Paper short abstract:

Knowing past cultural evolution is important to understanding current and future human and earth system interactions. This poster introduces the UoC’s cross-faculty project HESCOR that proposes to bridge gaps in concepts, methodology and data structure between humanities and science disciplines.

Paper long abstract:

The HESCOR project is a cross-faculty initiative at the University of Cologne, investigating human and earth system interactions from various perspectives in order to model future cultural evolution and thereby initiate a new direction for transdisciplinary environmental research integrating humanities and science disciplines.

Since a profound difficulty is that the governing equations for most human-system processes are unknown, the project has to find innovative inter- and transdisciplinary pathways to meet this challenge. For example, resilience is a measure of human-system stability in response to earth-system forcing, but is affected by a range of human factors such as human learning and cultural transmission. Therefore, one central challenge for the environmental humanities approaches in HESCOR will be the “parameterization of human learning”. In order to contribute to the interdisciplinary team’s efforts to subsequently develop new models for human system resilience and cultural carrying capacity i.e., the potential and role of narrative practices in facilitating cultural learning and enhancing cultural carrying capacity will be assessed from a humanities perspective. The poster will map the overall HESCOR initiative, introduce the challenges and opportunities of the humanities approaches in the project, and outline promising concepts and narrative domains that will be traced.