Global Futures: Futurecast | Vol. 2, Spring 2022

Humanities-led international hub comes to ASU Acknowledge struggles and inequities that started long ago.

Develop solutions for global challenges facing the world today.

Create a better tomorrow.

Humanities, as a series of disciplines, uses lessons of the past and present to understand how humans can plan for the future.

It dives into this metaphorical time travel by investigating the impact of human motivations, behaviors, desires and emotions.

The humanities offer conceptual clarification, theoretical analyses, and critical explorations of who “humans” are, how they live, what motivates them, and how they imagine and work for change. The “way we feel about the world” alters the choices people make, said Joni Adamson, President’s Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Department of English and director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. Adamson is the founding director of the UNESCO BRIDGES Sustainability Science Coalition Flagship Hub, which will launch in April 2022 during the grand opening celebration of the Global Futures Laboratory’s new building, ISTB7.

The goal of UNESCO BRIDGES is to go beyond theoretical analysis and connect diverse communities of knowledge and action through project-based activities. It is the first humanities-led international sustainability science initiative within UNESCO. Adamson credits the work of the Humanities for the Environment (HFE) Observatories Network that she launched in 2013 with Sally Kitch, University and Regents Professor of women and gender studies, founding director of the Institute for Humanities Research and the Humanities Lab at ASU, as central to the creation of BRIDGES. The HFE network, alongside UNESCO’s Management of Social Transformations (MOST) Programme and the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences, are the co-founding partners of BRIDGES.