ENLIGHT Climate Change Blended Intensive Programs (BIP)

As part of the European Universities Network ENLIGHT and under the academic direction of Prof. Dr Elfriede Hermann (Göttingen) and the coordination of Leon-Fabian Caspari, M.A. (Göttingen), various teaching formats on the topic of climate change were developed and successfully implemented at the Institute of Social Anthropology together with colleagues from the University of Göttingen and ENLIGHT partner universities.

Our interdisciplinary courses aimed at undertaking social scientific explorations of local perspectives on climate change consequences and their global contexts. In addition to developing and teaching Challenge Based Learning formats on climate adaptation in the ENLIGHT Global Engagement Module in 2022 and 2023, two multidisciplinary Blended Intensive Courses (BIP) were developed, focusing on the complex linkages between global and local levels in relation to climate change mitigation, adaptation and climate justice.

The first Global Engagement Module successfully took place from March to May 2022 in collaboration with the Intercultural LearningLab (ICL). In the Göttingen Track, students addressed the challenges of local climate adaptation. The aim was to use Challenge Based Learning (CBL) to identify specific local challenges of the climate crisis at a particular location and to seek solutions for them. The result was a mixture of critically reflected discussion and practical implementation. After a successful first iteration in 2022, we conducted a slightly revised version of the Global Engagement Module from March to June 2023.

The course Engaging with Climate Change: Local Views of Challenges was successfully held from April to June 2022. The goal of the course was to guide students from different Master's programs (and advanced Bachelor's programs) to explore the local challenges for citizens of our university cities and adjacent regions in relation to the impacts of global climate change. The course was developed with the participation of the Universities of Göttingen, Groningen and Uppsala and was implemented in the summer semester of 2022 with students from the Universities of Göttingen (Germany), Groningen (Netherlands), Ghent (Belgium) and Uppsala (Sweden).

The course Dealing with Climate Change: From Global to Local Perspectives took place from April to July 2023. With a new partner on board, the University of the Basque Country, we ran an extended version of the 2022 course. The focus now shifted to the relationships between the different levels of climate mitigation, climate adaptation and climate justice.