This minor will give you the necessary tools to be an integral part of transformative change towards a sustainable and just future. This requires critically reflecting on diverse environmental values and visions, but also developing the ability to translate these values and visions into concrete options for research, policy, and design. This presents a challenge as well as an opportunity for designers, engineers, business leaders, and administrators to reflect upon the values that shape research and innovation today, and to co-produce a sustainable future for all – including both humans and non-humans.

The overall aim of the minor is to enable students to develop conceptual critiques and propose societal changes for more sustainable solutions and transformations, addressing social, environmental, and climate injustices within policy and design. Existing and future technologies and practices are bound up with human-nature relationships, and tied to the local contexts in which we live, including urban, rural and peripheral spaces. Environmental philosophy systematically examines the moral value of non-human entities and the interplay between these values, culture, institutions, technologies, practices, and consumer lifestyles.

The minor takes critical environmental social sciences and environmental philosophy “into the field” to address real-world problems, enhancing the tools students have already learned in their Bachelor studies.  To complement plural perspectives in environmental philosophy, this minor also offers a variety of conceptual lenses, especially decoloniality, biocultural conservation, science and technology studies, and historical studies to examine the values that shape a just and sustainable future for both non-human and human entities, for both present and future generations. This includes learning to translate diverse environmental values and worldviews into concrete design requirements or guidelines for research and innovation.

Educational approach:During this minor you will learn the foundations of environmental values and sustainable transformations through environmental philosophy and critical social sciences. By engaging in different learning methods -including DIY creation of media, field trips, a ethics cook-out workshop, debates, philosophical walks, visit to art installations, and more-, you will combine the most relevant academic literature and learn with (guest-)lectures from the Philosophy and KITES sections. 

More information is available on the minor’s webpage:

https://www.utwente.nl/en/bms/wijsb/education/minor-evst/

At the end of this course, students will be able to:

1. Understand critical perspectives in environmental ethics, climate justice, decolonialism, and transformative change
2. Analyse current paradigms and practices of sustainability, including lifestyle change approaches and technological innovation, and identify the role of power dynamics, historical and colonial legacies, and political and economic structures
3. Evaluate the implications of these paradigms and practices of sustainability for the environment as well as for human and non-humans.
4. Translate critical perspectives from environmental ethics, climate justice, decolonialism, and transformative change into requirements for design, technology, policy, and research
5. Reflect on stakeholder perspectives in a case study to jointly identify prevalent sustainability paradigms and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses
6. Co-shape concrete options for research, policy and design to support sustainable transformations together with stakeholders

Fulltime

Information will follow

This is a minor of the University of Twente (UT). All lectures are offered at the UT campus in Enschede.

There is 1 term of enrolment: September