Future Perspectives

In line with the university’s overall concept of a network university, this transdisciplinary form of shared research and teaching will be substantively strengthened and intensified with the establishment of the Environmental Humanities. Our initiative is based on the conviction that the role of the humanities in the environmental crisis does not merely consist in adding selected cultural aspects to problems defined by the natural sciences. Instead it is our assumption that the Environmental Humanities are providing equally fundamental contributions to our understanding of the ongoing transformations of the biosphere and will decisively help to deepen our knowledge of the dramatic sociocultural changes that we are witnessing.

Transdisciplinary Research Projects

• Environmental Crisis and the Transnational Imagination
• Material and Cultural Ecologies
• Nature and Narrative
• Regenerative Energy
• Cultural and Natural Landscapes
• Dimensions of Sustainability

Some of these topics have been and will be discussed in workshops in the Alpine observatory on the Zugspitze mountain, in which the University of Augsburg is a cooperating member.