In this capacity-building event, held on December 7, 2022, Ulli Vilsmaier (Responsive Research Collective, Switzerland) elaborated on the responsive character of transdisciplinarity as a research orientation, a methodological feature, and an attitude that values plurality and difference. In her talk she shed light on the constitutional role of transdisciplinarity for in-between spaces in the landscape of institutions, intervening in the social fabric of research and education. She also offered insights from an article recently published in the Journal of Educational Studies as a product of the tdAcademy felllowship of Ulli Vilsmaier, Dena Fam and Livia Fritz in 2021 and a book on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary failures, edited by Dena Fam and Michael O’Rourke.
The goal of the webinar was to explore the responsive and constitutive character of transdisciplinarity and its consequences for higher education and to discuss struggles that result from these attributes of transdisciplinarity and present principles and practices to support such learning environments and to strengthen students’ abilities to work at the forefront of collaboratively constituting novel and unique sites of societal transformation. We thank all participants for the exciting and valuable discussion!
Ulli Vilsmaier
is currently a visiting professor at the Universidad de la República in Buenos Aires and part of the Responsive Research Collective in Switzerland. She grew up in the Austrian Alps and studied Geography. She has been teaching and researching at Salzburg University (2001–2011) and Leuphana University (2011–2020) where she held a professorship position for Transdsiciplinary Methods and served as Presidential Committee Appointee for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity, supporting the university’s transformation of research and higher education.