Community Agency - a conversation with Markus Luczak-Roesch and Gerhard Reese

Two scholars share their perspectives on Community Agency and discuss the links between the Global environmental and global mental health crises.

  Gerhard Reese

Gerhard Reese works as Associate Professor for Climate Change at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University Wellington in Aotearoa / New Zealand. Before, he was Professor and head of the Environmental Psychology Research Unit at the University Kaiserslautern-Landau in Germany since 2016. He got his PhD in Psychology from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany, in February 2010. His research focuses on individual, social and systemic catalysts and barriers of pro-environmental behaviour and the nature-health nexus. He attempts and sometimes succeeds to spend more time outdoors than indoors and he still is a serious competitor in Super Mario Kart.

Markus Luczak-Roesch

Markus Luczak-Roesch is Professor of Informatics and the inaugural Chair in Complexity Science at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Information Management. He is also one of two Co-Directors of Te Pūnaha Matatini, Aotearoa New  Zealand’s Centre of Research Excellence in Complex Systems. He founded and leads the Complexity & Connection Science Lab, an interdisciplinary group developing theories and computational tools to understand how complex systems unfold over time. His research investigates how structure and meaning emerge in systems - from language and brain activity to online communities and the environment - using models that reveal meaningful coincidences and unexpected system-level behaviors.