Minors

Minor Climate Change and Inequality

The Wubbo Ockels School helps developing the interdicsiplinary minor Climate Change and Inequality. This minor is led by researchers from the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies in collaboration with researchers from the Faculty of Arts.

Climate change presents the world with multiple challenges at local, national and global levels. These challenges are not only technological, scientific or economic, but also moral, social, cultural, and political. This minor introduces students to foundational questions raised by climate change about inequality and injustice. Students will study different kinds of inequalities that are either created or exacerbated by climate change – including political, social, economic, historical, cultural, and ontological inequalities and injustices.

The minor will consider questions such as: Which voices, perspectives and forms of knowledge are included and excluded from discussions about climate change, its effects, consequences, and how do we respond to them? What are the mechanisms by which these perspectives have come to be overlooked? What historical, linguistic, ideological, and cultural factors facilitate (in)action on climate change and perpetuate or worsen the unjust and unequal impacts of climate change? How can development practitioners, designers, engineers, educators, policymakers and others take these kinds of inequality and injustice into account in their work?

Minor Student Challenges

The Wubbo Ockels School is also involved in the 'Minor Student Challenges WO-HBO' working group, which is currently writing an action plan for a multilevel and multidisciplinary minor on student challenges.

The reason for setting up this minor is the student challenge 'Top Dutch Solar Racing'. For this challenge, the Top Dutch Solar Racing team is building a solar car in collaboration with governments, companies and educational institutions in the Northern Netherlands. The team is composed of diverse students from MBO, Hanze University of Applied Sciences and University of Groningen. It is important for these students that, where possible, they can also convert what they have learned into credits for their own study programme. Until now, university students have not been able to obtain credits for their participation in this student challenge, for example in the minor area.

The idea of ​​the Student Challenge minor is to focus on several student challenges in the coming years via a multilevel and multidisciplinary set-up.

Overview of other minors with the theme sustainability

An overview of other minors with the theme sustainability can be found here.