Postdoc Academy for Transformational Leadership

Für jeden Programmdurchlauf werden 20 Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler ausgewählt. Um sich für die Postdoc Academy for Transformational Leadership zu bewerben, sollten Sie:

• als Nachwuchswissenschaftler mit Nachhaltigkeitsfokus einer europäischen Forschungseinrichtung angehören,

• während des Programmdurchlaufs über finanzielle Förderung der Postdoktoranden-Stelle verfügen (bis September 2021).

• Ihren Doktortitel vor höchstens vier Jahren erworben haben (exklusive Familien-/ Pflegezeiten),

• ein Forschungsthema haben, das relevant ist für das diesjährige Schwerpunktthema "Land use practices in a globalised world",

• Interesse bzw. Erfahrung haben, an inter- und transdisziplinärer Forschung mitzuwirken,

• durch Ihre Forschung die Komplementarität von Sozial-, Geistes- und Naturwissenschaft anstoßen,

• ein exzellenter Wissenschaftler sein und das Ziel haben, den Transformationsprozess hin zu einer nachhaltigeren Gesellschaft durch Ihre Forschung positiv zu beeinflussen,

• eine Professur oder andere akademische Führungsposition anstreben,

• ein Intrapreneur sein, der durch verantwortliches Handeln positive Veränderungen in seiner Organisation initiiert,

• sich als Gestalter gesellschaftlichen Wandels verstehen,

• die englische Sprache hervorragend beherrschen (CEFR C2-Level oder gleichwertig) und

• an allen Seminaren und Vernetzungsaktivitäten teilnehmen können.

Bewerber müssen als Postdoktoranden einer wissenschaftlichen Institution in einem der folgenden europäischen Ländern angehören: Albanien, Andorra, Armenien, Aserbaidschan, Belgien, Bosnien-Herzegowina, Bulgarien, Dänemark, Deutschland, Estland, Finnland, Frankreich, Georgien, Griechenland, Irland, Island, Italien, Kosovo, Kroatien, Lettland, Liechtenstein, Litauen, Luxemburg, Malta, Mazedonien, Moldawien, Monaco, Montenegro, Niederlande, Norwegen, Österreich, Polen, Portugal, Rumänien, Russland, San Marino, Schweden, Schweiz, Serbien, Slowakei, Slowenien, Spanien, Tschechische Republik, Türkei, Ukraine, Ungarn, Vatikan, Vereinigtes Königreich, Weißrussland, Zypern.

16. Dezember 2019 bis 16. Februar 2020
Online-Bewerbung (Motivationsschreiben, CV, Empfehlungsschreiben, etc.)

16. Juni 2020
Assessment-Workshop (persönliche Präsentation, Interview, Gruppenarbeit)

bis 30. Juni 2020
Benachrichtigung der Bewerberinnen und Bewerber über das Ergebnis der Auswahl

• 1. Seminar vom 6. Oktober bis 8. Oktober 2020 an der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin/ Deutschland

• 2. Seminar vom 9. Februar bis 11. Februar 2021 an der Leuphana Universität in Lüneburg/ Deutschland

• 3. Seminar vom 12. Oktober bis 14. Oktober 2021 am Stockholm Resilience Centre/ Schweden

• 4. Seminar vom 15. März bis 17. März 2022 am The Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (DRIFT) in Rotterdam/ Niederlande

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its special report entitled ‘climate change and land’ in August 2019. It states that “land provides the principal basis for human livelihoods and well-being including the supply of food, freshwater and multiple other ecosystem services, as well as biodiversity. Human use directly affects more than 70% of the global, ice- free land surface. Land also plays an important role in the climate system.” (IPCC SRCCL 2019) Similarly, the IPBES Global Assessment shows how land use conversions are the largest direct driver for loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services that undermines the wellbeing in human societies (IPBES 2019). The reports set out how the continuation of current land use practices in combination with global environmental and climate change will render many regions of the world increasingly inhabitable. Across disciplines and fields of research, they call for major transformations of the systems that produce the negative social and ecological outcomes. Central to such transformations is the notion of complex, interconnected human-environmental systems and the need to move from single solutions and single problems towards integrated understandings of interconnected and interdependent problems to integrated solutions. This includes regenerative approaches and solutions that can help deal with climate change in ways that have positive effects on land use practices and vice versa.

