UNESCO

Cornelius Holtorf presented at the second capacity-building workshop of the Expert Group on Awareness Presentation, which is part of the Nuclear Energy Agency’s Working Party on Information, Data and Knowledge Management at the OECD. Even Anders Högberg participated.

During the session, held on 14 June 2021, the 30+ participants discussed the significance of understanding human behaviour in all its complexity. In relation to mechanisms of awareness preservation we will need to shift focus: from creating to consuming, from intentions to impacts, and from assets to outcomes. This requires understanding social and cultural processes, and entering the realm of the human sciences, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc.

In each specific context anticipated, we need to be asking questions such as

1. What’s happening?
2. Who’s involved or affected?
3. In what socio-cultural context?
4. With what socio-cultural consequences?

In a second step, we need to learn how to manage processes changing over time: how can we today facilitate certain socio-cultural processes in novel futures which will be changing further with time? This will require not to be creating continuities but to be facilitating discontinuities (constituting meta-continuities). How this can be achieved is a difficult question and there are no ready answers.