Healthy Food and Sustainable Agriculture: Exploring Transformative Practices
Co-Presented with Poul Holm, Peter Wagner and Verena Winiwarter
This panel presents the work of the AE Task Force Environment, Sustainability, Climate (TFESC). The aim of the Task Force is to explore if and how Academia Europaea (AE) is a suitable organization to take an active stance on urgent issues of climate and environmental change, mobilizing the diversity of expertise that exists across the AE membership through its four constituent Classes, through its geographical coverage, and across generations of scholars through the co-operation with the Young Academy of Europe (YAE). Towards that end, conceptual reflection on transformative practices has been applied to the complex issue of reliable and healthy food provision on the basis of sustainable agriculture. Drawing on interdisciplinary expertise, transformative practices are conceptualized as being based on knowledge about earth systems and social systems; including knowledge about issues of governance and including a normative dimension, as in law and religions; taking a long-term and international comparative approach; being aware of the mediatization of society and the resulting communication challenges; and creating narratives rather than mere factsheets. To actually bring the knowledge to fruition, they use technical and social problem-solving capacities, including economic capacities.
By the time of Building Bridges 2023, a workshop will have been held (University of Cambridge, 20-22 September) to further concretize the approach and design future activities in this direction. The panel will present this work and invite for further discussion and involvement.
Biography
Katalin Solymosi is a plant biologist and an Assistant Professor at the Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary). Her research is actually focused on how different stresses (e.g. drought and salt stress) affect crop growth and physiology, but she is also interested in sustainable and economically viable production of plastid-derived natural products used by the pharmaceutical and the food industry. She is the Vice-Chair of the Young Academy of Europe and Co-Chair of the Danube Region Thematic Mission of the Academia Europaea Budapest Knowledge Hub.
Website: katalinsolymosi.elte.hu