Abstract
The participants of this panel/roundtable discuss the possibilities and limits of transdisciplinary research concerning youth and their designs for a future in the face of climate change and political shifts. Transdisciplinarity – here understood as a combination of academic and non-academic forms of knowledge production, dissemination and implementation – is often praised as bringing science into society and involving society more closely in academic research thus addressing its needs and challenges more directly. But how is this cooperation supposed to work and who takes on which role? How can aesthetic ways of knowing the world help to find research questions and generate new understandings? How can academics learn to incorporate artistic methods and collaborate with them in problem-solving? What happens then with standards of good academic practice and peer-review control mechanisms? What happens with the freedom of art to go beyond the controlling norms to create something new? And how can academics and artists take a stance and yet convey an awareness of the complexity and ambiguity of the situations on the ground?
The panelists will discuss ways to integrate art and academic work along with the question of future aspirations and expectations of youths whose lives and livelihoods are questioned by climate change and the degradation of the environment, political and social transformations, and by dissolving or increasingly exclusivist forms of belonging. With concrete examples of art/academia cooperations they will show how transdisciplinary approaches can help to understand the complexity of these processes and to develop coping strategies. A special focus lies on the challenge to address the concerns of youth and develop participatory approaches to include their future aspirations – not as problem but as a part of the problem-solving process.
Moderators
Panelists