The Excellence Cluster Roots explores the long-term trajectories of current socio-environmental challenges related to conflict, inequality, diet and disease, settlement concentrations and urbanity, knowledge transmission, and the impact of environmental hazards. We aim to mobilise and integrate a set of usually diverging disciplines from the humanites, social and naturals sciences in order to empirically assess the deep histories of those phenomena, as well as their interrelations. We use this work to critically reflect the impact of these historical trajectories on our current societies and on our current worldviews including our current academic approaches to the past. In this contribution, I will address inherent challenges of interdisciplinary integration, data and proxy development and their interpretations as well as the impact of historically contingent academic traditions that play an important part in our integrative approach to the past. The integration into an international research network like CfAS is a central pillar of our strategy.

First Author: Martin Furholt

Keywords:
Synthesis
Socio-Environmental Relations
Inequality
Conflict