As evidence of the climate and ecological crisis mounts, climate and environmental scientists increasingly face a question: how to make their results actually matter? To what extent should they incorporate elements of public and civic engagement into their day-to-day research practice? Civic engagement remains rare among scientists, unevenly supported, and often contested on the premise that it is incompatible with scientific neutrality and detrimental to scientific credibility. Yet both public and civic engagement may take many forms — public communication, policy advice, art-science collaboration, advocacy, and civil disobedience — each of these forms raises its own questions of legitimacy, credibility, and personal or professional risks.

This session invites contributions that document, analyse, or reflect on the many ways scientists engage in response to the climate crisis. We particularly welcome works that try to unravel the tensions such engagement raises: between perceived need for neutrality and academic freedom, between critique and defence of science, and between individual initiatives and institutional support. We are interested both in conceptual contributions (philosophy of science, sociology of the scientific field, legal frameworks of academic freedom and civil-service duties) and in concrete experiences — individual trajectories, collective initiatives, and institutional practices — from across disciplines and countries. We want this session to contribute to the discussion on science's relation to society in face of the climate crisis.

A central aim of this session is to connect the initiatives — individual and collective, grassroots and institutional — that are emerging across Europe and beyond, and to foster exchange on what responsible, effective, and sustainable academic engagement can look like. We especially welcome submissions from collectives and networks at any career stage, and welcome reflective and interdisciplinary formats alongside conventional presentations.