How do the health and climate science professions imagine and shape the future of society? - This is the initial question of the SaFe-Health subproject. Using a mixed-methods design, we are investigating ideas of the future, practices and forms of communitisation of these two epistemic communities and, together with the research partners, developing a non-crisis-driven future narrative that enables (prospective) professionals in the climate and health sciences to participate confidently in Shaping Future Society.

Whether "risk" in Beck (2022), "unavailability" in Rosa (2022) or "loss" in Reckwitz (2024) - societies have been periodically analysed in the social sciences from the perspective of crises in recent decades. Currently, academic and everyday discourses are increasingly revolving around the omnipresent crisis. How to deal with "the" climate, democracy, solidarity or trust crisis or the war in Europe and still shape the future? Against the background of these questions, the SaFe-Health subproject is investigating ideas and practices of the future among health and climate scientists.

Why the health and climate sciences?

The future is fundamental to both scientific communities:

1. With their climate models and reports, climate scientists create scenarios for the future climatic conditions of our planet. In doing so, they create contexts for our living conditions in the future.

2. Health promotion in the sense of salutogenesis focuses health science on the future health of individuals, groups and populations. Maintaining and funding healthy living conditions to create health as an individual and collective good in the future is therefore a central claim of the public health community.

Both professions can therefore be described as architects of social change who imagine and produce futures in their professional activities.

But which futures do the health and climate science professions design?

There are currently no empirical findings on this. Instead, there are assumptions that prospective professionals are unsettled by multiple experiences of crisis.
This is precisely where the project comes in and aims to address this research gap with the following questions:

What futures do the health and climate science professions imagine?

• What ideas, strategies and practices are the professions developing within their networks and epistemic communities to deal with the ambivalences and uncertainties of current and future crises?

How does the project aim to sense futures?

The project pursues a mixed-methods approach with two focal points:

Using an online survey and a diary study, we explore futures practices in the everyday and professional worlds of aspiring and established professionals in the health and climate sciences.

• Using explorative interviews and (auto-)ethnographic procedures, we reconstruct discourses and patterns of interpretation within the two epistemic communities.

The data from the two empirical accesses will not only be analysed individually, but will also be brought together to form a larger picture of imagined futures and the underlying patterns of action and interpretation.

What does the project want to achieve?

Ultimately, the project aims to work with all research partners to develop a new (non-crisis-driven, action-guiding) narrative of the future that enables students and professionals in climate and health science to deal productively with the uncertainties, ambivalences and impositions of future developments and to participate confidently in "Shaping Future Society".

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Beck, U. (2022). Risk society. On the way to a different modernity (25th edition). Suhrkamp: Berlin.

Rosa, H. (2022). Unavailability (6th edition). Suhrkamp: Berlin.