New knowledge to meet growing challenges

KTH Future Humanities Initiative is a research project aimed at developing knowledge about climate transition and sustainable development in professional training programs during the Agenda 2030 decade. 

The central idea of the initiative is to use research and development as a means of disseminating and applying the so called ‘new humanities’ knowledge, generated by challenge-driven complexes of questions such as environment, sustainability, digitization, energy and others. These new integrative knowledge areas comprise for example environmental humanities, climate humanities, and digital humanities.

The initiative rests on the position of KTH Royal Institute of Technology as an unconventional knowledge environment for the humanities. Engineering and other professional training programs educate key specialists in the ongoing process of societal transitions towards sustainability. The new knowledge developed by the Initiative is aimed to reach those groups. The Initiative will mainly take place within the framework of KTH programs, but is designed so that its learning materials, courses and online programs can gradually be adapted and used in other professional training programs around the country. 

The researchers will be collaborating with research and educational institutions in Sweden and abroad, and also with organizations, businesses and individual practitioners in communications, publishing, design, art, popular education and the media. 

The humanistic knowledge to be put to use is characteristically integrative – it is challenge-driven, interdisciplinary and distinctly collaborative, with the aim of promoting social progress and contributing to sustainability and innovation.

Another distinctive feature of the project is that this knowledge is being developed in a unique KTH humanities research and teaching context – the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment and its embedded KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory (EHL). Established in the early 2010s, the EHL has become a defining integrative humanities environment. It has recently been upgraded to a KTH Center as part of a joining of forces at KTH in the environmental and climate humanities.

The Initiative may be summarized in the form of three overall aims:

• Offering a wide range of education/training alternatives and educational tools to KTH students at different levels (undergraduate and postgraduate).
• Ensuring these tools are scalable and can be used by other universities and colleges.
• Offering society at large transformative humanistic knowledge and contributing new key elements to Sweden’s and Stockholm’s position as a global cluster for knowledge and innovation on environment, climate and policy.