Amsterdam, 25-26 October 2023

Credits: 1 ECs (assignment details to be published in September)

Groningen & Amsterdam | 17 and 24 November + 1, 8 and 15 December 2023, 13:00-16:00

Organizers: Dr Ksenia Robbe (University of Groningen), Dr Sanjukta Sunderason (University of Amsterdam) and Dr Hanneke Stuit (University of Amsterdam).
Open to: PhDs and RMA students; OSL members have first access.
Credits: 5 ECs. NB: Credits can only be awarded to humanities ReMA and PhD students from Dutch universities.

Registration will open on 4 September 2023 via this link.

This course addresses the ways in which literature and art, in their generic capacity for multi-perspective representation, reimagine place and agency within the eternal present inaugurated by the end of the Cold War at the turn of the 1990s. This global discourse of contemporaneity was meant to deconstruct the linear progressive time of modernity that dominated the 20th century. However, arrested within such perceptions of new spatio-temporal fluidities of “the contemporary” were the heterogeneous temporalities of decolonization and democratization in societies that had been negotiating the impacts and afterlives of empire and ideological conflicts of the Cold War across the long 20th century. Today, we observe a certain “return of history” in calls for decolonization that have come to define militant imperialisms and nationalisms across the globe, as well as activist resistance to nation-statist hegemonies. The war in Ukraine, and continuing conflicts over postcolonial sovereignty across former colonial sites like Hong Kong, Kashmir, or Palestine reveal such circularities of eternal presents and resurfacing futures. These temporalities, while appealing to new calls for liberation, are nonetheless often dominated by nation-state driven essentialist past-orientedness and the wish to preserve the existing hegemony.

Our course will foreground the proposition that postcolonial and postsocialist societies of the past three decades can be approached as repositories of braided temporalities of struggle, affirmation, memorialization, and utopian horizons. We can encounter here new and alternate versions of contemporaneity that materialize the spectre of emancipatory history via aesthetic form and develop ways of engaging with the past that “resurface” futurity.

Programme

Fridays from 13:00-16:00

• 17 November 2023 – University of Groningen: University Library, Broerstraat 4 Groningen – Bladergroenzaal
• 24 November 2023 – University of Groningen: University Library, Broerstraat 4 Groningen – Bladergroenzaal
• 1 December 2023 – University of Amsterdam: Oudemanhuispoort 4-6, Amsterdam room – E 1.08
• 8 December 2023 – University of Amsterdam: Oudemanhuispoort 4-6, Amsterdam – room E 1.08
• 15 December 2023 – University of Groningen: Harmony Building, Oude Kijk in Het Jatstraat 26 – Room 1312.0025

Amsterdam, 17-19 January 2024

Organizers: Prof. Dr Michael Boyden (Radboud University), Dr Doro Wiese (Radboud University) and Dr Jeff Diamanti (University of Amsterdam)

Open to: PhDs and RMA students; OSL members have first access

Credits: 6 ECs. NB: Credits can only be awarded to humanities ReMA and PhD students from Dutch universities.

Registration will open 16 October 2023 via this link.

THE WINTER SCHOOL IS FULLY BOOKED, please send an e-mail with your with your name, affiliation, status (ReMA, PhD, other) and research school membership to osl@rug.nl. We will put you on our waiting list.

“Sustainability” is one of the central concepts of our age. While the term is so ubiquitous in virtually all areas of life – a Google search yields close to three and a half billion hits for the term, more than “freedom” or “democracy” – its rise in dominance is a fairly recent phenomenon. The pervasiveness of sustainability discourse suggests that we are now living through a major socio-economic transformation, comparable to the agricultural and industrial revolutions. But the concept’s popularity also raises many questions and concerns about the who and the what of sustainability. For instance, critics have argued that sustainability rhetoric serves to greenwash polluting industries, that it does not fundamentally call into question the neoliberal economy, or that it is rooted in imperialist, racist, and/or anthropocentric ideologies. Literary and cultural studies scholars have a crucial role to play in weighing these conflicting valences of sustainability. Not only do we possess the analytical tools to study the hegemonic narrative of sustainability, as expressed both in literary texts and in social discourses generally, we can also contribute to the articulation of robust visions of sustainable futures that resist co-option by neoliberalism and other ideologies. What is the plot of sustainability as it is currently written, and what are the terms of its emplotted futures? What currents of struggle and critique get absorbed or obscured by its ever-expanding reach? Turning to sustainability issues, finally, might impel us to reflect on the sustainability of our own critical practices and to consider the place of the humanities in the university. The 2024 Ravenstein Winter School puts these issues front and center by approaching the nexus between sustainability and literature from distinct but strongly connected perspectives: econarratology, critical logistics, and Indigenous literatures. In bringing together these perspectives, we encourage a cross-disciplinary conversation that includes considerations of narrative form, infrastructures and technologies, colonialism and decolonization as well as modes of collective continuance and continuous care in the Anthropocene.

