Mission statement and objectives

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Mission statement

The KU.Sustainability Research Lab (KU.SRL) primarily sees itself as a platform for academic networking and discussion. At the core of KU.SRL are these central aims: To kindle disciplinary research by using cross-disciplinary discussion and vice-versa. To give the necessary creative impulse to prompt the formation of new integrative theoretical approaches in science. To develop ideas for inter- and trans-disciplinary research projects on sustainable development. It also seems essential to us to further develop our own, often ambivalent roles and responsibilities in the generation of knowledge and any related research activities. We have to critically reflect the established research modes on human-environment interaction against this background. Thus, we not only want to make a transdisciplinary scientific contribution to the understanding of the complex dynamics and the holistic connections of the co-existence of man/woman and nature. Moreover, the task at hand is to develop a new contribution to a “new way of thinking” with regard to the interwoven nature of society and the world.

To this end, the way we think about causal relations between society and ecology has to change. The regard for the interconnection of human existence and ecological concerns in its entirety has been driven from our focus - a fact that not least the Club of Rome has lamented. It was driven from our focus by the dominating reductionist dissection of the world with its infinite amount of partial disciplinary perspectives that prevails in the world and has influenced scientific progress to this day. For man-/womankind nature has increasingly become an object, towards which society has developed a primarily instrumental and profit-oriented relationship. In this context, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker speaks of the Machtförmigkeit of scientific judgements, which is to say that this discipline’s judgements dominate the public view. Within the framework of the mechanistic dissection of the world, society’s relationship to nature has increasingly been reduced to the question of maximizing and optimizing the exploitation and management of natural resources. What has been lost sight of is not only the environmental ethical discussion of the intrinsic value and raison d'être of all elements of the environment, but also the attention to the complex dynamics and holistic interrelationships in the co-existence of humans and the environment. In the environmental ethics debate and also in the encyclical Laudato si', one finds in this regard the idea of "co-environment," a notion which does not want to conceive of nature as something distinct from us, but emphasizes that human and non-human living beings and entities share the world and exist together in interpenetration.

To better understand the complex socio-ecological interrelationships implied here requires new transdisciplinary theoretical designs. To this end, a cooperative, integrative and interdisciplinary understanding of science and a sincere interest in the perspectives, ideas and questions of other scientific disciplines apart from one's own is essential. We therefore need an altered science, that, in Paul Feyerabend’s words, does not paradigmatically constrict the diversity of knowledge, thereby effectively “obliterating” it. As a consequence, the KU.SRL is also designed as a place for the renewal of science. It is intended as a think tank for a transformation of scientific culture, which must be characterized by a changed epistemology and associated new integrative research modes, which will make joint research approaches easier to implement than before.

This particularly integrating form of science, more specifically of scientific discussion, takes into account how interwoven the world is in its entirety and leaves behind any dividing perspectives. It does nothing less than to enable a confluence of divergent views of individual scientific disciplines. Through this integral approach to research and knowledge production, the lab seeks to achieve a deeper understanding of the requirements and practices of sustainable development. This different way of doing science is what the initiators of the KU.SRL call "new science for a new world", or "science for the future". The KU.SRL thus also functions as a "think tank lab" creating space for fundamental reflection that will expand scientific thinking further.

As far as content is concerned, the KU.SRL wishes to contribute to a responsible form of science that faces the big and urgent questions of an endangered future for humanity, always keeping in mind the protection of - and our relationship to - the environment. To our eyes, the pressing socio-ecologically problems of our time, such as climate change, the loss of biodiversity or the energy transition, require a transformation of society’s relationship with nature and the resulting way in which we treat it. One of the core ideas of the KU.SRL is to generate a new kind of knowledge that critically reflects the normative settings, political conflicts and social practices in dealing with nature, i.e. the social relations with nature, makes them understandable and, if necessary, points out where society can take a different course of action. Today, psychologists agree that the key to changing individual and social behavior is to be found in our thought patterns and the socially shared world view we each carry with us in our mind. The sine qua non for a sustainability-oriented transformation of our social relations to nature is thus the development and establishment of a new way of thinking that makes the interrelationships of the world understandable to us afresh. The KU.SRL would like to contribute to giving the development of such thinking a place at the KU.