Dr. Philippe Forêt
Lehrbeauftragter
Lehrbeauftragter
Seminar für Soziologie
Petersgraben 27
4051
Basel
Schweiz
Curriculum Vitae
My publications and teaching have connected two types of interactions in the geography of knowledge: nature and culture in Asia, and fieldwork and review processes in the environmental sciences. I serve with Prof. Max Bergman as Co-Director of the Social Transitions Research Group in the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Basel. I am also a member of the Society of Fellows of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, and of the new BRIDGES UNESCO Management of Social Transformations program on sustainability. The Research Group of the Swiss Academic Society for Environmental Research and Ecology (SAGUF) that I lead with Profs. Christoph Kueffer and Marc Hall has promoted transformational research on collapse and recovery. We have facilitated the emergence of the environmental humanities in Switzerland, which is a field that I have sought to develop outside the Global North. I have held positions in various institutions from Peking University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at Berkeley to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich and Ludwig-Maximilians University. The Swedish Collegium and the Institute of Advanced Studies of Nantes have both elected me Fellow. "I owe to a fellowship from Dumbarton Oaks at Harvard my first book, Mapping Chengde. The Qing Landscape Enterprise. Fudan University Press in Shanghai has just issued: 图解承德—清代的景观营建 (Link: http://www.fudanpress.com/showdetail.asp?bookid=14979). This book investigates an instance of transition from innovation to sustainability, using the Qing summer capital as a case study to examine research framework and methodology, and to review processes in decision-making. My next (and eighth) book, A Documented Negative Outcome. How Geographers Immobilized the Past Climate of Asia, should be published by the University of Chicago Press."