Confirmed speakers: 

• Joni Adamson, professor of English and Environmental Humanities, Arizona State University
• Alexandra Campbell, Lecturer in English literature, University of Glasgow
• Erin James, professor of English, University of Idaho

Keynotes: Abstracts

Cosmovisionary Climate Science: Indigenous Literatures as Lively Ethographies  

Prof. Joni Adamson (President’s Professor of Environmental Humanities and English, Global Futures Laboratory, Arizona State University)

In January 2018, headlines in The New York Times referenced a bitter cold gripping the east coast of North America and two months later, subfreezing temperatures stretched across Europe from Poland to Spain.  Not a few journalists drew connections to Roland Emmerich’s 2004 film, The Day After Tomorrow, which imagines an extreme freezing event caused by human disruption of North Atlantic Ocean circulation.  Studies suggest, noted journalists, that the Artic is the fastest warming region on the planet, because the jet stream, or polar vortex, is “weakening more frequently and staying weaker for longer periods of time” causing cold air to escape the Arctic and find its way down to the North America, Britain, and Europe.  Articles comparing this real-world extreme weather to The Day After Tomorrow referred to the film as climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” and indeed, over the last decade and a half, there has been increasing interest among environmental humanists—and in the media—about the potential of climate fiction and films to educate the public about the causes of human-caused environmental change and motivate effective response.

The most well-recognized examples of climate fiction usually concern first world communities facing dystopian futures after humans have catalyzed some kind of apocalyptic collapse.  In this presentation, I will point to limitations in the ways climate fiction and films are defined and discussed as imaginative works deeply “indebted to climate science” (Milner and Burgmann 2017).  I’ll explore how our understanding of the genre might be enriched by bringing indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, cosmovisionary tales, and philosophies of intergenerational justice into the conversation.  I will bring Chickasaw novelist Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995) which fictionalizes the development of the James Bay megacomplex of dams in Canada into my analysis of the polar vortex and Northern hemispheric freezing events.  Hogan examines the 1970s construction of James Bay and the resistance of the Cree and Inuit peoples to its construction.  Thirty years later, the novel appears prescient as James Bay is associated with a shift in the seasons so dramatic that sea ice patterns have changed and the Inuit and animals upon which they depend for subsistence are on the brink of collapse.

The indigenous knowledge represented in Hogan’s novel offers a more scientifically plausible explanation for a weakening polar vortex than found in The Day After Tomorrow, yet Solar Storms is most often categorized as “historical fiction.”  To my knowledge, it has never been discussed as climate fiction.  I will explore what we gain when understandings of “climate science” are extended to include indigenous scientific literacies rooted in the cosmovisionary archives of diverse Native North American peoples and other ancient peoples around the world.  I will examine how the genre of climate fiction is enriched when it includes literatures illustrating what Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooran have called “lively ethography,” defined as a “mode of knowing, engaging, and storytelling” that recognizes the ethos and meaningful lives of other than humans. The presentation will conclude with some thoughts about why humanities-led climate science goes beyond data sets to include literary works that sing of “encounters with the animated world” (Rose and Van Dooran).

