The 2022 Report of the MJA–Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change: Australia Unprepared and Paying the Price
This historical research project aims to explain the conceptual development of the new planetary health, the principal means of assessing impacts of climate change and global environmental degradation on human health.
Using a novel combination of history of science and medicine, Indigenous studies, environmental history, and international history, this research is expected to show how environmental health and disease ecology have been re-framed and scaled up in the past century to address the effects of global warming. The project will examine critically this intellectual formation, exploring its potential in global health and revealing its blind spots and
omissions, especially in relation to Indigenous knowledge and structural inequalities.
Funded by Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP220100624.
School of Humanities, University of Sydney
Affiliated projects and centres
SPHERE–Study of the Planetary Human-Environment Relationship—is a European Research Council-funded project based at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. SPHERE is a historical study of a comprehensive and complex governance issue in the contemporary world: humanity’s relation to planetary conditions and constraints.
The Pacific Circle supports and promotes research and exchanges in the history of science, medicine, and other practices of knowledge in the Asia-Pacific. It takes knowledge to encompass a cross-cultural diversity of beliefs about the workings of the universe and the command of a myriad of techniques applied to investigations and manipulations of worldly phenomena.
Researchers at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies harness social science and humanities expertise to understand and transform how health and social life intersect on our changing planet. Working across scales of observation from the microbial to the planetary, the Centre highlights how historical context, political arrangements, economic structures, enduring inequalities, and interspecies and environmental relations both produce health problems and might map paths to new solutions.
Led by Paul Rhodes and James Dunk at the University of Sydney, the Ecological Emotions Research Lab explores new methods for engaging with ecological distress, grief, anxiety, and other forms of ecological emotion – particularly in community settings.
AusSTS is a network of researchers in science and technology studies (STS) in
Australasia. It hosts social, professional, and academic events to create a community in STS across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. AusSTS has local nodes in Melbourne, Sydney, Darwin, and Wellington.
The Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine exists to promote the academic study of the history of health sciences within the Australia-Pacific. Membership is open to anyone with an interest in the history of health and illness.
The Charles Perkins Centre is a large multidisciplinary research centre committed to improving global health. Based at the University of Sydney, its unique, complex-systems approach allows it to bring together researchers in unexpected research collaborations across four domains: biology; populations; society and environment; and solutions.
September 2023
European Association of the History of Medicine and Health, Oslo
Warwick Anderson and James Dunk will present at EAHMH in Oslo, 30 August - 2 September.
The Global Governance and Geopolitics of Environmental and Planetary Health - a Conversation
Warwick Anderson, Jakelin Troy and James Dunk will take part in a conversation about planetary health and global governance led by Sverker Sörlin for the KTH Environmnetal Humanities Lab. 5 September, 12.30pm. Register by email.
KTH Environmental Humanities Lab
James Dunk, Environ/mental: Planetary Mental Health and the Ecological Self, 7 September, 12-1.30pm. Register here.
August 2023
European Society of Environmental History, Bern
Warwick Anderson, Sverker Sörlin and James Dunk will participate in the ESEH conference in Bern, Switzerland.
Environmental Humanities, National University of Singapore
James Dunk has been invited to speak to the environmental humanities group at NTU on the theme 'Person/Planet: Towards a Planetary Mental Health'
July–August 2023
Project Meetings in Bern, Switzerland and Melbourne, Australia
Investigators will meet to discuss project aims and plan a calendar of individual projects and events across the project duration, 2023–25.
May 2023
Warwick Anderson wins the John Desmond Bernal Prize
The prize is awarded annually by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) to an individual who has made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Past winners have included founders of the field, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. Read more.
TBA
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Lead chief investigator
Warwick Anderson, Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics, School of Social and Political Sciences and Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney
Other chief investigators
Jakelin Troy, Director, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research, Research Portfolio & Professor of Linguistics, University of Sydney
Tony Capon, Director, Monash Sustainable Development Institute & Professor of Planetary Health, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University
Sverker Sörlin, Professor, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH
Postdoctoral research fellow
James Dunk, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney
Research assistant
Mujahid, School of Humanities, University of Sydney
Membership is available to individuals (including students), households and institutions. Members receive an electronic or print copy of the Society's biannual journal, Health and History, and quarterly newsletter.
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