UABDivulga - Barcelona recerca i innovació

Description:

The UAB will be the scenario of the tenth edition of this conference, organised by the Botstiber Institute for Wildlife Fertility Control (BIWFC) in collaboration with the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine.

The welcome session will be given by Javier Lafuente, rector of the UAB, Josep Maria López Martín, deputy director general of Fauna Cinegètica, Caça i Pesca Continental of the Government of Catalonia, and Monique Principi, director general of BIWFC.

The congress will once again bring together the international scientific and professional community in this specialised field to provide continuity to previous international forums dedicated to the control of wildlife fertility and the role that these strategies can play in mitigating conflicts between humans and wildlife.

With the title "Bridging the Gap: From Science to Management", the meeting aims to bring scientific research closer to practical management on the ground. Professionals from various disciplines will gather to share the latest advances in areas such as research and development of new strategies, improvement of existing methods, ongoing and completed field studies, identification and management systems, practical application case studies, the human dimension of wildlife management, stakeholder participation, scientific communication, and the social, regulatory and political challenges associated with this field.

The plenary session programme will feature the participation of four prominent international voices in the field of wildlife fertility control:

- Giovanna Massei, director of BIWFC in Europe and professor of Human Interactions with Wildlife at the University of York, United Kingdom, will present the paper "Too many? Wildlife fertility control in the future".

- Jordan Hampton, senior professor of Veterinary Physiology at the School of Veterinary Medicine Harry Butler Institute of Murdoch University, Australia, will offer the conference "Navigating contemporary animal welfare expectations in wildlife fertility control".

- Cameron Kovach, head of programmes at The Wildlife Society (TWS), will give the presentation "Transforming wildlife management: making space for new ideas".

- John Boone, research director of the Great Basin Bird Observatory, United States, will address the management of free-roaming cat populations with the session "Making the most of fertility control: Insights from free-roaming cat population management".

Attendance at the conference will allow participants to obtain up to 14.5 Category I continuing education credits (CEUs) within the Certified Wildlife Biologist title renewal and professional development programme, offered by The Wildlife Society, with the equivalence of one credit for each hour of training.

The fact that this conference is being held at the UAB consolidates the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine as an international reference space in research, knowledge transfer, and debate on the sustainable management of wildlife.

Congress programme

Place: Hotel Campus and Convention Centre, UAB Campus

Date: Thursday 23, April de 2026 - 08:15h

Date: Friday 24, April de 2026 - 17:30h

Promotor: Botstiber Institute for Wildlife Fertility Control (BIWFC) and Faculty of Veterinary Medicine

Description:

Gravitational waves (GWs) can be produced by a first-order phase transition in the early Universe via the fluid perturbations induced in the primordial plasma by the expansion and collision of broken-phase bubbles. Alberto Roper Pol, professor of the University of Geneva (Switzerland), will review the production of GWs by the anisotropic stresses of velocity and magnetic fields induced in a first-order phase transition and present recent developments on the analytical estimates and numerical simulations that address the stochastic GW background produced by acoustic motion (sound waves) and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence. These GWs could be detectable by current and future GW detectors like LISA or PTA, potentially providing us with direct clean information of the physics at the high energies of the early Universe and probing beyond the Standard Model physics. In addition, the presence of magnetic fields at a phase transition leads to coupled non-linear fluid perturbations, described by MHD turbulence, that will impact the cosmological GW background. The study of these effects can be used to put constraints on primordial magnetic fields. These fields would evolve until present time and leave observable imprints in, for example, the CMB and in the cosmic voids of the large-scale structure of the Universe, allowing us to combine GW observations with other cosmological and astrophysical observations in a multi-messenger approach.

You can access the full event here: https://indico.ifae.es/event/2434

Place: IFAE Seminar Room C7b/064

Date: Thursday 23, April de 2026 - 15:00h

Description:

The REAL-Postgrowth project (Post-growth – REAL – A Post-Growth Deal) is excited to announce that Richard York and Stefano B. Longo will present a public talk as part of our monthly public seminar series.