Logistical Counter-Rhythms: Resistance, Revolt and Reproduction on the (dis)Assembly Line 

Dr Alexandra Campbell, University of Glasgow

Against the synthesized roar of crowds, blaring alarms, and the frantic beats of the 909 drum machine, the sonorous voice of Martin Luther King rings out: ‘Now is the time’. Sampled from the infamous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech of 1963, the 1991 track ‘Riot’ by techno collective Underground Resistance (UR) tunes into a revolutionary history of Black struggle that is set against the postindustrial ruination and infrastructural abandonment of Detroit. The militant stylings of UR deploys techno as “an operating system that overrides the present” (Eshun 1998), a form of sonic weaponry launched against racialised modes of production that center logics of replication, optimization, and efficiency. In this lecture I read the sonic experiments of the Detroit techno scene as an archive of counter-logistical form. More than a technological system of distribution and supply, logistics names a regime of metrical ordering that maintains the accumulation of value through an algorithmic choreography that renders environmental and social assemblages into standardized forms conducive to the smooth circulation of capital. Following Deborah Cowen’s suggestion that logistics is “not only about circulating stuff, but about sustaining life” (2014), I ask what forms of life does logistics structure and sustain? Where the logistical image of streamlined organization chimes easily with narratives of environmental sustainability that center ideals of reduction, resilience, and efficiency, I turn to those sites and forms that rub against the grain of logistical circulation. If logistics constitutes “the calculative politicization of rhythms and tempos of exchange” (Chua 2022) as they organize a planetary architecture of sustainment and supply, what are the counter-forms that resist or disrupt this spatio-temporal regime? Taking the assembly line as its object of inquiry I tune into a poetics of disassembly that takes us from the factory rebellions of autoworkers in the 1960s and 1970s into the militant sounds of techno in the 1980s and 1990s. By giving form to social compositions that block, hack and glitch the circulatory rhythms of logistical reproduction, I consider how the machinic interventions of Black sound artists assemble an acoustic ecology that attunes and sustains alternative arrangements of life.

Narrative, World, Anthropocene

Prof. Erin James, University of Idaho

This past July, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) pointed to a small, little-known lake in Ontario, Canada, as ground zero for a new geological epoch. Because of the unique shape and size of Crawford Lake, the sediment at its bottom has remained undisturbed as it has accumulated over the past centuries. A sampled core of that sediment thus provided AWG scientists with a clear “golden spike” of the Anthropocene; plutonium isotopes from early-1950s Hydrogen bomb testing, they argue, signify a sharp shift from the Holocene to a new epoch in which humans are directly—and visibly—leaving their mark on the planet.

As a scholar of narrative, I am fascinated by this declaration that the Anthropocene, by definition, is a concept that hinges upon humans writing the world. The scientists of the AWG root their understanding of our current epoch in a specific physical marker, a semiotic sign that records the ability of humans to reshape the material world in which we live. The AWG’s definition of the Anthropocene depends upon the recognition that (some) humans in this epoch literally write the world in our own image and inhabit that changed reality. I understand narratives, too, as records of humans writing and inhabiting worlds for some purpose. My work is driven by the work that narratives demand of us—the cognitive, imaginative, and emotional work that goes into interpreting the stories we read, watch, listen to, and tell. Cognitive scientists and narrative scholars that study this work argue that, to interpret a narrative, we must mentally model and imaginatively transport ourselves to the world of the story; we must shift from the here and now of our actual world to the alternate world of a story to understand a narrative. This research argues that worldbuilding and inhabitation is essential to narrative comprehension.

I explore the connections between the world-building power narrative and the built world of the Anthropocene in this talk, proposing a new approach to both that foregrounds the following questions: what type of worlds do specific narratives encourage readers to model? What attitudes, values, and behaviors do these worlds rely upon and assume? What relationship between humans and their environment do these stories assume? What role do the values, attitudes, and behaviors of these storyworlds play in driving the anthropogenic climate change that defines the Anthropocene in the real-world? And, crucially, how do the worlds of these narratives foreclose, suppress, or deny other, alternate worlds that rely upon other, alternate attitudes, values, and behaviors?

Utrecht, 10-14 June 2024 | Summer School of the Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies

Description

Cultural Narratives are symbolic matrixes in the making that orientate behavior, world-views, affects, social engineering, and practices (Kuipers 2019; Valdivia 2017, 2019). Literature and cultural symbolic products (fiction, poetry, music, transmedia, theater, amongst others) are privileged sources of transformative knowledge – by enacting simulative and experiential information processing, they play a key role in configuring our societies, identities, systems of representations, technologies, policies, and communicative mediations (Comer & Taggart 2020; Landau 2017; Levine 2015; Stockwell 2020). In this interdisciplinary Hermes Summer School, we will explore, analyze, and problematize cultural narratives of degrowth and sustainability, with particular attention to how they might unfold new imaginaries that can contribute to developing novel ways of rethinking the social fabric.

