In collaboration with colleagues from UC Irvine, the UzK creates methodical and didactic teaching-learning concepts for two successive courses on Environmental and Science Communication with a climate justice focus. Learning material for this course is designed in such a way that multimedia resources play a prominent role, and the readings and material assigned reflects the intercultural and interdisciplinary nature of both the teaching team and students.

These courses make critical use of digital tools in order to foster internationalization at home and provide students with diverse and intercultural inputs.

The second course provides a critical introduction on the field of environmental communication. This course explores environmental communication through a variety of disciplines. It is organized around a number of key, persisting themes in the field, such as the discussion of the symbolic construction of the environment, environmental journalism, activism and health and risk communication. In its essence this course engages students in critical discussions about telling environmental stories.

The team working on this project consists of two University Professors, namely Prof. Kim Fortun and Prof. Kirk W. Junker and two PhD students, Mariana Arjona Soberón, and Tim Schütz. Ms. Arjona Soberón and Mr. Schütz are primarily responsible for planning and delivering the courses under professorial supervision. This project aims to support young scholars and foster teaching experience and international collaboration at the PhD level.

Mariana Arjona Soberón studied sociocultural anthropology at Yale University in the USA, followed by an interdisciplinary master's degree in environmental sciences at the University of Cologne. She was born and raised in Mexico and has been touring the world through academia. Her research focus lies on digital media, relationships to science, environmental understandings, speech, and activism. The working title of her dissertation is "#ViralEnvironmentalism—Digital Landscapes of Environmental Activism, Fridays for Future and Beyond." She is currently looking at the Fridays for Future movement in Mexico in the hopes of learning a thing or two. Currently she is a research associate at the Deutsches Museum where she functions as the head of the new Science Communication Lab. She has over eight years of professional experience in higher education institutions, where she developed and managed international cooperation projects, was the the academic director of the International Master of Environmental Sciences at the University of Cologne, and currently lectures on Science and Environmental Communication.