Workshop | Climate Change and Resilience in Transdisciplinary Research

Researchers have long acknowledged that due to its complexity, the challenge of climate change cannot be met within the bounds of traditional academic disciplines. Within the natural sciences alone, the field of “Climate Science” encompasses disciplines like geology, physics, biology and more. In what has come to be called the Anthropocene, climate change even transcends the most basic distinctions between nature and society, or nature and culture. Therefore, efforts have been made to coordinate cross-disciplinary projects involving both the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities.

This workshop aims to explore some of the difficulties of working on climate change in a cross-disciplinary context, and to share how these difficulties were overcome in one case study of the “Climate Change and History Research Initiative” (based at Princeton University). In this research project, researchers from disciplines as diverse as History, Archeology, Geo-Engineering, and Climatology explored the ways in which the political, economic and social history of the Byzantine empire is entwined with, and shaped by, the weather conditions of their environment. Together with Prof. John Haldon (Princeton University, Project Director), Prof. Jürg Luterbacher (JLU, Team Member) and Dr. Elena Xoplaki (JLU, Team Member), we will discuss the potential and surplus of such an alliance between science and humanities, as well as the difficulties and limits of such endeavors, for example when it comes to finding a ‘common language’, research questions, and methodological framework in the ‘contact zones’ between disciplines.