Webinar: The responsive and constitutive character of transdisciplinarity: consequences for higher education

Transdisciplinarity is widely recognized as a key to tackle complex problems, driven by socio-economic and technological developments, and accordingly negative social, cultural and ecological effects. Thereby, transdisciplinarity plays a dual role: it is a response to complex problems that emerge from rapidly changing life worlds and simultaneously constitutes alternative social and epistemic regimes. This dual role has far reaching consequences when implementing transdisciplinarity within higher education as it cannot be simply taught as a techno-scientific means to address complex problems but rather requires dialogical and interventionist forms of learning when involving students in establishing new terrain. For the still experimental nature of transdisciplinarity as a responsive form of research and approach to constitute alternative social and epistemic regimes, these learning spaces are highly dynamic, relational, often fragile and pose significant challenges to both students and educators in practice.

In this webinar, Ulli Vilsmaier (Responsive Research Collective, Switzerland) and Dena Fam (UTS, Australia) elaborate on the responsive character of transdisciplinarity as a research orientation, a methodological feature, and an attitude that values plurality and difference. We 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. Based on studies on failure and the perception of failure in student driven transdiscplinary research-based learning we 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.

This webinar is a space to explore the responsive and constitutive character of transdisciplinarity and its consequences for higher education, while also offering 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.

Please register for the online event by sending an email to Annabell Lamberth: annabell.lamberth@tu-berlin.de You will receive the login information shortly before the event.