Brown Bag Seminar: Resilience on all fronts – people, communities, and infrastructure in the era of climate crisis

Prof. Ojala will discuss possible resilience factors that may not only help young people to adjust to today’s global threats, but also promote transformative learning and an active citizenship. She will focus, for example, on social trust, meaning-focused coping and hope and elaborate on practical implications for climate-change communication and education. She addresses this topic in the context of the hopelessness and helplessness that many young people today experience regarding global problems like climate change.

Assoc. Prof. Shortridge will discuss climate change tipping points in socio-environmental systems. These tipping points can lead to highly damaging climate impacts, but also create an opportunity for transformative adaptation that builds equity, resilience, and sustainability. She will discuss interdisciplinary efforts to understand how natural, engineered, and human systems interact with each other to create the potential for tipping points, ultimately aiming to paint a more holistic picture of community resilience.

The seminar will take place on Monday 25th of November from 11 am to 12 pm at Tellus Stage on Linnanmaa campus. Lunch will be provided for those who register by Wednesday 20th of November at 12 pm. The seminar will be in English.

If you cannot make it to the Linnanmaa campus, you can also participate via Zoom. If you participate via Zoom, you don’t need to register for the event.

Maria Ojala is a Professor of Socio-ecological Resilience in Profi7 Frontiers of Arctic and Global Resilience (FRONT) research programme. She started in August 2024 and is affiliated with the Faculty of Education and Pychology. She is a Doctor and Docent of Psychology and also works part time as an Associate Professor in psychology at Örebro University, Sweden. Previously she was a research director (shared responsibility) for CESSS (Center for Environmental and Sustainability Social Science). Key themes of her research concern how young people relate to, and learn about, sustainability issues with a specific focus on emotional reactions to climate change.

Julie Shortridge is an Associate Professor and Extension Specialist in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University). Here in Oulu she is currently a Fulbright Scholar visiting the Water, Energy, and Environmental Engineering Research Unit and FRONT research programme for about nine months. Her Ph.D. was in the field of Geography and Environmental Engineering. Key topics of her research revolve around climate change impacts to water resources and agriculture, as well as the use of risk and decision analysis to support climate adaptation and resilience.

Note UniOGS Doctoral Researchers: You can add Brown Bag Seminars in your personal learning plan and once you have attended 10 Brown Bag Seminars, you can get 0,5 credits of doctoral studies.

The aim of the Brown Bag Seminars is to showcase University of Oulu’s research and to encourage knowledge-sharing and networking amongst our researchers. Once a month, we invite two of our researchers from different fields to talk about their research related to the same topic. Brown Bag Seminars are open to everyone - come learn something new and join in the conversation!