Seminar: "Environmental sociology, ecological crisis & degrowth" 

Speakers: Richard York, University of Oregon, & Stefano B. Longo, University of Gothenburg.

• Date: Tuesday, April 28th, 2026
• Time:  12 -13h (CET)
• Venue: Sala Z/032 ICTA-UAB and online: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89902459669?pwd=3mnkCJeyZ6o60nIIAXHHJNsh1qPZ5k.1

What social structures drive societies beyond planetary boundaries? Drawing on York’s analyses of energy, pollution, and technological displacement and Longo’s work on global development, food systems, and critical sustainability science, this talk examines the growth-dependent political economies that lock modern societies into ecological overshoot. It argues that contemporary provisioning systems reproduce unsustainable resource use and unequal exchange, obstruct just North–South convergence, and help explain why techno-fixes and mainstream sustainability approaches so often fall short. Bringing environmental sociology into dialogue with degrowth and post-growth scholarship, the talk examines the structural and political-economic drivers of ecological change and the constraints they place on more just and ecologically viable forms of social provisioning. 

Richard York is Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. An environmental sociologist working at the intersection of human ecology and political economy, he studies how the structural characteristics of modern societies shape energy use, resource consumption, and pollution, and has been especially influential in showing the limits of technological substitution as a sustainability strategy.

Stefano B. Longo is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Gothenburg. His research examines global development, agri-food and marine systems, and the social drivers of ecological change, while also advancing a more sociologically grounded sustainability science attentive to power, historical specificity, and just transitions.

Date: Tuesday 28, April de 2026 - 12:00h

Description:

The Group on Immigration and Ethnic Minorities (GEDIME) and the Centre for Migration Studies and Research (CER-M) of the UAB are working with the Millennium Nucleus for Research on Anti-Racist Chilean Education (MRACE) to organise a seminar entitled "Unaccompanied migrant adolescents in Chile: a new migratory actor". The session will take place on 29 April at 11:00 a.m. in the Boardroom of the UAB Faculty of Political Science and Sociology.

The seminar will be given by Iskra Pavez, researcher at CER-M and the MRACE group at the UAB. The speaker will address the emergence of unaccompanied migrant adolescents in Chile as a relevant social and political subject within contemporary migratory flows. There will be reflections on their migratory trajectories, the reception conditions, and the institutional and social challenges they pose, as well as on the educational and political responses provided within the Chilean context.

Place: Faculty of Political Science and Sociology (Boardroom)

Date: Wednesday 29, April de 2026 - 11:00h

Description:

In this talk, iHC researcher Carlos Tabernero offers a historical analysis of a series of film and television narratives in which the notions of sustainability form part of the central theme, more or less explicitly, or are in some way essential, as contextual elements, for the development of the plot. These narratives are historically linked to confluences of social, political, academic, and activist imaginaries, as well as to specific historical concepts in film and television production, which have shaped our conceptualizations (past, present, and future) of nature and the environment over the last century.

Tabernero draws a critical map of the contemporary processes of constructing visual sociocultural spaces for the notions of sustainability and their influence on our conceptualizations and debates about nature and the environment.

Presents: Álvaro Girón Sierra (IMF-CSIC).

Further information

Place: Milà and Fontanals Institution for Research in the Humanities (CSIC)

Date: Wednesday 29, April de 2026 - 12:00h

Description:

On 5 May, Judith Butler, professor of the University of California, Berkeley, and recipient of an honorary doctorate from the UAB, and Chiara Bottici, distinguished Serra Húnter lecturer in the Department of Philosophy of the UAB, will be participating in a round table entitled "Words, Bodies, Images: Rethinking Identity in Times of Resistance". The event will take place at 6:30 p.m. at the UAB Casa Convalescència in Barcelona, and is organised jointly by the Fira Literal and the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting of the UAB. Lupe Romero, lecturer in Translation and Interpreting will moderate the debate.

Place: UAB Casa Convalescènc, Barcelona (Carrer Sant Antoni Maria Claret 171)

Date: Tuesday 5, May de 2026 - 18:30h