jeremy-kidwell
Dr Jeremy Kidwell

Dr Jeremy Kidwell is a co-investigator on an AHRC Follow-on Fund for Impact and Engagement grant, for the project ‘Finding Common Ground’.

This one-year project (awarded £98,133) follows on from the AHRC-funded ‘Ancestral Time’ project, led by Principal Investigator Professor Michael Northcott at the University of Edinburgh, which explored the contrast between short-term and long-term outlooks of time – especially those embedded within theological understandings of time – as a resource for addressing the failure of modern industrial societies to mitigate human climate change.

Using the knowledge generated in the Ancestral Time project, the follow-on funding will enable the research team to engage new audiences and foster new collaborations with religious environmental activists in Scotland. The project will result in the generation of a digital tool (http://mapping.community) where members of the public, activists, and policymakers can “find common ground” and identify overlapping areas of concern and work among the many networks located in the UK. The team has been using this “location intelligence” to host regional workshops which draw together representatives from different local community groups, with the aim of finding common ground between secular and religious organisations and how they can cooperate on environmental care.

In the coming months, the project team will present a green paper outlining best practices for collaboration with, and outreach to, religious environmental groups in the UK. They will take this report and the case studies to a diverse audience, including researchers, civil servants, local authorities, environmental charities and representatives from business in workshops later this autumn. The project started in September 2016. You can find out more here: Find Common Ground.