DATE/TIME: Friday, February 9, 2024, 2:30 pm
Jack Tchen
Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, Rutgers-Newark
The Silo Crossing Imperative of Responding to Global Warming / Environmental Sciences / Environmental Humanities / Traditional Ecological Knowledge
You’ve likely heard the phrase: Social movements happen at the speed of relationships. As I’ve been writing up a final report for an NSF Sustainable Regional System planning grant and facing the implementation proposal, we’ll discuss the cultural challenges of developing such relationships against the imperative of working across silos of specialization and fragmentation.
I'll briefly describe the beginning of two sets of such relationships, well three really: working with Elders of the Munsee Lunaape communities, working with faculty at SEBS, and the most gnarly - explaining this to administrators.
More of our time will focus on the most difficult challenge of bridging “science” and the historical and translational chasm between what are referenced as Local Indigenous Knowledge (ILK) and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in our region, now regularly cited by the IPCC as key to the enormous changes we now face.
How can all this be grounded in ongoing applied research and relationship building?
How can this also understood as what the NSF has framed as “convergence research”?
Seminar Host:
Donna Fennell
Department of Environmental Sciences, Rutgers University