This summer school aims to provide participants with a critical understanding of narratives of degrowth and sustainability, their complex relations and their implications for sustainable development. For instance, what sustainability narratives configure the sustainable development goals as formulated by the UN construct? (UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals 2015; UNESCO Knowledge Driven Actions 2022) Do they tell a story that frames economic growth as compatible, if not essential, for social and ecological wellbeing? How do they hide or highlight the contradictions between economic, social and ecological agendas? Moreover, what narratives are needed to rethink sustainability in such a way that it moves beyond “green” growth and towards a degrowth path? How might these narratives intersect with posthuman and/or decolonial theories and demands and foster a better understanding of the tension between the Global South and the Global North? In short, this summer school will investigate the potential of such narratives to promote alternative forms of economic and social organization that prioritize ecological sustainability, social justice, and human well-being over economic growth.

As stated by Johns-Putra, Parham, and Squire in their introduction to the volume Literature and Sustainability: “In discussing sustainability from a literary perspective, we draw forward two approaches … One, is that of a critical sustainability. Certainly, other literary scholars have suggested that the very discourse and praxis of sustainability bears scrutiny of a literary kind. Karen Pinkus has argued that sustainability functions in the same way as narrative; it ‘implies or writes a narrative coherence’ […], and rethinking sustainability requires that we rethink narrative itself. Indeed, a narrative of jouissance rather than of futurity might release us from the trap of ‘business-as-usual’ thinking that accompanies so much sustainability discourse. The other approach may be considered a literary response (broadly speaking) to such discourses of sustainability, including an emphasis on the possibilities that arise in a fluid engagement with literature per se” (2017: 5-6).

In this vein of critical inquiry, amongst other timely research questions, this Hermes Summer School will investigate which cultural narratives can foster and prime social transformations enhancing degrowth and sustainability. What conceptual architectures (e.g., conceptual metaphors and analogical modeling) could promote and contribute to developing fairer and more respectful human, economic, and technological practices concerning the climate and ecological crisis? How do literary knowledge and its practices convey innovative paths for re-imagining change, including social and environmental responsibility within the symbolic frameworks of legal, political, and economic imaginaries? How do we inquire about the theoretical foundations of degrowth and sustainability cultural narratives? What is the overarching role of narratives in shaping public discourse and policy? How can we inform social change through case studies of communities and movements that have embraced narratives of degrowth and sustainability? What challenges and opportunities are associated with implementing narratives of degrowth and sustainability?

As operating non-normative terminological frameworks, we suggest conceptual points of entry for discussion and dialogue based on the following understanding of

Culture: “A set of beliefs, practices, rituals, and traditions shared by a group of people with at least one point of common identity (such as their ethnicity, race, or nationality). At its core is the sense that it is different from nature in that it is a product of conscious choice and not the instincts. But as authors like Donna Haraway have shown, the nature/culture divide is difficult to sustain. A wide range of disciplines—predominantly anthropology, archaeology, Cultural Studies, history and sociology—make use of the concept of culture, each one adding its own qualification, making it problematic to say that what is meant by this word is exactly the same in any two disciplines. In the humanities, from the time of Matthew Arnold in the late nineteenth century up until very late in the twentieth century, culture referred to artistic production of all types, and was further classified into categories of ‘high’ and ‘low’ reflecting the perceived relative aesthetic merit of a particular work. The advent of Cultural Studies in 1950s Britain began to change that, as it combined ways of thinking about culture from history and sociology and conceived of culture as the glue holding society together. Culture came to refer to any form of creative production, from the self-consciously artistic work of professional artists to the relatively banal habits and practices of everyday life. It is this sense of the word that has lately become dominant. The principal theoretical problem culture raises is one of reproduction: why do people adhere to a given culture and to what extent are their actions determined by this?”. (Buchanan, I., 2018)

“UNESCO defines culture as the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, that encompasses, not only art and literature, but lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs”. (UNESCO, 2001)

Narrative: “We make sense of our memory and others’ behavior by constantly constructing narratives from an information stream that unfolds over time. Comprehending a narrative is a process of accumulating ongoing information, storing it in memory as a situational model, and simultaneously integrating it to construct a coherent representation (Zwaan et al., 1995; Langston and Trabasso, 1999; Polyn et al., 2009; Ranganath and Ritchey, 2012). Forming a coherent representation of a narrative involves comprehending the causal structure of the events, including the causal flow that links consecutive events or even a long-range causal connection that exists between temporally discontiguous events”. (Song et al. 2021, Cognitive and Neural State Dynamics of Narrative Comprehension)

