Summary

Supported by a President’s Special Initiative grant, Create the Change focuses on the moral, economic, and cultural challenges to planetary health—including power struggles, entrenched interests, and destructive disinformation–that elude material or technological solutions. Those complexities mean that all disciplines, especially the social sciences and humanities, must be engaged in addressing what Peter Schlosser of the Global Futures Laboratory describes as “the underlying causes of the recurring instabilities and conflicts” that threaten planetary health.

Create the Change responds to that challenge. CTC mobilizes the social sciences and humanities—the human sciences—in collaboration with sustainability sciences, to address the moral, economic, political, and cultural complexities of achieving planetary health, in which thriving, equitable human societies are aligned with Earth’s biosystems. CTC is built on four intellectual pillars: 1) countering disinformation with “re-information,” counter-speech, and creative practice; conducting dialogues and difficult conversations; 2) addressing the intersections between social and environmental justice; 3) embracing alternative knowledge systems and collaborative problem-solving strategies; and 4) educating and collaborating with the next generation of change agents.

Create the Change activities include supporting and inspiring human sciences-led initiatives and projects over a three-year period.  Through such project engagement, pedagogical innovations, and other activities, CTC will develop a human sciences “action and accountability framework” for achieving planetary health.  This framework will emphasize the importance of values clarification, advancing dialogue across disciplines and social divides, and infusing technological projects with knowledge about social structures, historical inequities, power conflicts, and cultural contexts and expectations, all of which impact the acceptance and efficacy of technological solutions.