Social Sciences and the Environment Network | Community and Agenda-Building Workshop [1]
On Friday March 30, over 55 people gathered at the Design Building at UMass for an animated day of dialogue hosted by the Social Sciences, Humanities and Environment Network (SSEN).
The SSEN workshop on Environmental Social Science Research: Commonalities and Conundrums [2] convened faculty, administration, graduate students and staff to discuss how to leverage diverse backgrounds to develop and implement social science, humanities scholarship that best illuminates how we understand and address the environment.
A full day of interactive panels and breakout sessions addressed topics including bridging epistemologies, balancing normative and theoretical expectations, selecting and moving across interacting units of analysis and scales, participant recruitment, public engagement and fomenting greater communication across UMass and within the Five Colleges. To capitalize on the strength of social science scholarship on the environment, the group brainstormed new agendas to build opportunities and tackle obstacles in this quintessentially inter-disciplinary field.
This workshop – and the SSEN as a whole – is jointly supported by the School of Earth and Sustainability [3] and the Institute for Social Science Research [4] at UMass Amherst. To view the workshop agenda and stay in touch with the ongoing dialogue, visit the SSEN blog [5].
SSEN is a growing community of scholars across the Five Colleges whose research, teaching and public engagement explore environmental conditions, relationships between people and the environment, and the human dimensions of environmental challenges. As the community grows, it will foster new collaborations, share teaching and research funding resources, and host and publicize events to grow this important field of work.
For more information about SSEN, and to join the community, please contact Anita Milman (ECO) [6].
- Environment [7]