Professor Ann Dale's Wiley Lecture - Synoikismos

Professor Ann Dale's Wiley Lecture is now available for download in PDF (with accompanying notes) and PPT (with transitions and hyperlinks) from our presentations archive.  The presentation, entitled Synoikismos: Overcoming the Terrorism of the Either/Or, was delivered at the 2012 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences and a description of the presentation can be seen below.

The problems of modern society are beyond any one sector, any one discipline, any one level of government to solve. Climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as biodiversity are only two examples that illustrate how complicated and complex our challenges are. The academy has failed to communicate both the urgency of the problems and the science surrounding these issues. The lack of integration between the natural and social sciences continues to be major barrier to communicating useful knowledge to decision-makers and the more general publics. Why have we failed? What have we learned, and what can we do better? Has the space for meaningful dialogue around critical issues such as population and consumption shrunk, and why? How do we as academics, re-enlarge this space, re-engage and diffuse the necessary and critical trans-disciplinary knowledge to key actors?