Anthropology of Global Climate Urgency
Doctoral Network
Mid-term Training in Catania
Social Innovation for Climate Action
C-URGE's mid-term training unfolded through a series of workshops designed by DCs, PIs and invited partners. Moving from the decks of the Ermenautica sailing expedition to onshore sessions at the University of Catania, participants explored how we can think, write, and act within the urgencies of climate change, to reflect on ethnographic practices and its link to environmental action.
The training sessions focused on how climate theory can emerge from field-based practices and relational engagements, rather than being imposed as a pre-existing framework. Emphasis was placed on the political and imaginative potential of data when mobilised toward action and collective experimentation, and on how social processes can open space for alternative climate futures. Finally, the event foregrounded the importance of qualitative approaches to climate science, inviting cross-disciplinary and practice-based conversations that challenge dominant paradigms and create room for situated knowledge production. Taken together, these contributions reflect an ongoing effort to reimagine climate action through the lens of anthropology and collaborative practice.
Training modules and workshops
30 August to
5 September 2025 | Along the Aeolian Archipelago
INSPIRATIONAL TALK
DCs WORKSHOP 1
January 2023 - June 2024
This opening workshop invited participants to attune to the immediate conditions surrounding them — to wind, water, and changing skies. Through guided sensory observation and collective discussion, the exercise fostered an embodied understanding of “weather” as both a physical and relational experience, setting the tone for the voyage ahead.
Led by doctoral candidates, this workshop explores human–water relations, this module examines how water shapes social, political, and ecological worlds through the creation of hydrosocial maps. Participants reflected on water as a connective medium — a carrier of memory, conflict, and cooperation — and discussed the ethics of research in environments marked by scarcity and uneven access.
DCs WORKSHOP 2
DCs WORKSHOP 3
January 2023 - June 2024
The workshop explores how processes of de-, re- and afforestation can embody both ecological harm and attempts at repair. Through case studies participants reflected on the ambiguities, emotions, and politics embedded in acts of environmental care. Discussions highlighted how repair is rarely straightforward but emerges through situated, relational, and often contested practices.
This workshop examined how ideas of justice and injustice manifest in various field sites. Using the CHASE Climate Justice Card Game, participants discussed positionality, we engaged in conversations about our own fieldwork and experiences, surfacing connections, dilemmas, and ambivalences.
DCs WORKSHOP 4
DCs WORKSHOP 5
January 2023 - June 2024
This workshop explores how and why to write ethnographic descriptions, focusing on writing as a reflective and theoretical practice. Drawing on the works of Kristen Ghodsee and John Van Maanen, participants engage in presentations, small group discussions, and guided writing exercises. They share personal experiences, reflect on writing challenges and strategies, and experiment with turning vivid field memories into narrative and theory. The session encourages accessible, evocative, and grounded ethnographic storytelling.
This workshop invites anthropologists to critically engage with their own positions in the field and the ethical complexities that arise in the practice of ethnographic research in ciritical times. Through collective reflection, case-based discussion, and peer exchange, participants explore how power, responsibility, and moral judgment shape fieldwork encounters and narratives. The workshop offers a space to think through dilemmas not only as challenges, but as moments of learning, transformation, and theoretical insight.
PIs WORKSHOP 1
INSPIRATIONAL TALK
This activity is an experimental and interactive game designed to open up reflection and dialogue around the affective, epistemological, and institutional tensions we face when doing ethnographic and collaborative research—such as citizen science—within large European research projects. It allows us re-engage with the lived experience of research and the dilemmas it raises.
In line with C-URGE’s objective to pioneer a social science attuned to climate urgency, the session highlighted the need for research approaches that are both critically analytical and relevant to policy. It emphasized the importance of engaging with the entanglements of time, environmental change, and human vulnerability, while also identifying how these insights can shape practical, locally grounded, and socially fair responses to climate challenges.
PIs WORKSHOP 2
PIs WORKSHOP 1
The session highlighted the need for research approaches that are both critically analytical and relevant to policy. Through three interconnected sessions, participants explored the relationship between fieldwork and writing, addressed the challenge of balancing personal experience with analytical framing, and engaged in collective exercises to support the transition from raw material to publishable text. The workshop also invited participants to reflect on how different writing styles and strategies can be developed in relation to their own career.
This workshop invited DCs to reflect on theory-building in relation to their own doctoral research, drawing inspiration from advanced and applied experiences in eco-ethnography. Through exchanges with members of the Ermenautica crew, it explored how theoretical insights can emerge from long-term, reflexive ethnographic work. The goal was to help participants identify conceptual tools and methodological orientations relevant to their socioecological research and ethnographic theorizing.
6 - 7 September 2025 | Monastero dei Benedettini
KEYNOTE SPEECH
BY MAURO VAN AKEN
WORLD CLIMATE CAFE (PART I & 2) BY HIMBY
What happens when the atmosphere itself becomes the stage of our cultural disorientation—and we find ourselves unmoored between social time and atmospheric time? How do we live when the very economy that once promised horizons now shrinks them, and the invisible traces of our fossil-past become tangible limits in the present? Can we re-learn to dwell in relation—with other beings, with non-human life, with the atmosphere above, when our old notion of nature as “outside us” has collapsed?
This two-part workshop invites participants from transnational research groups to ex- plore the emotional, symbolic, and political dimensions of the climate crisis as experienced in their own fieldwork and everyday life. Through embodied and dialogical methods, the lab seeks to identify both the blocks and generative potentials of working through climate and environmental urgencies across diverse localities.
OPEN SPACE WORKSHOP BY IMPACT HUB SICILY
The workshop addressed the question of how ethnographic research can generate both theoretical insight and practical impact in the context of climate-related challenges. Through collaborative exercises grounded in field experience, participants explored ways to translate situated knowledge into context-responsive strategies. The process highlighted the potential of ethnography not only as a tool for understanding but also as a method for shaping inclusive and locally grounded approaches to environmental transformation
This session drew on C-URGE DC Luisa Mohr’s ethnographic research in Augusta, Sicily, exploring how communities in a post-industrial landscape engage in ecological repair and collective imagination. Through the project Archivio del Futuro, developed with local artists, it illustrated co-creative storytelling as a mode of situated knowledge-making. The session highlighted reparation as a reciprocal, ongoing process between research, art, and commu- nity life.
