This coming January, scientists, humanists, culture producers, and policy experts from around the USA will join together to imagine and design new ways of communicating to accelerate and broaden our human response to climate change. It is a response to the fact that current efforts to curb global warming lack the necessary scope and urgency, and that remaining impediments are not only scientific but increasingly social, cultural, political, and economic. We are seeking interested participants with knowledge, skills, and abilities as listed below.
New Info for Participants:
- For those who can attend, there is a meet & greet dinner on campus tonight, 6-8 PM, at the normal workshop space, UMBC’s Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building. Shuttle buses will leave the hotel at 5:45 PM.
- See you all for breakfast tomorrow, Tuesday, at 8 AM. Shuttle leaves the hotel at 7:30 AM. Workshop begins at 9 AM sharp on Tuesday.
- We will provide a shuttle bus for attendees, the schedule/route is on the Daily Program page.
- The workshop website has been updated to include the Daily Program and a list of Speakers, and a section called New Infor for Participants on the workshop HOME page. All pages are found on the Imaging Research Center’s website under the FULL-CIRCLE WORKSHOP menu. Please consult these pages to stay abreast of information.
- Bio & headshot. Please send a bio of up to 75 words to share with other conference participants, and a headshot that will help other participants identify you. Send these to Hemanth Chelluri: hemantc1@umbc.edu
- Bring your laptops. The core of the workshop is working in groups of 5 or 6 to produce and publish a communication project, so you will need to be able to produce text, images, etc.
- Save your travel-related receipts, such as public transportation, Ubers, Lyfts, taxis, and parking.
- For the Monday evening meet & greet dinner, there will be a bus from the hotel to campus at 5:45 PM.
- Campus locations (link to map):
- The workshop will be held in the Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building (ILSB), Room 116. However, dinners may be in a different location, if so, it will be announced here.
- Parking for local and regional participants is in the garage adjacent to the ILSB.
- Dinner on Tuesday and Thursday evenings (the 14th and 16th): Our shuttles will take you into Baltimore on Tuesday and Old Ellicott City on Thursday where you can find many choices for dining. You will arrive in each location at a convenient intersection at 6:30 and be picked up at 9pm. To look over the various options and make reservations, point Google Maps to these dropoff/pickup locations:
- Baltimore: https://maps.app.goo.gl/dmW1RtQiYxsyDmon8
- Old Ellicott City: https://maps.app.goo.gl/WjEH4zhkCBfEJH6V6
- If you have other plans for those nights please let us know in your reply so we can have accurate numbers for the shuttle service.
- If you have any questions about travel, please email Anita Komlodi, with “FULL-CIRCLE” in the subject, at komlodi@umbc.edu
- If you have any questions about the workshop beyond that please email Lee Boot, with “FULL-CIRCLE” in the subject, at boot@umbc.edu
Workshop Dates: Jan 13-17, 2025 (minimum 3-day commitment required for participants)
Location: University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building (ILSB), room 116.
Sponsors: The Institute for Harnessing Data and Model Revolution in the Polar Regions (iHARP) and the Imaging Research Center (IRC) at UMBC. It is co-sponsored by the Center for Social Science Scholarship (CS3) at UMBC. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Cost: There is no cost for the workshop for USA-based participants.
Travel and lodging expenses: Available funding can cover travel and lodging for approximately 25 USA-based participants, excluding iHARP and UMBC scholars and researchers. The planning committee will select participants for reimbursement based on the distance they must travel, and the need to balance disciplinary representation for the workshop.
Workshop Goals
Given the shifts in climate and related phenomena in 2024 alone, Full-Circle can now only be considered a summit in the midst of a global emergency. Even if this seems alarmist and overblown, it would be useful to operate under this assumption just in case it is not. The diverse knowledge and expertise present in the workshop will enable participants to learn about and utilize current climate research to develop innovative and viable communication strategies. These will be published online and be made public. The work will be based on climate science and informed by knowledge of its likely impact on human beings and ecosystems. It will be aimed at behavior change and policy objectives and incorporate theories of change that account for knowledge of human behavior and cultural dynamics, narrative, and rhetoric. All of this will be designed to take form through visualization, the media arts, creative inquiry, and arts expertise.
- Integrate your thinking and articulate communication strategies creative and insightful enough to shift policymaking and people’s individual choices sufficiently to carbon sufficiently to level or reduce climate change.
- Model, in a scalable way, the broadly transdisciplinary, impact-oriented work universities can do to optimize the impact of their research.
- Experience the transformative practice of integrating your knowledge and expertise with that of others whose work is very different from your own but equally essential for meeting challenges and seizing opportunities of our time.
Participant Eligibility
We seeking researchers and scholars in the following and related areas who are interested in integrating their knowledge and expertise with that of colleagues in different fields, and who are passionate about curbing climate change:
- Climate Sciences
- Geography
- Computer Science
- Data Science
- Machine Learning and AI
- Information Systems
- Human-Centered Computing
- Media Arts
- Data Visualization
- Story, Narrative, Rhetoric
- Behavioral Science
- Social-Community Psychology
- Anthropology
- Political Science
- Public Policy
- Public Health
Registration for the workshop is now closed.
If you have any questions please email info@irc.umbc.edu and put “FULL-CIRCLE” as the subject.
NSF Grant Number: 2118285