RCC Fellows to Attend GESA Summer Academy 2014

Four RCC Fellows - Khaled Misbahuzzaman, Daisy Onyige, Stefan Dorondel, and Eunice Blavascunas - will attend the 2014 Global Environment Summer Academy (GESA). RCC doctoral students Alfredo Ricardo Silva Lopes and Yolanda López-Maldonado also received scholarships to attend.

GESA is a peer-to-peer learning event that takes place annually under the auspices of the Global Diversity Foundation (GDF) and the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE), with support from the Rachel Carson Center. The Academy is designed to broaden and deepen the knowledge, networking, and communication skills of postgraduate students, professionals and activists who are concerned about human dimensions of environmental challenges.

Every year the course focuses on different themes within the broad concern of human dimensions of global environmental change. It spans local to global scales, diverse ecosystems and all geographical regions, exploring the most critical contemporary environmental issues from multiple perspectives including biocultural diversity, environmental history, political ecology, sustainability studies and personal activism.

Since 2013, GESA has taken place in Bern, Switzerland. This year, it began with a retreat in the Swiss Alps, the Salvia Goethe Retreat: Dynamic Engagement, A Goethean Approach to Connection. The retreat focused on fostering connection and commitment between participants and with the natural world, through an experiential exploration of J.W. van Goethe’s works and methods.

Following the retreat, GESA returns to Bern. In the classroom, participants join forces with leading scholars and resource people for lively roundtable debates on contemporary socio-ecological themes. GESA also offers workshops on a variety of different themes: science communications, such as video and comics; art, scholarship and advocacy; law and policy; and participatory mapping. This year, a local scholar took the participants out on a walking discussion on the ‘unseen’ Bern of squats, social resistance and alternative urban dwelling.

In addition, GESA provides a forum for participants to share their work, ideas and innovations as changemakers, and to learn how to communicate this important material to a broad audience. This year, they have all prepared TED-style talks for this purpose, which have been refined during GESA for filming in the final week. GESA concludes with a session on Building Global Action Networks, followed by one on Collaborative Initiatives, which encourages participants to develop ideas for future collaboration together. The final event is an anonymous evaluation, which the organisers use to improve GESA for the subsequent year.

(Participants at GESA 2014.)