Graduate Symposium 2024: 

Theme General Theme: Vulnerability, Resilience and Change towards Sustainability: Multidisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Perspectives.

Over several millennium change has been a phenomenon experienced in human society. However, this transformation has become more pronounced in recent decades as the types and intensity of change exponentially increases due to world population growth and demand for environmental resources.  Change is viewed as a complex interplay of environmental, social, economic, and scientific and technological phenomena that have a profound impact on the lives and livelihood of humans on the global, regional, and local scales. Depending on the nature and scale of change, contrary trends often emerge, both to the detriment and benefit of society.

Environmental, social, economic, and scientific and technological change occur as a result of both natural and anthropogenic processes. Environmental change is seen as an alteration of bio-physical systems and sub-systems while social change features the processes of human interaction and relationships that alter cultural and social institutions respectively. Economic change refers to market adjustments for goods and services due to new opportunities or pressures from competing market forces. Scientific and technical change focusses on technological inventions, continued improvement, and commercialization.

Generally, human-induced changes are often designed to improve lives and livelihood in relation to such aspects as poverty, gender equality and equity, mortality and morbidity, biodiversity loss, reduction in socio-economic disparities and access to better quality education and medical care overall living conditions. However, change also has contrary consequences for society by becoming detrimental to sustainability. For instance, improved science and technology (medical care) contributes to longevity and high population growth rates which in turn leads to overexploitation of resources, occupation of marginal lands, land conflicts and vulnerability of communities.

Over time, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary methodologies have been incorporated as pivotal strategies to not only build community resilience, but adaptation also has become a pivotal means to combat change. Change in its various forms is a cross-cutting concept across all disciplines and is perceived as the conceptual and contextual basis for the involvement of researchers across various disciplines in this proposed symposium. The focus on multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research, therefore, is to allow for interaction between and within disciplines and identify the linkages with the concept of change in all its dimensions.