SOCIAL INNOVATION FOR CLIMATE ACTION

This event is organized by the C-Urge in collaboration with Officine Culturali, a Catania-based organization dedicated to fostering public engagement with cultural heritage through innovative practices of education, curation, and collective memory.

The C-URGE mid term event themed “Social innovation for Climate Action” is organised by the University of Catania, Department of Political and Social Science (DSPS). The first part of the event brings together doctoral researchers, supervisors, and invited guests in a collective exploration at sea. It is organized by the Catania-based C-URGE team in collaboration with Ermenautica.

This offshore seminar unfolds aboard two sailboats navigating from the Sicilian coast to the Aeolian Islands. During this part of the meeting, the Doctoral Students (DCs) and their supervisors (SPs) as well as two members of the interdisciplinary advisory board will embark on a 6 days knowledge exchange. The experience is supported and accompanied by the Ermenautica group, an anthropological project that uses the sailing boat intimate experience to create innovative, face-to-face, and horizontal forms of interaction and collaborative learning.

In this phase of the event, participants engage in shared navigation, daily seminars, and embodied practices of cohabitation at sea. The program is weaving together thematic discussions, collaborative workshops, and situated reflection. Topics include hydrosocial landscapes, forest repair, eco-ethnography, climate justice, and ethical fieldwork. Through collective navigation exercises, and open exchanges, the group explores how research, responsibility, and imagination can be reoriented through movement, proximity, and slowness. Living and learning together on the water, this offshore phase invites participants to reimagine climate action not only as policy or science, but as a shared horizon of emotional, social, and epistemic transformation. All the participants will engage in low-cost, low-carbon, slow-down ways of coexistence and sharing knowledge that will maximize learning and creative thinking beyond the typical power asymmetries that define academic relations. DCs will learn how to translate their PhD experiences into action of use for civil society, citizens science activists, and social innovators.

In the second phase of the event, participants will engage in a dense two-day program of collaborative exploration, public dialogue, and situated experimentation. HIMBY (Hot in My Backyard) will facilitate a two-part World Climate Café, guiding participants in connecting planetary crisis with personal, local, and emotional realities. Impact Hub Sicily curates moments of co-creation, including an Open Space workshop. A collaborative ethnographic session on ecological reparation, co-led by Luisa Mohr and research participants from Augusta, will close the symposium, grounding academic reflection in field-based relationships and shared responsibility. By including local civil society and academic actors and Sicilian research participants, the event fosters cultural exchange with tangible local impact.

HIMBY (Hot in My Backyard): Translating Climate into Collective Action

The association HIMBY brings anthropologists, activists, and social methodologists together to explore the tangled affects, uncertainties, and urgencies of climate change. During their World Climate Café workshops, held in two parts, they invite us to connect

global planetary issues with personal and local experience, transforming abstract knowledge into situated social imagination.

HIMBY’s approach is grounded in ethnographic research and long-term engagements with communities and environmental struggles. Their workshops mix dialogue, improvisation, and relational sensitivity, opening space for not only understanding, but feeling and rethinking climate responsibility. These sessions are more than exercises: they are invitations to dwell in the climate crisis without turning away, and to explore collective strategies for staying with the trouble.

Impact Hub: Social Innovation at the Crossroads of Ideas and Territory

Impact Hub Sicily, an associated partner of the C-URGE network, curates spaces where ideas and people meet to design social and environmental solutions with real-world impact. During the onshore symposium, they will host an Open Space workshop as well as informal networking moments, using collaborative tools to surface shared questions, initiatives, and imaginaries.

Their presence is not simply logistical: it is a question. How can research be porous to society? How can we move from critique to construction? How can a network of practitioners, researchers, and change-makers co-create resilient pathways in and beyond academia? The Impact Hub sessions will invite DCs and guests to map possible futures together, guided by trust, courage, and cooperation.

Ecological Reparation as Ethnographic Experiment: Blurring the Line between Field and Institution

This session emerges from Luisa Mohr’s long-term ethnographic work in Augusta, Sicily, a site where the global C-URGE research framework meets the lived realities of ecological harm, community resilience, and collective imagination. The opportunity to include share this experience within the midterm symposium reflects a core commitment of the project: to intertwine international research with locally rooted collaborations.

As part of this session, Luisa Mohr will present Archivio del Futuro together with photographers Maria Bauer and Giuseppe Scafidi, offering insights into their collaborative approach to ecological storytelling and situated archival work. This session reflects what ecological reparation can mean in practice: a reciprocal process of academic and local knowledge and shared authorship.

Rather than ending in the field, this form of engagement continues through layered co-creation. Research participants are not passive contributors, but active shapers of both content and form, involved in curation, presentation, and documentation. A local videomaker from Augusta accompanies the symposium, tracing the experience from within and contributing to its collective memory.

Text credit: Mara Benadusi, Luisa Mohr, Suranga Lakmal and Avishka Sendanayake.

Poster design credit: Officine Culturali.