Bigger, bolder, better social science? UK Launch of the World Social Science Report

Confirmed speakers are Heide Hackmann (ISSC), Lee Davies (UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), John Urry (Lancaster University), Thomas Tanner (UK Overseas Development Institute, London), Bronwyn Parry (King’s College London) and John Crowley (UNESCO). Denise Lievesley, Head of the School of Social Science and Public Policy, King’s College London will chair the launch.

The World Social Science Report 2013, prepared by the International Social Science Council and co-published with UNESCO and the OECD, argues that social science needs to be at the heart of understanding and responding to global challenges such as climate change, pollution, resource limits and planetary boundaries to economic growth.

The report issues an urgent call to the international social science community to collaborate more effectively – with each other and with colleagues from other fields of science and research users – to deliver solutions-oriented knowledge for today’s most pressing environmental problems. It calls for a transformative social science that is:

• bolder in reframing and reinterpreting global environmental change as a social problem
• better at infusing social science insights into real-world problem-solving
• bigger in terms of having more social scientists to focus on global environmental change
• different in the way it thinks about and does research

The speakers will present and discuss the key messages of the report and possible policy implications, transformative and transdisciplinary research – with each other and the audience. All are welcome to this free event, which will be followed by a reception.

For further information please email Louise Daniel (louise@worldsocialscience.org).