Opportunities At The Intersection

We’re hosting a series of workshops in the coming weeks to kick-start the conversation about opportunities at the intersection of “Sustainable Production” and “Sustainable Consumption”. Our goal is to connect with early-career and established researchers interested in helping to shape collaborative sustainable consumption-production research projects, and to identify and engage with new collaborators. Check out the details for these events and read below for more details.

Researchers in the fields of sustainable consumption and sustainable production have developed deep expertise and strong, distinct communities of practice. The Value Retention Exchange Network-of-Networks [The VR(Ex)Change], is an emergent NSF-funded international network of industry, academic, and NGO collaborators with a goal of creating a community of practice focused on issues at the interface of sustainable consumption and production. Through a series of interactive activities, participants will contribute to identifying, refining, and co-creating clear research and practice pathways and priorities for interdisciplinary collaboration at the interface of sustainable consumption and sustainable production. Creating connections and opportunities for early-career researchers (ECRs) is a key outcome priority for the workshop. Utilizing a backcasting-style methodology, participants will be organized into interdisciplinary breakout groups and will be asked to collaboratively respond to a series of discussion questions and activities that include individual and group rankings. First, the session will focus on articulating visions for meaningful cross-cutting research priorities (e.g., How might methods for studying systems of production, and the resulting consumption be more effectively integrated for stronger and more competitive research?); Second, the participants will discuss and distinguish factors that interfere with meaningful collaborations (e.g., across consumption-production lenses, across North-South/South-South/North-North, and between predominant vs, emerging theories of change). Finally, the session will involve brainstorming, ranking, and refining research topics of mutual interest at the interface of sustainable consumption and sustainable production. Workshop outputs will be collated and synthesized into a working document that will be shared with all participants and incorporated into The VR(Ex)Change’s strategic planning progress. All participants will be invited to join The VR(Ex)Change and organizers will actively engage in facilitating new collaborative connections for participants with special attention devoted to early-career researchers (ECRs) who will be assigned leadership roles in the network’s activities. Hosted by the leadership team members from The VR(Ex)Change, this workshop session is open to everyone, and is focused on cultivating a strategic conversation that helps to build connections and convergence opportunities between researchers interested in strategic collaboration between the engineering-social sciences / production-consumption fields.”