Degrowth: “Degrowth can generally be defined as a collective and deliberative process aimed at the equitable downscaling of the overall capacity to produce and consume and of the role of markets and commercial exchanges as a central organising principle of human lives (Schneider et al., 2010)”. (Sekulova et al. 2013, Degrowth: from theory to practice)

Sustainability (also known as sustainable development):

“In 1987 the UN World Commission on Environment and Development published the Brundtland Report under the title Our Common Future. The report was named after the former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland who chaired the commission. In it sustainable development was defined as “development which meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” There are two very important principles the definition invokes. The first is that sustainability is inherently intergenerational; namely, it is future oriented. The second is that sustainability is an ethical issue. It demands current generations act responsibly vis-à-vis future generations and consider the long-term consequences of their actions. ” (Parr, A., 2014)

“Sustainable development has been defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainable development calls for concerted efforts towards building an inclusive, sustainable and resilient future for people and planet. For sustainable development to be achieved, it is crucial to harmonize three core elements: economic growth, social inclusion and environmental protection. These elements are interconnected and all are crucial for the well-being of individuals and societies. Eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions is an indispensable requirement for sustainable development. To this end, there must be promotion of sustainable, inclusive and equitable economic growth, creating greater opportunities for all, reducing inequalities, raising basic standards of living, fostering equitable social development and inclusion, and promoting integrated and sustainable management of natural resources and ecosystems”. (UN 2023, The Sustainable Development Agenda)

4th Industrial  (Knowledge) Revolution: “The fourth industrial revolution, a term coined by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, describes a world where individuals move between digital domains and offline reality with the use of connected technology to enable and manage their lives. (Miller 2015, 3) The first industrial revolution changed our lives and economy from an agrarian and handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacturing. Oil and electricity facilitated mass production in the second industrial revolution. In the third industrial revolution, information technology was used to automate production. Although each industrial revolution is often considered a separate event, together they can be better understood as a series of events building upon innovations of the previous revolution and leading to more advanced forms of production”. (Xu et al. 2018, The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Opportunities and Challenges)

We welcome abstracts related but not limited to the areas listed below:

• Cultural narratives of degrowth and sustainability: literary and artistic practices from Medieval, Early Modern to present.
• Culturally mediated social transformations enhancing degrowth and sustainability.
• Literary conceptual architectures for rethinking the social fabric.
• Sustainable development goals and their implications for cultural imaginaries.
• Aesthetic coping with contradictions, frictions, and unbalances engendered by the 4th industrial revolution.
• Literary knowledge and practices for re-imagining change.
• Symbolic frameworks of legal, political, and economic imaginaries.
• Theoretical foundations of degrowth and sustainability cultural narratives.
• Role of narratives in shaping public discourse and policy.
• Case studies of communities and movements embracing narratives of degrowth and sustainability.
• Analogical modeling (metaphor, metonymy, amongst others) for developing fairer and more respectful human economic and technological practices concerning the climate crisis.
• Environmental responsibility within symbolic frameworks of legal, political, and economic imaginaries.
• Degrowth thinking and posthumanism under the context of the 4th industrial revolution.
• Decolonial theory and anti-/post-extractivism.

Applying

Each paper will be allotted 20 minutes. PhD students from Hermes partner institutions are welcome to send their proposals, including an abstract (300 words) and a short bio note (150 words, with name, email address, institutional affiliation, dissertation topic, and disciplinary anchoring), to osl@rug.nl by November 30, 2023.

Keynote Speakers (TO BE ANNOUNCED)

Masterclasses by Hermes faculty for small groups: the program will include three seminars for small groups, each focusing on a topic related to the general theme of “Narrating Degrowth and Sustainability”.

General Information

The Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL) is a member of the Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies, a long-standing collaboration of twelve doctoral schools in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the USA. The Consortium’s annual summer school, hosted in turn by each partner institution, brings together specialists, delegates from the partner universities, and 24 PhD students (two per university). An intensive training workshop and work-in-progress presentations focus on shared methodologies and interdisciplinary themes and lead to the publication of an annual edited volume, published by UCL Press in the Comparative Literature and Culture series.

