By Joern Fischer
Leuphana has just advertised up to eight more postdoc positions in sustainability. These are associated with a new project called “Bridging the Great Divide“, run by Daniel Lang, Henrik von Wehrden and Klaus Kuemmerer (from Leuphana), as well as Arnim Wiek and Manfred Laubichler (from Arizona State University). Please help distribute these positions by sharing this blog post.
The detailed advertisements are on Leuphana’s website. You can find them here, but please note you may have to go to the second page (or even the third) to find the relevant advertisements. All the ones related to this blog post start with “… 13.07.2016 … in the project Bridging the Great Divide“.
As an entry, here is the project abstract for “Bridging the Great Divide”:
Sustainability challenges threaten the long-term viability and integrity of societies around the world. While the theoretical understanding of these challenges continues to grow, solutions are far less developed. In response, sustainability science has been developing a research agenda that focuses on evidence-based solutions that are scalable and transferable. Yet, there is still a significant gap between understanding complex challenges and contributing to context specific solutions. This project aims to build additional capacity at Leuphana University of Lüneburg to bridge the divide between (i.) modeling and understanding of complex sustainability problems (often on a global scale), and (ii.) developing and evaluating contextualized solution efforts (often on a local scale). Focusing on specific topics (water, land-use, and climate change challenges including mobility), this project aims at combining two prominent approaches: high-performance computational modeling and transition experiments. Combining these two approaches and supporting interdisciplinary collaboration across the related academic communities while building on disciplinary excellence defines the agenda for a future cluster of excellence, for which a proposal shall be developed as part of the project. This will also be a major leap towards bridging the knowledge-action gap in sustainability science. Three specific components of the project beyond the two approaches are (i) the establishment of a “Mobile Solution Theater” as a further development of existing Decision Theater Concepts, to facilitate linking transition experiments with high performance computational modeling; (ii) further development of innovative, research based teaching-learning environments embedded in the overall setup of the project and (iii) a critical reflection of the epistemological foundations of sustainability science as well as the specific approaches utilized in this project.
Please address all questions to the people running this project; you can find contact details here.
