Climate Change Doesn’t Care About Your Major

But our world needs you to care about Climate Change

Audio recording of our 2016 Global Challenges conversation on Climate Change:

Global Challenges 2016 Article

Global Challenges—Interdisciplinary Answers on Climate Change

UW Honors, Seattle Campus
Tues, Nov 15, 2016 // 6:00-7:30 p.m.
Husky Student Union Building//North Ballroom

 

As Interdisciplinary Honors students begin their academic careers, we invite them into conversation with faculty who are thinking and working across many fields on complex societal problems. Each year, the University of Washington Honors Program presents a new Global Challenges—Interdisciplinary Answers event, where students and faculty tackle their biggest questions, together.

Honors Program Director Vicky Lawson (Geography) joins three passionate UW faculty thought leaders from seemingly disparate disciplines in a fast-paced conversation demonstrating how interdisciplinary collaboration can impact Climate Change.

About the Speakers

David Battisti (Atmospheric Sciences), UW Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and Tamaki Endowed Chair, is also a Fellow at Stanford University’s Food Security Institute. David was Director of the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO) between 1997-2003 and of the UW’s Earth Initiative 2003-2006. His recent interests are in understanding the processes that determine variability in summertime climate, and how the distribution of continents and topography affect global climate. He is presently working on the impacts of climate variability and climate change on global food production.

David has served on numerous international science panels, as co-chair of the Science Steering Committee for the U.S. Program on Climate (US CLIVAR) and is co-author of several international science plans. He has published over 100 papers in peer-review journals in atmospheric sciences and oceanography, and twice been awarded distinguished teaching awards. He has taught for the Honors Program in the past and in spring 2017 will be co-teaching HON 220: “Why the Public Accepts or Rejects Science,” continuing this important interdisciplinary conversation with our students.

Jean Dennison (Anthropology), a citizen of the Osage Nation, is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington. Her book: Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty-First-Century Osage Nation (UNC Press 2012) speaks directly to national revitalization, one of the most pressing issues facing native nations today. In particular, it looks at how blood, culture, natural resources, and sovereignty are all negotiated as nodes of limitation and possibility. Jean’s current research continues to follow the nation building process, using ethnographic methods to interrogate how various governmental officials and citizens deploy concepts of accountability.

As nations across the globe, particularly indigenous nations, rebuild their governing institutions in the wake of past and ongoing colonialism, they face a similar set of challenges to their governing structures and sovereignty. Whether it is their own oil extraction, disputes with other polities over water usage, or court cases against international industrial wind farms, natural resources are often center stage in battles over authority and accountability.

Hanson Hosein (Communication Leadership), Director of the UW’s Communication Leadership program, recently co-founded Prosperity of the Commons International, a human development and technology company. He is the author of Storyteller Uprising: Trust & Persuasion in the Digital Age, and the director of two Independent America films, which have been broadcast internationally and stream on Netflix, Hulu, and iTunes. He is also a Trustee for the locally-based nonprofit Climate Solutions, whose mission is to accelerate practical and profitable solutions to global warming by galvanizing leadership, growing investment, and bridging divides.

As Director of the Communication Leadership master’s program at the University of Washington, Hanson leads powerful graduate learning experiences for professionals from around the planet. Hanson actively explores how storytelling can be deployed to tackle today’s biggest challenges and wants to change the conversation we are having around human impact on the environment.

More about Hanson’s current work:
My story solution to fend off a poorer, meaner, hotter world

Vicky Lawson (moderator, Geography), Director of the UW Honors Program. In addition to teaching Honors and Geography courses at UW, Vicky also directs the Relational Poverty Network (RPN) with co-founder, Sarah Elwood. The RPN is a collaborative network focused on conceptual and methodological innovations, building new practices to scale up relational poverty research. Vicky writes on feminist care ethics and questions of political responsibility, with a particular focus on those named and constructed as poor.

Care ethics focuses our attention on how social realms rest on unequal power relationships and also moves us beyond critique and toward the construction of new forms of relationships, institutions, and action that enhance mutuality and well-being. Vicky considers how research, teaching, and professional practices might shift in conversation with care ethics and attend to the ways in which historical and institutional relationships produce the need for care (extension of market relations; famine, unnatural disasters, environmental and cultural destruction). Vicky’s determination to produce the Global Challenges program at UW reflects her conviction to take up social responsibility in professional practice and throughout personal development.