The British Academy has announced three ambitious, state-of-the-art Global Convening Programmes which will enable collaborative exploration across disciplines and borders. The programmes bring together global networks of problem or challenge-focused scholars asking questions around the themes of Just Transitions, What is a good city? and Global (Dis)Order.
Funded by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the programmes will provide opportunities for researchers in the UK and internationally across the humanities and social sciences to network, open new fields of inquiry and harness research to catalyse change in industry, practice, policy, and society.
Each award is for around £500,000 per annum, convening researchers over three years to develop sustained, innovative, multidisciplinary engagement.
The Global Convening Programmes 2023 awardees are:
- Professor Leigh Jenco and Dr Hasan Karrar (London School of Economics and Political Science) – ‘Chinese Global Orders’.
- Professor Keri Facer and Professor Nomi Claire Lazar (University of Bristol) – ‘The Times of a Just Transition’.
- Dr Sonia Lewycka and Professor Phaik Yeong Cheah (University of Oxford) – ‘A Just Transitions framework for equitable and sustainable mitigation of antimicrobial resistance’.
Professor Keri Facer, Programme Lead and colleague at the School of Education, says ‘By bringing together African, Anglo-American, Francophone, Indigenous, Feminist, Latin American and Indian scholarship we hope, for the first time, to overcome the temporal blindness that too often structures our thinking about climate change, and open up new ways of negotiating justice in a warming world.
‘It will be very exciting to see what comes from putting these different projects into dialogue – from the work on rhythms of life and plant timing on the one hand, to the use of intergenerational narratives in Indigenous and Diaspora farming communities on the other, from the apocalyptic language of climate activists and the populist far right, to the conflict between industrial and local times in windfarm and megadam projects – we will develop a much richer picture of how time, timing and rhythm structure conflicts or enable coordination of activities in sustainability transitions around the world.’
‘We all know how much time matters in our everyday lives – but we forget this too often when we think about the big political decisions. For the first time this project will put time, timing, rhythm and pace front and centre – and, we hope, will allow us to see the world and sustainability questions – differently’.