Land: matter, markets, meaning

In the Postdoc Academy, this insight is our starting point to think forward. The focus on land use practices foregrounds the ontological tripartite of land: Land is biogeophysical matter. It is soil, topography and literally the foundation of all terrestrial life. We can remotely sense global changes in land cover over time, assess degradation and improvement and try to understand the dynamics of biodiversity in particular biomes. Yet land also represents markets. Land is owned, sold, commodified, turned into a global asset and has become a matter of speculation. It is being ‘grabbed’, swapped and inherited and we can measure its economic value as well as the routes through which it and its products are traded. Finally, land is meaning. People call land a home, they value landscapes and they assign symbolic meaning to particular landscape features. We can interpret what land means to people, how they relate and attach to it and what kind of futures they hope for, as well as how these person-land relations affect place stewardship or change resistant responses. With ‘Land use practices in a globalised world’, we want to address all three of these dimensions and particularly their interconnectedness in a rapidly changing world. When ‘people do things on and with land’ the physical, the technological, the economic and the socio-cultural dimensions of land become intertwined.

Land use practices in a globalised world

The investigation of land use practices in a globalised world brings together a wide range of disciplines from natural sciences such as physical geography, agricultural sciences, geoinformation sciences and ecology through environmental economics, environmental psychology, and further into social sciences and humanities to practical philosophy, law and ethics. The ability to work across disciplines and thought styles is paramount. To understand the dynamics of land use practices requires becoming aware of and considering dynamics across temporal and spatial scales. Land use practices are more often than not driven by what is happening beyond ‘on site’ locally. They are driven by ‘distal’ factors such as transnational supply chains and investment flows, technological advances, global knowledge and social mediascapes, migration of people and animals alike, as well as regional and global air- and waterflows. In an increasingly urbanising world, cities as very dense and complex forms of land use shape in manifold ways their local hinterland while being embedded into global networks of human activities. Investigating such telecouplings and translocal dynamics of land use practices thus means engaging with an interconnected world and engaging with people from diverse backgrounds; it means engaging with colonial pasts and widely diverse aspirations for futures. Moreover, land use patterns are always a manifestation of power (asymmetries) and of distributional (in) justice. In fact, access to land and having the right and capabilities to use land are fundamental boundary conditions that shape today’s and future land use in a globalised world.

Transdisciplinary Research and Sustainability

Investigating land use practices, their dynamics and the sustainability transformations needed thus requires inter- and transdisciplinary approaches: Whether it is remote sensing scientists engaging in ground truthing or ethnographers co-designing urban public space; whether it is land system scientists working together with supply chain managers or agricultural scientists discussing novel production methods with regional farmers. Inquiring into the dynamics of land use practices needs to engage with various actors inside and outside academia. Increasingly, this engagement takes the form of collaboration in order to achieve a transformation towards more sustainable land use practices. Interventions, real world experimentation, co-production and co-design are forms of engaged scientific research that will become increasingly important over the next few years as academia tries and has the responsibility to contribute to a global transformation towards more sustainable land use practices.

The Postdoc Academy for Transformational Leadership

The Postdoc Academy for Transformational Leadership addresses scholars with an interest in transforming land use practices in a globalised world towards sustainability. The Academy explores through the four seminars what kind of science this will require and what this kind of science will require from the people who will shape it. How does transdisciplinary research on land use practices fit within different research institutions? How do different disciplinary lenses approach the challenges of cross-scale interdependencies of interventions in land-use patterns? How can the future governance of land use look like? What is this type of transdisciplinary research of land use doing to my academic career? Do I have the right skills already to lead a group in this direction? Do I know people across Europe who can help me develop those skills and build networks for future projects?