Project: tdAcademy
Platform for transdisciplinary research and studies
In June 2020, we
started our new project the tdAcademy. The aim
of this project is to provide a place for the further development and
dissemination of transdisciplinary research methodologies, concepts and
competencies.
The project tdAcademy began to
work in June 2020 and is funded for at least three years by the German
Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of the funding program
"Social-Ecological Research". The founding partners are the ISOE –
Institute for Social-Ecological Research, Leuphana
University of Lüneburg, Zentrum
Technik und Gesellschaft from the TU Berlin and the Oeko-Institut.
The tdAcademy pursues three
objectives. First, consolidating state of the art insights concerning
four issues relevant for transdisciplinary research: societal impact,
scientific impact, context dependencies, and new methods. Second,
providing high quality capacity-building opportunities (e.g. summer
schools or workshops) for transdisciplinary researchers, especially
early-career researchers. Third, supporting and further developing the
global transdisciplinary research community by providing a space for
exchange, reflection, collaboration, and new ideas.
In July 2020, we hosted the first project meeting at Leuphana University Lüneburg
with all founding partners. The aim of this workshop was to set the
working structures for the project and to distribute the first tasks. In
addition, we discussed the close collaboration between all founding partners
and additional institutions engaging in transdisciplinary research as a
key for the success of this project. We were delighted by the positive
energy of all participants and their enthusiasm to advance
transdisciplinary research and strengthen its community across institutes
and all countries.
As a first step, we will start consolidating the newest
insights concerning societal impact, scientific impact, context
dependencies, and new methods of transdisciplinary research. For this, we
will conduct reviews, analyze transdisciplinary research projects,
organize workshops, and conduct interviews. Afterwards, we want to
discuss our insights with leading experts in the field and develop new
capacity-building opportunities.
The tdAcademy welcomes
universities, institutes, organizations, and individuals who are
interested in or working with the transdisciplinary research practice to
share their experiences, provide capacity-building opportunities, and
participate in dialogues to advance the field.
Further funding for an additional fellowship program,
enabling research stays of individual scientists at one of the partner
institutions as well as intensive collaboration in small
fellowship-groups, is expected to be soon approved.
Postdoc Academy for Transformational
Leadership
In February the
second seminar of the second round of the Postdoc Academy for
Transformational Leadership took place in Lüneburg.
Based on the huge demand of Postdocs from all over Europe and the
overwhelmingly positive feedback for the first two rounds, the project
got extended for a third and fourth round till 2023.
The Postdoc Academy for Transformational Leadership is
designed to develop the next generation of leaders in sustainability and
transformation research. It is an initiative of the Robert Bosch Stiftung
and a joint project of the Robert Bosch Stiftung and the four academic centres Humboldt-Universität zu
Berlin, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the
Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (DRIFT) in Rotterdam. It
provides an intensive high-end training with four seminars in two years
that broaden the research competencies of postdocs and promote their
qualifications towards transdisciplinary leadership. The program also
offers seed funding (e.g. for stakeholder meetings or proposal writing
activities) to small groups of participants, who plan to initiate
research collaborations. Furthermore, an active network of current and former
participants of the program will be established.
The academy is based on insights in the need for more and
better integration of natural sciences, social sciences and humanities in
sustainability research, a better recognition of inter- and
transdisciplinary research in academia and excellent, highly competitive
researchers who are able to lead inter- and transdisciplinary teams and
academic institutions. Thus, it is seen as important to prepare
early-career researchers for leadership positions in inter- and
transdisciplinary contexts.
During the seminar at Leuphana
in February this year 20 European Postdocs explored the potentials as
well as the challenges of transdisciplinary research environments and
transdisciplinary learning, including individual reflections on the own
profile and portfolio as a researcher. They engaged with
transdisciplinary research methodologies as well as transdisciplinary
learning processes on different levels and learnt how to overcome typical
difficulties in td research with insights into challenges and approaches
of scaling.
The roundtable series Sustainability
and Digitalization – a European perspective
In December 2019 the project "Sustainability and
Digitalization – a European perspective" started. The project
started as a joint effort from the Leuphana
University Lüneburg, the Weizenbaum
Institute for the Networked Society, and the German Advisory Council on
Global Change (WBGU). It is financed by the Robert Bosch Stiftung and
based on the WBGU report "Towards our Common Digital
Future."
