PhD candidate Alice Frantz Schneider from DIGENT has been awarded the Kristine Bonnevie scholarship to conduct a research stay in Beijing, China. Alice was accepted as a visiting PhD candidate at the School of Environment of Tsinghua University and was based in the team of Urban Mining and Circular Economy from July to September 2019.

Alice’s PhD research focuses on e-waste management systems, and China is one of the countries of study. The stay at Tsinghua University allowed her to collect relevant data, in addition to providing invaluable experience of networking with researchers in the e-waste management field.

The Kristine Bonnevie scholarship is provided by the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences for a research period abroad from one to six months. PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, and researchers can apply for the grant. More information about the scholarship, and on how to apply, is available here.

Birthe Soppe from DIGENT, Taran Thune, and Jochen Markard are convening a track on “Sustainability Transitions: Bridging Systems and Organizational Perspectives to Tackle Grand Challenges” on the forthcoming EGOS colloquium in Hamburg in July 2020.

 

Introduction to the theme

We live in a world facing a variety of grand challenges connected to environmental and societal sustainability, including food, water, and energy security, climate change, natural disasters, poverty, and inequality. How societies and organizations deal with such challenges and commit to developing more sustainable futures, while discontinuing unsustainable businesses and practices is a key concern and research topic (Ferraro et al., 2015; Geels et al., 2017; George et al., 2016; Markard et al., 2012).

This sub-theme will bring together scholars who study grand sustainability challenges and transformations from different perspectives, including systems and organizations. We are particularly interested in contributions that explore new approaches, perspectives, and methods.

Read more on egosnet.org

Deadline

Deadline for submission of short papers: Tuesday, January 14, 2020 (23:59 Central European Time – CET)

We are looking forward to receiving your contributions!

Associate professor Maja van der Velden and PhD candidate Ines Junge, both from DIGENT, presented research at the 3rd Product Lifetimes and the Environment (PLATE) Conference held in September in Berlin, Germany.

PLATE is organized every two years and brings actors from different sectors to discuss the product lifetimes from a sustainability context. This year’s conference included several workshops and poster sessions, and more than 100 oral presentations.

Maja presented the paper “Sustainable product lifecycles: a systemic approach to the regulation of e-waste” in the session Legal Framework for Product Longevity. The paper was written together with Postdoc Mark Taylor from the Department of Private Law, and Associate professor Martin Oteng-Ababio from the University of Ghana. The authors proposed a polycentric perspective to regulation by bringing the case of cable burning in the scrap metal yard of Agbogbloshie, Ghana.

Ines presented the paper entitled “Modularity as one principle in sustainable technology design – a design case study on ICT” in the session Design for Sustainable Products. The author explored desirable characteristics and nowadays insufficiencies within modular ICT. Through the design case review spanning over the recent decade’s marketed and conceptualized technology, she argued how modularity can contribute to Sustainable Technology and Interaction Design (StaID), a combination of fields, supposedly treated as a matter of critical design practice in future research.

Both papers were based on research in the “Sustainable Market Actors for Responsible Trade” – SMART project, a Horizon2020-financed project coordinated by the UiO.