Connecting environmental changes and human mobility as a way to draw new maps of knowledge (3–6 March 2019, venue Congress Centre Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland)
The Conference Final Report is now available! This document summarizes the presentations and discussions that took place at the conference. During the three-day conference, around thirty speakers – including numerous young researchers – presented their research on the main topics related to environmental changes and human mobility, across different disciplines and from different angles, including environmental history, human geography, visual analytics and the international legal perspective, stimulating rich and vivid discussions with the participants.
The event is co-organized by Prof. Elisa Fornalé, World Trade Institute, Prof. Marco Armiero, Environmental Humanities Laboratory, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Prof. Denis Lalanne, Human-IST Institute, University of Fribourg, and Prof. Elspeth Guild, Queen Mary University.,
Negotiations on two global compacts, and a resolution at the UN, have brought climate change and human mobility into the limelight. The Conference aims to make a timely contribution to a progressive transformation of our knowledge. The debate will focus on three emerging themes: how we can expand our knowledge and reframe current problems by reflecting on historical cases of societal adaptation/resistance; how we can expand claims by identifying legal developments on recognizing the rights of migrants and refugees; and how we can expand governance and cooperative mechanisms by analysing the greater global engagement in migration-related political processes.
The Conference will adopt a novel threefold approach: normative, historical and visual analytical. The focus is on interactive means of kick-starting dialogues by means of innovative workshops followed by keynote speeches from experts. The thematic workshops are based on:
- exploring the past and imagining new futures,
- climate change and migration – visual analytics,
- legal developments and implementation in the field,
- the global compacts – on migration and for refugees.
These workshops create a space for presentations and reflection; therefore PhDs and young researchers interested in interactive tools (such as geo-archives and interactive maps) for informing society, or in learning more about the topics being discussed will find the exchange particularly beneficial. The user-friendly portrayal of big data on migration flows and the geosystem is aimed at members of the public by presenting complex empirical results in an understandable manner. The Conference will contribute to the knowledge-based society targets in these challenging subjects, prioritised as policy issues at international, regional and local levels.
