Current News

Application Deadline: 15. April 2025

We invite applications for:

A PhD position (4 years, full time): just climate resilience & social learning with film

at “Critical Sustainability Studies” Unit & mLAB, Institute of Geography, University of Bern (Start Sept. 1st, 2025)

You will be part of the transdisciplinary EU-funded Horizon project “JustREACH: Just Climate Resilience through Enhanced Adaptation and Capacity Harnessing”. The project aims to enhance resilience by empowering local actors to achieve equitable climate adaptation outcomes. We will work in five pilot regions in urban, industrial, and rural settings in Germany, France, Greece, the UK and Croatia. Facing resource constraints, the authorities often struggle to balance overlapping objectives and to co-create an understanding of just resilience. The research project involves researchers, citizens with a cause, policymakers, businesses, and civic organizations to co-create tools and ways of working together to implement climate adaptation plans for well-being and societal transformation. Social learning videos with authentic storytelling will be co-created at all pilot sites to share their transformative knowledge about adaptation processes.

Your tasks:

· Conduct transdisciplinary PhD research in Geography with a methodological focus on understanding and fostering social learning processes across the pilot sites,

· Learning the Social Learning Video method, exploring the potential, critically reflecting, and developing the method further,

· Conduct extensive multi-sited fieldwork with the camera in a collaborative manner (five pilot sites),

· Contributing to JustREACH workshops, conferences, reading groups, colloquia and mLab events,

· Outputs of your PhD are social learning videos and published results in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Requirements:

· Excellent completed master’s degree in sustainability and transformation research or related fields such as human geography, global, urban and mobility studies, human ecology, visual anthropology, sociology,

· Proven experience in working with film (camera, editing) and qualitative methods,

· High interest and, preferably, already experience in transdisciplinary research, co-creation & integrating different perspectives,

· Strong commitment to extensive field research with a camera at different places in Europe and critical reflection of multi-sited research,

· Excellent written and spoken English. German, French, Croatian, and Greek are strong additional assets.

· High level of self-organisation for field sites and eco-friendly modes of travelling,

· Willingness to move to Switzerland to become part of our team.

JustREACH connects project partners across Europe (Lead: TU Delft). You will be based at the Critical Sustainability Studies research unit and the mLAB, Institute of Geography, University of Bern. Your PhD supervisors are Prof. Dr. Susan Thieme and Dr. Patricia Fry.

The project starts mid-September 2025, with a 2-day kick-off meeting in Delft (NL), which you must join.

We offer:

• The Institute of Geography, our research team and the mLAB as an inspirational research environment committed to just futures,
• Supportive supervision and mentoring,
• A unique opportunity to collaborate with inter- and transdisciplinary project partners across Europe,
• Fully funded PhD position for 4 years (according to University of Bern salary standards) with budget for fieldwork and conferences,
• Possibility to participate in the International Graduate School North-South (https://www.igs-north-south.ch/).

Explore our work here: Institute of Geography, mLAB, www.patriciafry.ch

Online information on the EU project is still limited. Please email Susan Thieme and Patricia Fry (susan.thieme@unibe.ch, contact@patriciafry.ch) for further information.

Please send your application in English in one PDF with a letter of motivation, CV, a 1-page summary of your research interests related to the topic of the announced position, university certificates, and two contact persons for references. Please send your master’s thesis in a separate PDF or/and another publication, if you have one already, tosophia.schatz@unibe.ch.

Application deadline: 15. April 2025

Interviews will be held May 6th and 7^th, 2025, at the Institute of Geography, University of Bern.

Here you can find current Bachelor's and Master's thesis topics in Critical Sustainability Studies.

Call for Participation: Workshop Geographies of Health and Wellbeing (Switzerland)

Organised by the Swiss Geography Association's (ASG)  Health and Wellbeing Thematic Group

We invite you to participate in a workshop that brings together geographers and colleagues from related fields studying health and wellbeing from spatial, relational, and multi-scalar perspectives. In Switzerland, scholars conduct critical research on the inequalities and injustices in health-related issues such as healthcare workers’ experiences in different institutional settings, mobilities of care workers, medical tourism, reproductive health, environmental health and pollution, and experiences of health and wellbeing, among others. The workshop offers a space for all self-identifying health geographers – understood as research by geographers with a health focus/implications, and geographical/spatial research by non-geographers with a health focus/implication (Andrews 2018) studying these different areas of research (and beyond). We aim to foster dialogue and will explore inequalities, in/justices, future imaginations, and transformative research for more equitable health outcomes.

We welcome contributions on topics such as (but not limited to):

• Planetary health
• Healthcare and health care related educational systems
• Inequalities in access to care
• Relationships in care work and practices of care
• Circulations and im/mobilities of workers & technologies
• Commoning, re-arranging, and re-claiming (care)work
• Transformative research that drives social change
• Environmental pollution and health impacts
• Lived experiences of illness and health
• Therapeutic landscapes and places of wellbeing
• Interdisciplinary perspectives and dialogues beyond geography
• Methods and methodological approaches in studying health

The goal of this workshop is to co-create a common ground and outline for a special issue in a journal in geography (waiting for confirmation) to map current key issues in geographies of health and wellbeing; particularly by researchers based in Switzerland.