Practical Information

The school will take place in Utrecht. Accommodation for delegates, speakers and student participants will be provided for five nights (10th June to 14th June 2024). A conference fee of EUR 350.00 per participant will include participation, accommodation, cultural activities, coffee breaks, lunch on five days, and conference dinner. Participants are requested to make their own travel arrangements.

References

Buchanan, I. (2018). culture. In A Dictionary of Critical Theory. : Oxford University Press. Retrieved 24 May. 2023., https://www-oxfordreference-com.proxy-ub.rug.nl/view/10.1093/acref/9780198794790.001.0001/acref-9780198794790-e-154

Büchs, M. & Koch, M. (2019). “Challenges for the degrowth transition: The debate about wellbeing,” Futures, Volume 105.,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2018.09.002

D’Amato, D. (2021). “Sustainability Narratives as Transformative Solution Pathways: Zooming in on the Circular Economy”. Circ.Econ.Sust. 1, 231–242. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43615-021-00008-1

Johns-Putra, A. (2017) Literature and sustainability: Exploratory essays. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Johns-Putra, A., Parham, J. and Squire, L. (eds) (2017) Literature and sustainability: concept, text and culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Landau, M. J. (2017) Conceptual metaphor in social psychology: the poetics of everyday life. New York, New York: Routledge.

Levine, C. (2015) Forms: whole, rhythm, hierarchy, network. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kuipers, G. (2019). “Cultural narratives and their social supports, or: sociology as a team sport,” The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 70, Issue 3, 708-720.

Parr, A. (2014). Sustainability. In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. : Oxford University Press. Retrieved 24 May. 2023. https://www-oxfordreference-com.proxy-ub.rug.nl/view/10.1093/acref/9780199747108.001.0001/acref-9780199747108-e-701

Prádanos, L. I. (2018). Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain. Liverpool University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvt6rjgt

Schröder, P., Bengtsson, M., Cohen, M., Dewick, P.,  Hofstetter, J., Sarkis,J. (2019) “Degrowth within – Aligning circular economy and strong sustainability narratives,” Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Volume 146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2019.03.038

Sekulova, F., Kallis, G., Rodríguez-Labajos, B., Schneider, F., (2013) “Degrowth: from theory to practice”, Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 38, 1-6, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2012.06.022

Song, H., Park, B., Park, H., Shim, W. M., (2021) “Cognitive and Neural State Dynamics of Narrative Comprehension”, Journal of Neuroscience, 41, 43, 8972-8990. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0037-21.2021

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2022) Culture and Cognitive Science.

Stephenson, J. (2023) Culture and sustainability : exploring stability and transformation with the cultures framework. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Stockwell, P. (2020) Cognitive poetics: an introduction. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

UNESCO (2010) The UNESCO Framework for Cultural Statistics.

UNESCO (2022) Knowledge-driven actions: transforming higher education for global sustainability.

United Nations (2023) The Sustainable Development Agenda.

Valdivia, P. (2017) “Literature, crisis, and Spanish rural space in the context of the 2008 financial recession”, Romance Quarterly, 64:4, 163-171, 5. https://doi.org/10.1080/08831157.2017.1356135

Valdivia, P. (2019) “Narrating crises and populism in Southern Europe: Regimes of metaphor,” Journal of European Studies, 49(3–4), 282–301. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047244119865083

Xu, M., David, J., Kim, S. (2018) “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Opportunities and Challenges”, International Journal of Financial Research, Volume 9, No 2, 90-95. https://doi.org/10.5430/ijfr.v9n2p90

Groningen, 28 February 2023

The OSL seed money grant aims to foster collaboration within and beyond the OSL community. The OSL Board will make € 1000,- available as seed money for the most promising initiative, including for instance:

• Planning of symposia, workshops and conferences in 2024 or 2025
• Publications (e.g. contribution to publishing fees, editing services, etc.)
• Assistance for joint funding applications
• Organization of OSL budgeted academic events (in this case, the seed money will be added as an extra to the budget already made available by OSL).

Applications (short description of the initiative and its ‘seed’ nature + estimation of expenses, approx. 500 words) should be sent to osl@rug.nl by 28 April 2023, end of day. The OSL Board will notify the recipients by the end of May 2023.