands.

The Coastal Anthropocene (CoAnt) – Literary Visions of Past and Future Shorelines

Shorelines are the frontlines of climate change. CoAnt investigates how writers depict and imagine human habitation with coasts.

Cattle Crossroads - Researching Danish livestock production for the future

This project explores ways to envision and generate a new research basis for a future green livestock production in Denmark.

Research groups

Art and earth

The research cluster traces material entanglements of art and earth in the shadow of the Anthropocene.

Engerom Environmental Humanities Group

Forum for research in green thinking and transition, ecocriticism, and sustainability within European, Ibero American, and American language and culture studies. 

Nature and Spirituality

The research cluster brings together a number of fields across the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies to foster innovative, creative, and interdisciplinary research related to understanding the plurality of spiritual understandings of nature,

Sustainability and culture

The research group is an interdisciplinary collaboration which allows different research fields to meet and inspire each others in their approach to sustainability research. 

Green cross-faculty centres at the University of Copenhagen

Centre for Sustainability and Society

Green Solutions Centre

Sustainability Science Center