Beyond Disciplines: Why Climate Action Requires Multiple Perspectives
About
📅 24 September 2026, 13:00-14.00
📍 Geocentrum, Uppsala University
💻 Hybrid event — online participation is possible
Transdisciplinary research is, by definition, about transcending disciplinary boundaries. But a more fundamental challenge is our capacity to engage with multiple perspectives. This includes different forms of knowledge, experience, values, and claims to validity.
In this presentation, Karen O’Brien reflects on what it takes to work across perspectives and why this can be both intellectually and personally challenging. She argues that transdisciplinarity is not only an approach or process, but a capacity and a practice: the ability to recognize, navigate, and work productively with different ways of seeing, knowing, and relating.
The presentation concludes by considering what an integrative approach might mean for responding to complex and extreme climate challenges.
Key Topics
• Transdisciplinary research and climate action
• Working across different forms of knowledge and experience
• Values and claims to validity in research
• Navigating different perspectives
• Transdisciplinarity as capacity and practice
• Integrative approaches to climate extremes
Speaker
Karen O’Brien is Professor Emerita of Human Geography at the University of Oslo, Norway, and Zennström Visiting Professor in Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University, Sweden. She is also co-founder of cCHANGE, an organization that works with society to support transformative change for a just and sustainable world.
Karen is recognized for her work on climate change impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation, and transformations to sustainability. Her work bridges systems thinking, sustainability science, and the deeper cultural and human dimensions of environmental change. She is particularly interested in integrative approaches that connect the practical, political, and personal spheres of transformation. Her current research explores fractal approaches to scaling transformative change and the potential for quantum social change, and engages with new narratives, capacities, and collaborations for a rapidly changing world.
Karen has contributed to four assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, and served as co-chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Transformative Change Assessment. She is the author of numerous influential articles and books, including You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World, Climate and Society: Transforming the Future, and Environmental Change and Globalization: Double Exposures. She was recognized as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (2019–2022) and received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award for Climate Change for pioneering contributions to understanding climate adaptation. She is an elected member of Academia Europaea, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
Karen O’Brien is the 2026 Zennström Professor of Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University. The professorship focuses on research, education and collaboration on climate change and societal transformation. Karen will be working at Uppsala University from 1 March 2026 until the end of February 2027 and is located at Geocentrum within the unit of Climate Change Leadership.
More on cChange: https://www.cchange.no/
More on Karen O’Brien: https://www.sv.uio.no/iss/personer/emeriti/karenob/
Highlights
Expert perspective: Reflections on the practical and intellectual challenges of transdisciplinary research
Interdisciplinary focus: Exploring how different forms of knowledge, experience and values can contribute to understanding complex climate challenges
Climate extremes: Considering how integrative approaches can support responses to complex and extreme climate challenges
Image credit: climateone.org