Global Grand Challenge: The Future
For Cornell's second Global Grand Challenge, the challenge is very literal: it is the future itself.
2024: The world is a challenging place. Planetary crises loom. Rising temperatures, wildfires, floods, droughts, famines, wars, pandemics, crushing inequality, and accelerating dispossession have evolved at dizzying speed into conditions of everyday life for many across the globe.
At the same time, 2024 feels full of possibility. Fundamental advances in communication, artificial intelligence, and scientific understanding of the social and natural world promise unprecedented capacity to transform—for better or worse—the world around us.
Funded Projects 2024–26
We're excited to announce the research and curricular projects selected to form the core of Cornell's Global Grand Challenge: The Future. The funded projects met the challenge of reaching beyond the immediate—the well-known constraints—to envision the future with imagination, hope, and purpose. Congratulations to the project teams! Read more in the Chronicle.
Curricular Project: Mentoring Pluralistic Leadership in Reparative Climate Justice
Lead PI: Rachel Bezner Kerr (College of Agriculture and Life Sciences)
This team will design and test an interdisciplinary graduate climate justice program that provides pluralistic perspectives on climate justice and leads to action. The program will use engaged pedagogies and mentor new scientists to do reparative, just climate research and related development actions with Indigenous and Global South organizations.
Research Project: Transforming Global Strategies to Stop Pandemics
Lead PI: Raina Plowright (College of Veterinary Medicine)
Zoonotic spillovers, the transmission of pathogens from animals to humans, have caused most pandemics since 1918. This project will establish a center dedicated to primary pandemic prevention, focusing on reducing the probability that pathogens will enter human populations through spillovers. The ultimate goal is to shift the global focus from reactive measures to proactive solutions in pandemic prevention.
Research Project: AI and Global Societies
Lead PI: Aditya Vashistha (Cornell Bowers Computing and Information Science)
Artificial intelligence (AI), while transformative in sectors like healthcare and education, predominantly works in Western contexts. This project will conduct foundational work to set up a new interdisciplinary research center on AI and Global Societies that will bring global perspectives to shape the design, development, evaluation, and governance of AI technologies.
A Future of Global Importance
The challenge is to begin with the future—and to see it as a means, not an end.
Confronting crises and taking advantage of opportunities are luxuries not everyone has. The university should be a space where the power of knowledge can be harnessed ambitiously to make a real difference.
What are the implications of achieving a better future in terms of worldwide distribution of resources and development of new regulations, technologies, and subjectivities? What technologies, infrastructures, systems, relationships, norms, and practices would be necessary to enable that sound, equitable, and sustainable future? How would that future play out across radically divergent conditions around the globe? And how do history and the ways in which diverse peoples make meaning of their world provide different perspectives on and for this new alternative?
We believe that imagining the future provides conditions and creates possibilities for dialogues among scientists and humanists, engineers and architects, planners, and artists. This necessitates new pedagogies and relationships centered around "what do we want" rather than "what can I do."
About Global Grand Challenges
Meet the Global Grand Challenge: The Future advisory team and learn about Cornell's first Global Grand Challenge: Migrations.