Abstract
Global climate change research has seen an increasing involvement of the social sciences and humanities. The introduction charts the changing role of the social and cultural sciences in this field, delineating different research strands that have emerged over the past few years. Studies differ significantly according to the role assigned to the respective discipline, both within and beyond academia, as well as how they deal with the problem of uncertainty. While some studies are directly connected with a call for cultural or even system change, others take into account that people from different cultures conceptualise human-environmental relations in different ways. We move on to discuss several epistemological and methodological challenges arising out of the inherently interdisciplinary research subject of climate change and the attempt to reconcile locally-grounded approaches with global models. All of these problems are reflected in the different contributions of this volume, which are grouped into three parts. The first foregrounds questions of interdisciplinarity and the role of the social sciences in climate research, the second presents ethnographic case studies, while the third part provides insight into collaborative and comparative approaches.
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Notes
- 1.
For a more comprehensive overview of social scientific contributions to environmental change research, see ISSC/UNESCO (2013).
- 2.
Heike Greschke coordinated the group from 2009 to 2012 and Julia Tischler joined in from 2011 to 2012 (see Greschke, Chap. 7, in this volume).
- 3.
- 4.
Apart from these epistemological questions, there are also some very real obstacles to interdisciplinary cooperation. From our experience, including the compilation of this volume, publication logics and career trajectories differ in a way that seriously undermines interdisciplinary cooperation in climate science.
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Greschke, H., Tischler, J. (2015). Introduction: Grounding Global Climate Change. In: Greschke, H., Tischler, J. (eds) Grounding Global Climate Change. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9322-3_1
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