Events

The Summer School brought together scholars and PhD students from different disciplines to present their personal as well as general disciplinary understanding of what a ‘human-environmental relation’ is. This understanding has implications for how research on human-environment relations is done in different disciplines. The scholars are therefore encouraged to link their personal and disciplinary understanding of human-environment relations with how they go about exploring these.

By providing the students (and invited scholars) with epistemological and methodological insights into how different disciplines engage with human-environment relations the Summer School provided 1) a better understanding of how different disciplines understand a ‘human-environment relation’, 2) how they go about researching it, 3) ways to identify and understand differences between disciplines, and 4) ways to identify common and complementary research topics and methodologies cutting across disparate disciplines.

The latter objective was a particularly important component of the Summer School. A major challenge for interdisciplinary research is the difficulty of developing research questions around which different disciplines can collaborate. It is our hope that the Summer School will equip the students with knowledge on how to think about and develop such questions. The 2015 Summer School was organised by Prof. Dr. Jonas Østergaard Nielsen and Wiebke Hampel.