Recently I contributed to the 5th Living Knowledge Conference which was held in Bonn, Germany last May with a talk on “Science as community: Sustainability- oriented trans-disciplinary research”. The entire talk has now been uploaded on youtube as have been several of the other talks held at this energizing event. The talk can be found here. Since the slides I used are not always (clearly) visible you can find the slides I used here: WalsBonnLivingKnowledge.
The conference covered the following teams:
A. Setting shared research agendas by CSOs and Research Institutes
B. The role of Higher Education in creating knowledge with communities
C. Communities and students learning together
D. Evaluation and quality improvement: New lessons learned on measuring the value of community engagement and collaborative research
E. Developing partnership working for research – civil society engagement
F. Policies to support collaborative research relationships
My talk related mostly to theme B which is described on the conference website as follows: Research and education are going to play a central role during the transformation process towards a knowledge society, as the realisation of the necessity for restructuring the world economy has been triggered mainly by scientific knowledge. Society should therefore decide on actions that are not a direct response to recently experienced events, but motivated by foresight and precaution. For this purpose, the debate between science, politics and society should be far more structured, more obligatory, and livelier, to ensure a constructive discourse about the best ways to achieve sustainability.
Key questions:
- How can problem-based approaches and transdisciplinarity be encouraged?
- How can a relation of mutual trust between researchers and CSOs be developed?
- How can career opportunities for young researchers engaging with communities be improved?
- How can universities and research institutions give researchers and students more opportunities to reflect about the societal consequences of their work?
Transformative learning 