Triggering Transformations: Rethinking AgriCulTure, EnvIrONment, and Society (ACTIONS)
Agricultural systems have always evolved in response to shifting social, environmental, and technological conditions. Today, those conditions are changing at unprecedented speed. Climate pressures, emerging technologies, and political uncertainty converge to redefine how food is produced and valued. What, then, triggers transformative change? And how can societies engage with transformation in ways that support sustainability rather than undermine it?
Theme coordinators: Annette Krais (Faculty of Engineering) and Richard Walters (Faculty of Science)
CreAItive Futures: What Becomes of Creativity in the Age of AI?
As tools for writing, art, design, and research increasingly rely on AI, creativity is no longer just a matter of individual expression—it is reshaped by technologies, social practices, and institutional contexts. This article asks what becomes of human creativity when AI enters the creative process: how creative work changes across disciplines, where tensions arise between expression and efficiency, and what we can learn by actively experimenting with creativity both with and without AI.
Theme coordinators: Stephan Schaefer and Miranda Kajtazi (both from School of Economics and Management)
Evolvability
How do organisms, technologies, and societies stay stable while still being able to change? This Theme explores evolvability – a system’s ability to adapt and sometimes improve – as a shared idea linking several scientific fields. Researchers in biology, medicine, engineering, computer science, and the social sciences increasingly face similar questions about how complex systems change and improve their performance, from cancer cells developing resistance to the rapid rise of AI. The Theme aims to build a common understanding of how systems adapt under changing conditions and to develop new approaches for navigating future scientific and societal challenges.
Theme coordinators: Masahito Tsuboi (Faculty of Science) and Josef Taalbi (School of Economics and Management)
Memory and Hope in the Age of Polycrisis
Climate change, war, economic instability, political violence, and AI are no longer separate challenges – they reinforce one another, creating cascading effects that are hard to stop and even harder to navigate. In the face of such entanglement, hope often erodes. What happens when hope itself becomes a problem? Can shared memories of past crises help societies cultivate forms of hope that are realistic, critical, and capable of sustaining meaningful action?
Theme coordinators: Barbara Törnquist-Plewa and Eleonora Narvselius (both from the Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology)
Democratic challenges in an AI-mediated society
Political polarisation, misinformation, and declining democratic tolerance are no longer just social or political problems – they are the result of complex dynamics between human behaviour, economic incentives, and algorithmic systems. Can interdisciplinary models that explain how these dynamics interact over time and thereby lessen the risk that policymakers “fly blind”? To protect democracy in an AI‑mediated society, we need better tools to understand how individual interactions scale into large political consequences – and how those dynamics might be redesigned to reduce polarisation rather than amplify it.
Theme coordinators: Hanna Bäck (Faculty of Social Science) Emma Tegling (Faculty of Engineering)