Date: Friday 2 October 2026
Venue: Ole Worms alle 3, Building 1170 in the auditorium 347 (third floor)

Registration: You can register for the meeting here: https://event.au.dk/events/opening-the-au-interdisciplinary-water-cluster

We are happy to announce the first plenary meeting of the Water Cluster at Aarhus University. AU WaTeC embraces trans-/interdisciplinary water research, education, and innovation within the Faculties of Arts, Natural Sciences, Health and Technical Sciences.

Our first meeting will be a journey around AU to shine a light on the different water interests and activities living at AU through general presentations, matchmaking and networking activities. In addition, external speakers will provide inspiration and showcase the wider water universe. Funding opportunities for future cross-disciplinary activities will also be presented. The meeting is followed by a dinner in Fysisk Kantine at 7th floor in building 1520 with a view over the Aarhus waterscape.

Join us if you are interested in helping to shape the Water Conversation at AU!

The invitation is for all PhD students, Post docs, Assistant, Associate, Full professors, who are interested and active in water-related research at AU.

We will have a limited number of seats for the auditorium and for dinner. Note that unless otherwise informed, a 100 DKK no show fee will apply to offset costs. We need your latest confirmation before 17 September, but you are encouraged to register before this date. You can contact Uffe Sognstrup Thomsen if you have questions via email ust@bce.au.dk or telephone 93 52 22 62.

Tentative program:

12.00 Arrival, and then

 Welcome by prof. Barth F. Smets
 Keynote speaker 1
 Scientific presentations on the topics Water, Health and Prosperity
 Break - Matchmaking 1
 Keynote speaker 2
 Scientific presentation(s) on the topics Water Resources: Excess and Absence
 Scientific presentation(s) on the topics Water, Nature and Food
 Break - Matchmaking 2
 Keynote speaker 3
 Scientific presentation(s) on the topics Water in the Technosphere
 EIT Water a large EU investment

18.00 Dinner at Fysisk kantine

20.00 Water in the Arts Spoken Word/Audio-Visual Work

We will end at approximately 21.00

Yours sincerely,
AU-WaTeC leadership team Barth F. Smets, Uffe Sognstrup Thomsen, Anders Vest Christiansen, Ciara Kierans, Klaus Koren, Nikolai Friberg, Pedro Carvalho, Anette S. Hansen and Jörg Schullehner.

We will gather at the lookout space at the southern point of Risskov on 20 October at 17.40. I will provide light guidance to facilitate a series of flexible activities. Afterwards we will move to a nearby food court and share stories, experiences, and any reflections of food and drink.

Read more here

Financial support for attendance is available from several sources, so fee/travel is a barrier, please reach out to ceh@cas.au.dk

Organizer: START: Centre for Sustainable Agrifood Transition

Friday, 30. Oktober 2026 kl. 13.3015.00

Location: Building 1441, Room 012 (Auditorium 1), Tåsingegade, Aarhus Universitet

Lecture open to all!

Sörlin is a Swedish historian of ideas, award-winning author, and Professor of Environmental History at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. His research explores how our conceptions of climate and the environment have been shaped historically, and how they influence the ways we understand the ecological crises of the present.

Drawing on intellectual history, Sörlin demonstrates through both his research and his extensive public engagement how the humanities can open up new perspectives on the greatest challenges of our time.

The lecture is arranged by the Sløk committee composed of Christian Olaf Christiansen, Rithma K.E. Larsen og Rikke Louise Peters.

Abstract:
In the Anthropocene, we are increasingly aware of the impacts humans make on all scales, including the planetary. New nature-cultural archives emerge and grow, in maritime sediments, vast ice sheets, and in other stratigraphic data. We are gradually realizing that the implications are profound. Science and technology play key parts, not least as "environing technologies", and need to be reinterpreted in relation to the ongoing reformation of the human-Earth relationship. What roles may the humanities at large, and the environmental humanities in particular, play? How can the writing of history, and the craft of historians, speak to our current predicament in a world of deep geopolitical conflict over the earth's resources and our common future.

The lecture will be held in English.

Time: 2 November 2026, kl 14-15:30

Zoom/Teams link: To be posted later

Invited speaker: Prof. Kate Brown, MIT: Book presentation and discussion of Tiny Gardens Everywhere (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026)

Abstract: 
From pre-Industrial England to modern-day Washington and Amsterdam, ordinary people, working with each other, with plants and microbes, cultivated life in the unlikeliest of places. Tiny Gardens Everywhere explores how urban gardeners reactivated commons in European and North American cities in the long 20th century. Using the deluge of nutrients that flow into cities, working class gardeners regenerated wasteland, built the first garden city communities, created the first sinews of the social welfare state, and engaged in the most productive agriculture in recorded human history. Following the plants and microbes, urban gardeners also built mutual aid societies that advocated for equity, social welfare and common law rights to food, fuel and shelter.

Bio:
Kate Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her latest book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past and Present of Urban Self-Provisioning was published by Norton and Bodley Head (UK)  in February 2026.  Browns work on Tiny Gardens has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. She has published short segments from this work in the New Yorker, Mother Jones and Lithub. She is also the author of several prize-winning histories, including Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013) and Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton 2019), translated into eight languages, won the Marshall Shulman and Reginald Zelnik Prizes for the best book in East European History and the Silver Medal for Laura Shannon Book Prize. Manual for Survival was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pushkin House Award and the Ryszard Kapuciski Award for Literary Reportage.

Bio:
George Kirkham is a visiting doctoral student from the University of Oxfords School of Geography and the Environment. For the past eight years, George has engaged in research and advocacy concerning the global health issue of snakebite envenomation: a Neglected Tropical Disease engendered by toxins in the bites of venomous snakes. In his academic work, George engages more-than-human geography, medical anthropology, and political ecology to investigate how humans and snakes live and work together.

Georges doctoral research stems from a partnership with the Instituto Clodomiro Picado, an influential Costa Rican public antivenom producer and snakebite research centre. As part of this collaboration, George employs ethnographic methods to study non-human care and labour in Central American antivenom laboratories; the role of plantation agriculture in configuring snakebites emergence; and regional infrastructures of snakebite governance.

Prior to starting his DPhil, George worked for the Wellcome Trusts Snakebite Priority Area and Digital Team. This experience led him to his earlier research which studied the implementation of SARPA, a snake translocation and antivenom access smartphone application developed by the Kerala Forest Department. This research inspired an interest in the digital mediation of multispecies health, an area George has developed through the notion of digital disease ecologies. Georges work also engages with the geographies of toxicity, having published on the need to re-situate animal- and plant-derived toxins within social scientific theorisations of environmental toxicity, as well as issues of pharmaceutical and atmospheric pollution.

Michael Schnegg (Hamburg University)

Organiser: Changing Environments Research Program

We will begin with short presentations from a small group of junior and senior researchers about their reflections about their experiences with innovation at AU. This will be followed by discussion. The event will be followed by an informal winter holiday reception.

TIME: 14:15-16:00 followed by winter holiday reception.