The fellowship program funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung supports researchers to work on current and relevant topics of transdisciplinary research at one of the research institutes involved in the tdAcademy project. A total of eight fellow groups and nine individual fellowships have already successfully been realized. In this brief overview, you can find out more about the current status of our three current fellow groups and two individual fellowships, which are making exciting contributions to transdisciplinary research.
The two tdAcademy fellow groups “What is a ‘good’ transformation and who gets to define it?” and “Improving critical social science skills in transdisciplinary transformative change initiatives” have been working closely together since September 2023. A physical meeting was held in Frankfurt in November 2023, at which employees of the Institute for Social-Ecological Research (ISOE) were also invited to exchange ideas. You can already find a report in that meeting on our website. Since then, the groups have been working actively on evaluating the results, which will be presented in a webinar in fall 2024.
Source: Sitha Reis, 2023
The fellow group "Transdisciplinary Research and its Scientific Implications: Findings and Implications from Health Research and Sustainability Research on Interconnected Health and Environmental Challenges, Collaborative Approaches and Structural Development in Science" has been working together since September 2023. The group focuses on the previously less-researched interface between sustainability research and health research in order to strengthen transdisciplinary approaches in this area in the future. In addition to online meetings in September 2023 and a webinar in May 2024, the group met at ISOE in Frankfurt in early February 2024. At the meeting, the different perspectives of sustainability research and health research on transdisciplinarity were discussed. The group is currently preparing the results, which will soon be published on the tdAcademy website.
The three groups will also hold workshops together with ISOE employees at the ITD Conference 2024 in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Source: Chantal Krumm, 2023
Individual fellow Isabella Radhuber visited the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) from September 2023 to January 2024. During this time, she devoted herself to researching the health effects of climate change and conducted a detailed literature review, placing particular emphasis on a transdisciplinary perspective. This led to questions regarding the current and future health impacts of climate change, the best approaches to understanding the complex relationships between climate and health, and the importance of transdisciplinary research in developing solutions to complex problems. She has summarized her impressions and findings from the fellowship for us here. She is currently planning a webinar for the tdAcademy community in which she would like to present and discuss her findings and follow-up activities. The webinar is scheduled to take place in fall or winter 2024.
Another individual fellow, Stephanie Moser, will visit the Center Technology and Society (ZTG) in Berlin in August 2024. She intends to stimulate an exchange on impact pathways in various thematic areas of transdisciplinary research. At the end of her stay, she will present her findings to the ZTG staff and other interested parties and then discuss them. More information will follow.
In addition to the named fellow groups, several other groups and individual fellowships are currently being set up. Anyone interested in the fellowship program can contact tdAcademy@isoe.de for more information. Further fellowships can be accepted in the coming weeks before the fellowship program ends in March 2025.