Planetare Gesundheit: Planetares Denken in den Sozial-und Geisteswissenschaften

• Applicant: Dr. Caroline Meier zu Biesen
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 546946850

Today's complex crises – including climate change, biodiversity loss, antimicrobial resistance, and increasing zoonoses – are a stark reminder that human health is inextricably linked to that of the planet, and that we urgently need complex, interdisciplinary research. Indeed, after decades of work on Global Health focused on human populations, health must now be approached as a 'planetary' issue, requiring an integrated analysis of human health and ecological degradation (Myers and Frumkin 2020). A growing number of scholars in the social sciences and humanities are providing new grounds for conceptualizing human health through the lens of its deep connection to ecosystem integrity. At the same time, and this is the starting point for this network, many social science and humanities scholars are critiquing the knowledge systems on which the field of planetary health is based as technocratic, colonial, exclusionary, and narrow. In addition, the social sciences and humanities face several methodological and conceptual challenges in researching planetary health, including the need to consider other temporalities ("deep time") and other forms of knowledge (e.g., Indigenous knowledge) and data to which they are accustomed. Shifting our focus from an anthropocentric to a planetary framework requires us to question conventional ways of writing history and conducting social science research, and to rethink our perspectives and methodologies. The proposed network aims to explore 'planetary health' as a new interdisciplinary field, to critically interrogate its intellectual history and the epistemic practices on which it depends, and in particular to address its methodological challenges to historical and anthropological research. Our primary objective, therefore, is to foster scholarly exchange that paves the way for "interdisciplinary planetary thinking" in the social sciences and humanities (Hanusch et al. 2021). To achieve our goals, the network will bring together scholars from a range of disciplines, including (environmental) history, sociology, (medical and environmental) anthropology, and human geography, as well as the natural sciences, and will promote interdisciplinary research and collaboration on planetary health.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks