Moving with uncertainty
Application deadline: January 15th, 2026
Do you have any questions about the TECTU 2026 program? Join our info meetings:
December 4 at 16.00-17.00 CET (signup until December 3)
January 5 at 18.00-19.00 CET (signup until January 4)
Sign up at [email protected]
December 4 at 16.00-17.00 CET (signup until December 3)
January 5 at 18.00-19.00 CET (signup until January 4)
Sign up at [email protected]
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 2026 will have a special focus on uncertainty. We live in uncertain times. The consequences of past and current political decisions and events make the future increasingly unforeseeable, even in the most privileged parts of the world and society. Misinformation and fake news are spread via the most trusted channels and voices and the amount of bad news has become so big that many of us, who still can, have chosen active breaks from any information source in a last attempt to protect our mental health. Unfortunately, the past and presence has also told us that uncertainty makes humankind crave for authoritarian voices pretending to hold an unchangeable truth under most confusing circumstances. It’s the time dictators thrive and those who remind about the contextuality (situatedness) of all knowledge are even less listened to.With TECTU we want to offer a different space, reminding ourselves of the critical power that uncertainty can carry. Rather than managing, suppressing or freaking out about uncertainty, we offer theoretical frameworks and empirical, analytical and creative tools to move and develop with it, always holding in mind, that our perspective is just one out of many, that we can never be certain, but that articulating what is not clear, steady and true as such can move us further – and possibly closer to each other.
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 2026 will have a special focus on uncertainty. We live in uncertain times. The consequences of past and current political decisions and events make the future increasingly unforeseeable, even in the most privileged parts of the world and society. Misinformation and fake news are spread via the most trusted channels and voices and the amount of bad news has become so big that many of us, who still can, have chosen active breaks from any information source in a last attempt to protect our mental health. Unfortunately, the past and presence has also told us that uncertainty makes humankind crave for authoritarian voices pretending to hold an unchangeable truth under most confusing circumstances. It’s the time dictators thrive and those who remind about the contextuality (situatedness) of all knowledge are even less listened to.With TECTU we want to offer a different space, reminding ourselves of the critical power that uncertainty can carry. Rather than managing, suppressing or freaking out about uncertainty, we offer theoretical frameworks and empirical, analytical and creative tools to move and develop with it, always holding in mind, that our perspective is just one out of many, that we can never be certain, but that articulating what is not clear, steady and true as such can move us further – and possibly closer to each other.
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 (hosted by Aarhus University, Denmark) will offer a lot of practice opportunities to gain know-how of the TECTU methods, and for critical discussions on their scientific foundations. Methods that will be deepened at the summer school are:
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 summer school is set at Danakilde in rural Denmark, within a landscape formed by the slow movements of glaciers during the Ice Age. This venue provides a space for noticing uncertainty within the seemingly idyllic, and for understanding how moving with uncertainty - and moving together - affects our way of thinking, challenges habitual approaches and enriches conceptual patterns. |
Environmental immersion at the TECTU 2025 summer school
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, 14.00 - 16.30 CEST April 14th - May 19th, 2026 |
The Summer School
June 14th - 19th, 2026 |
Webinar II
Tuesdays, 14.00 - 16.30 CET August 25th - November 3th, 2026 |
The Independent Project
Submitted November 15th, 2026 |
The TECTU Teachers at the summer school 2026
Christine Abbt
Damian Nussbaumer
Donata Schoeller
Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir
Heinke Deloch
Jaša Černe
Katrin Heimann
Marieke van Vugt
Ram Eisenberg
Tomke König
Damian Nussbaumer
Donata Schoeller
Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir
Heinke Deloch
Jaša Černe
Katrin Heimann
Marieke van Vugt
Ram Eisenberg
Tomke König