Dr. phil. Dipl.-Ing. Oliver Parodi

Oliver Parodi
Dr. phil. Dipl.-Ing. Oliver Parodi is a sustainability researcher and activist. He heads the research group "Sustainability and Social Transformation" at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis at KIT. With his research group, he is currently leading the “Karlsruhe Transformation Center for Sustainability and Cultural Change” (KAT), which as an institution of change conducts transformative sustainability research - that is, it makes contributions to a “Great Transformation” and researches transformation processes. The KAT is based on the real laboratory "Quartier Zukunft - Labor Stadt", which Oliver Parodi initiated and built in 2012 as one of the first real laboratories worldwide and has been operating since then with his team in Karlsruhe.
As a trained civil engineer, cultural scientist and philosopher, he has been researching and working in the field of sustainable development for more than 20 years, building bridges in thinking and perception, bringing together different perspectives, worldviews and (disciplinary) cultures - in the conviction that sustainable development is only a joint task and can be realized in communication across the boundaries of departments, disciplines, sectors and social subsystems.
As a cultural scientist, he anchors current social efforts for a sustainability transformation in the depths of human history, demands and promotes the emergence of "cultures of sustainability" and makes plausible why the establishment of a global culture of sustainability would not only be a great transformation, but a ( r) evolutionary step in human history.
As a philosopher and sustainability researcher, he also illuminates corners that have so far been neglected or neglected in the context of sustainable development, takes care of aesthetic aspects, perception and beauty in the context of sustainability and is a pioneer of "personal sustainability" that otherwise takes a look at people who have been cut out of sustainability discourses as subjective-bodily beings and, in addition to the transformation of the eco-socio-technical system, also addresses an “inner transition”. You can learn more about this in the book "Personal Sustainability - Exploring the Far Side of Sustainable Development", which he published together with Kaidi Tamm in 2018.