The aim of the roundtable series is to bring expertise
from the currently often separated communities focusing on sustainability
and digital transformation, respectively, in a discourse to explore
solution options for major societal challenges of the 21st
century. For doing so we will conduct a series of six expert roundtables
in which representatives of both communities will exchange views on
central issues of transdisciplinary learning in the field of digitization
and sustainability from a specifically European perspective. Based on
in-depth discussions, learning both from and with one another is
encouraged on three levels: social, organizational, and
individual. We are aiming for (i)
promoting increased cooperation between the communities, (ii) stimulating
scientific and political discourse, and (iii) helping to familiarize the
interested public with the topic.
The first three roundtables will be held in September 2021
in a digital format:
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social learning
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"Digital
participation to empower civil society and accelerate sustainability
transformations in urban and rural areas"
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organizational learning
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"Digitalization
for the Greater Good: The role and responsibility of European business"
– A European roundtable on corporate digital responsibility
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individual learning
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"Education,
Sustainability, and Digitalization – How is learning in schools
shaped?"
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The other three
workshops are planned as face-to-face events at the end of January 2021.
The findings and results will be presented in different manners,
including in an interactive exhibition for the general public at the
Futurium in Berlin and in a symposium probably held 2021 in Brussels
for a selected group of scientists, members of society, and politicians.
Project proposal: ESD for
2030
In May, we also
applied for the research project "ESD FOR 2030: Learning for and in resilient and sustainable communities"
with international partners from
the Baltic States: Besides the Leuphana
University of Lüneburg, the University of
Latvia, the University of Klaipeda in Lithuania and the University of
Estonia for Life Sciences are partners in the planned project.
Participating municipalities are the Hanseatic City of Lüneburg as reference municipality in Germany, Valmiera in Latvia, Klaipeda in Lithuania and Viljandi in Estonia. Secondary schools in the cities
involved have also agreed to participate in the project. With a budget of
330,000 € the project is scheduled to start in January 2021.
The project aims to make the potential of real-world
laboratories and experiments as places of mutual learning - in the sense
of education for sustainable development - available to municipalities
and cities. Specifically, the role of pupils and young adults in these
processes is to be strengthened. To this end, special emphasis will be
put on individual learning processes of pupils and students in the sense
of project-based and experience-based learning as well as on joint
cooperative and social learning processes between various local actors
and the pupils and students. Furthermore, the staff from local city
administrations shall be intensively involved in the research and
development process.
In addition to the project management and the coordination
of the partner network, the objectives are to be achieved by 5 further
work packages: (i) Capacity Mobilizing and
Training Formats for the participating teachers and administrative staff,
(ii) Real-world experiments with pupils and students actively involving
administrative staff and other local actors, (iii) Facilitation of a
focused exchange between the participants through three exchange formats
targeting all groups of actors involved, (iv) Formative monitoring during
the entire project duration to enable a comparative evaluation and
methodological support of the processes in the partner municipalities and
(v) Establishment of a WiKi for the
dissemination of the project results.
Project
proposal: Regenerative Local Food Economies
In November we
applied for the research project "Regenerative Local Food Economies" as
part of the funding program of "2020 South African/ German Collaborative
Research Programme (SAG-CORE)" on: The
Interface between Global Change and Social Sciences – post COVID-19.
This project addresses failures that have precipitated the crisis in food
systems during the Covid-19 pandemic, recognising
that these, predominantly human behaviours, are
intertwined with systems of inequality, the mechanisms driving globalised capitalism, and climate change-related
risks and disasters. It is a joint project together with our partners
from Rhodes University and University of Fort Hare (South Africa).
The proposed applied and socially oriented research of
this proposal brings transdisciplinary social science and food system
practice development (drawing on farmers and food system actors'
knowledge and experience, sustainability sciences, economics and
education and expansive learning praxis) into a relationship with
ecological research, business studies and food systems development
studies. The impact from this project intends to build and connect
knowledge to increase the (societal) impact of research, and evidence new
development pathways which can accelerate transitions towards sustainable
development through deliberate social learning processes. In doing so
this project explicitly seeks to inform knowledge towards sustainable
societal transitions and transformation across two themes: (1) Governance
of societal transformations to sustainability – post-COVID-19 (Theme a)
and (2) Well-being, quality of life, identity, and social and cultural
values in relation to transformations to sustainability - post-COVID-19.
Specifically, this
project aims to investigate and support the development of regenerative
local food economies involving SMMEs in urban and rural contexts in
Germany and South Africa, through co-engaged transdisciplinary social learning
and skills ecosystem approaches. It considers how these approaches
contribute to building back better in ways that reflect just recovery
principles and practice. It further conceptualises
how regenerative food economy practices and just recovery can offer
catalytic understandings for informing Just Transitions towards
sustainable social-ecological transformation within wider contexts and in
a medium to longer term sustainable development framework aligned with
the SDGs.
 
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