Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding in Times of Polycrisis
Application deadline: March 21st*, 2024
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Course description
TECTU’s program 2024 “Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding in a Time of Polycrisis” will explore critical thinking and understanding as a creative, eye-opening kind of experience that involves courage as much as empathy. The TECTU approach which will be practiced comes about by a) a careful, discerning use of language that makes a difference to the topic and the person engaged in thinking; b) an attentive and generous listening until one feels understood and has managed to make one's point; c) a skill to explore one's own bias and helpful perspectives by becoming more aware of the experiential backgrounds partaking in one's approach.
The novel concept of critical understanding will be explored in interdisciplinary ways, applied on one’s own research projects and unfolded with embodied-experiential research practices that motivate trainees to deeply engage with backgrounds and their own lived experience connected to relevant issues of today's challenging problems, with a special focus on climate, social engagement and democratic participation.
TECTU involves three different aspects of critical understanding:
The novel concept of critical understanding will be explored in interdisciplinary ways, applied on one’s own research projects and unfolded with embodied-experiential research practices that motivate trainees to deeply engage with backgrounds and their own lived experience connected to relevant issues of today's challenging problems, with a special focus on climate, social engagement and democratic participation.
TECTU involves three different aspects of critical understanding:
- discussing traditions of critical theory in regard to disembodied and partially reflective approaches in the sciences and philosophy, disregarding the complexity of a life-world;
- practicing how to open an intra-subjective space of deep immersion with backgrounds for the sake of more careful and engaged understanding of relevant subject matters;
- working on the skill of an intersubjective critical exchange that allows for development of ideas.
Online webinars
12 week webinar series, six weeks before the summer school and six weeks following the summers school, covering the scientific foundations of our approaches to what we call Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding, and introducing the methods and practices involved. Students will have weekly assignments, resulting in an expose of the independent project. Click here for the complete syllabus.
Summer School
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The summer school will offer a lot of practice opportunity to gain know-how to use TECTU methods and the critical discussions on its scientific foundations. Students will give presentations of the relevance of the learned method for their independent project.
In this summer school, students/researchers will be introduced to methods of embodied critical thinking that were developed at the University of Chicago, at the Technion in Haifa, at the University of Iceland and at the Micro-phenomenology Laboraty in Paris. With these methods, students and researchers learn to unfold and think with the thickness of their actual experiences and situations. This novel combination of critical thinking in philosophy and in design makes theories of the embedded, extended and enactive mind concretely applicable in the thinking process, with far reaching implications for training a differentiated, creative and critical approach to frame problems and solutions and initiate projects. The setting of University of Iceland will draw on the environmental resources available, by having students immerse in firsthand experience of landscape and environment to understand and to display how these affect thinking abilities and challenge as well as enrich conceptual patterns. |
Results and goals
Students will work problem based on philosophical and environmental issues. They will get to know methodological corner stones of embodied critical thinking: thorough unfolding of subject matters (“close talking”), conditions of inclusive emotional intelligence (“reflexive care”), enhanced attention to the embodied dimensions of knowing (“Focusing”), deepening of the experiential realm (“micro-phenomenology”), facing the unknown and paradox edges of issues and questions (“thinking at the edge”), thinking with empathic competence (“radical listening”, methods of mindfulness), methods of accessing “extended and embedded mind” (environmental immersion). |
Independent Project
The independent project will center around a topic of interest of the trainee, for the development of which TECTU practices will be engaged. A fruitful interdisciplinary exchange during this process among trainees will be mentored by the partners. The students will write a 12 - 15p paper on an idea, initiative or understanding that is innovative in the context of their own field.
Important dates
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Webinar I
May 21st - June 25th, 2024 |
The Summer School
August 12th-16th, 2024 |
Webinar II
September 17th - November 26th, 2024 |
The Independent Project
Submitted December 30th 2024. |
The TECTU Teachers at the summer school 2024
Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir
Donata Schoeller
Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir
Marieke van Vugt
Ram Eisenberg
Donata Schoeller
Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir
Marieke van Vugt
Ram Eisenberg