If you would like to join us, please send your abstract using the attached template by 20 February 2025 to susan.thieme@unibe.ch and maaret.jokela-pansini@uzh.ch. Limited travel budget is available for early-career researchers.

References

Andrews, G (2018) Non-representational theory and health. The health in time in space-time revealing. London: Routledge.

From November 7-10 in Bern, Zurich, Basel, and Lugano, we will be showing feature films, documentaries, and short films related to current scientific debates, followed by discussions with the filmmakers and experts from research and other fields of practice. The short film sessions provide the stage for filmmaking by postdocs and PhDs.

Forschungsmittwoch ‘Dialogue as a means to understanding and empathy’ reflecting on the transdisciplinary EcoArtLab Residency on the 9th of October 2024 at 17.00, at the HKB, Fellerstrasse 11, Bern.

How does climate change connect the Gangetic Delta with the Swiss Alps? The EcoArtLab organised a residency in collaboration with the mLAB (UniBe), the Ballenberg Open-Air Museum, and Helvetas. The SNSF research project “Relational Encounters between the Arts and Climate Research” examined the residency on the basis of its institutional framework and strategies and methodological approaches within the collaboration of the residents.

Speaker: Alisha Dutt Islam, Christa Hermann & Nora Gailer (Terravibe)

Moderation: Johanna Paschen, EcoArtLab

Host: Institute Practices & Theories in the Arts

More Information on the poster.

Gender Campus is publishing a series of lecturer Dr. Jinat Hossain's contributions on the recent political transition in Bangladesh and its impact on gender leadership and equality. 

Gender Campus: The End of Sheikh Hasina’s Era: Is women leadership in Bangladesh at risk?

EnJust Conference 2024

Jinat Hossain and Susan Thieme screened and discussed their new film project “Who speaks for us?’: Claiming rights, resistance and (in)justice in South Asia” at the Aby Warburg House in Hamburg, Germany.

ITD Conference 2024

Inter- and Transdisciplinarity Beyond Buzzwords:
Educational Pathways for Sustainable Research Collaborations

4 - 8 November 2024 | Utrecht, The Netherlands

Relational Encounters between the Arts and Climate Research: Exploring the Future of Art and Science Collaborations

Susan Thieme, Johanna Paschen, Mirko Winkel, Riikka Tauriainen, Yvonne Schmidt

https://www.conftool.net/itd2024/sessions.php

Grand opening 8^th Nov Friday in Bern.  Details follow very soon.

https://www.sciencefilm.ch/

The residency "Sowing the Seeds of Change" at the mLAB and EcoArtLab examines climate change from an artistic perspective. Nora Gailer and Alisha Dutt Islam explore the temporal nature of living in climate-conflicted regions and address concepts such as abundance, scarcity, drought and flooding in relation to soil health. Through their work, they aim to change the perception of soil and encourage viewers to rethink their perspective. The connection between India and the Alps is made through the shared impact of climate change, and the project explores alternative forms of connection with nature and collaboration. In an interview with BFH, they talk about their personal motivation and perspective on the project.

In addition, Susan Thieme was interviewed by SRF Regionaljournal Bern Freiburg Wallis about the exhibition at the Ballenberg Open-Air Museum.

Maaret Jokela-Pansini (University of Oxford) and Susan Thieme (Universität Bern) are leading the new Verband Geographie Schweiz (ASG) thematic group Health and Wellbeing. This aims to bring together researchers in geography studying the different factors that influence health and wellbeing and produce injustices, and the practices and discourses different individuals and institutions use to act upon such injustices in a transformative way.

Concretely, the thematic group will organise workshops, meetings and talks to address issues related to health and wellbeing and to connect people working along those topics.

Image: Dialog N

The University of Bern supports the project financially via U-Change and is a co-applicant through Prof. Dr. Susan Thieme. The Student Minds Network is networked with the student organizations SUB and Mind Balance at the University of Bern and various joint activities are being planned for 2024 and beyond.

The Student Minds Network connects student and youth organizations that campaign for mental health at universities on a national level. The aim is to strengthen and protect mental health and to remove the taboos and stigma surrounding the topic in higher education. The project is based at the Swiss Student Union (VSS) and the first project phase in 2024 is largely funded by the U-Change program.

As part of the lecture "Migration, Im/Mobilities, In/Equalities" lead by Prof. Dr. Susan Thieme, there will be a lunch cinema with subsequent discussion on the documentary film "Weaving Threads Across Borders" with Prof. Dr. Yvonne Riaño on Monday, 15.05.2023 from 12:15 - 14:00h. All interested parties are cordially invited.

An SNF-funded collaboration between the EcoArtLab, the BHK, the mLAB and the Research Unit Critical Sustainability Studies.

Click here for further information on the research project.