Transformation as lived experience: First-person science approaches
Do you have any questions about the TECTU 2025 program? Join us at one of the online Q&A meetings:
- December 2nd, at 18.00 CET
- January 8th, at 18.30 CET
Join via Zoom by clicking here.
Course description
“Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding” approaches critical thinking and understanding as a creative, eye-opening kind of experience that involves courage as much as empathy. The TECTU approach comes about by a) careful attention to and exploration of lived experience, b) by a discerning use of language that makes a difference to the topic and the person engaged in thinking; c) attentive and generous listening to grant one another the freedom to say what one actually means and to make sense of complex topic; 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 enacted with embodied-experiential research practices that motivate trainees to deeply engage with each other, and with the rich and diverse backgrounds they bring along. Trainees will learn the skill needed to come into fruitful contact with their own lived experience of relevant issues of research, and of today's challenging problems.
TECTU 2025 will have a special focus on challenges and opportunities of transformation. In today’s polycrisis, we are confronted with multiple rapid changes, disruptions and transformations – of environments, of society and individuals. Among other things, the TECTU program will 2025 explore questions like:
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 enacted with embodied-experiential research practices that motivate trainees to deeply engage with each other, and with the rich and diverse backgrounds they bring along. Trainees will learn the skill needed to come into fruitful contact with their own lived experience of relevant issues of research, and of today's challenging problems.
TECTU 2025 will have a special focus on challenges and opportunities of transformation. In today’s polycrisis, we are confronted with multiple rapid changes, disruptions and transformations – of environments, of society and individuals. Among other things, the TECTU program will 2025 explore questions like:
- How do we recognize crucial moments when transformation as a lived and embodied experience is taking place?
- How do we grasp and think with experienced meanings related to important situations of change, disruption or transformation?
- How do we differentiate between change, disruption and transformation?
- How can moments of liberatory transformation be protected and strengthened within and through the way we do research?
- And how does critical and embodied thinking enable us to grasp these processes of transformation more accurately?
TECTU involves three different aspects of critical understanding:
- discussing disembodied traditions of critical theory and partially reflective approaches in the sciences and philosophy that disregard the complexity of the life-world;
- learning to open and care for spaces that incubate creative insights, along with a comprehensive understanding of relevant subject matters;
- developing skills to engage in critical exchanges that facilitate the clarification and development of ideas.
Online webinars
The webinar portion is comprised of 12 webinars - six weekly before the summer school and six bi-weekly following the summer 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. After the summer school, in addition to the bi-weekly webinars, the TECTU team will offer intermittent voluntary practice sessions to deepen the practice of the methods learned at the summer school.
Summer School
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. Methods that will be deepened at the summer school are:
- Micro-phenomenology - Phenomenological Observation/Contemplative Methods - Thinking at the Edge - Experiential Interviewing - Intimate Reading - Environmental Immersion 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 Laboratory in Paris and the University of St. Gallen. 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 Bielefeld will draw on the environmental resources available, by having students immerse in firsthand experience of industrialized landscapes and environments to understand how these affect thinking abilities, challenge habitual approaches and 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 teachers. The students will write a paper (12-15 pages in length) on an idea, initiative or understanding that is innovative in the context of their own field.
Important dates
Webinar I
Tuesdays, 14.30 - 17.00 CET May 20th - June 24th, 2025 |
The Summer School
July 7th - 11th, 2025 |
Webinar II
Tuesdays, 14.30 - 17.00 CET September 16th - November 25th, 2025 |
The Independent Project
Submitted December 30th, 2025. |
The TECTU Teachers at the summer school 2025
Christine Abbt
Heinke Deloch
Ram Eisenberg
Katrin Heinemann
Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir
Tomke König
Claire Petitmengin
Donata Schoeller
Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir
Marieke van Vugt
Heinke Deloch
Ram Eisenberg
Katrin Heinemann
Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir
Tomke König
Claire Petitmengin
Donata Schoeller
Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir
Marieke van Vugt