This PhD course gives participants an opportunity to intensively engage with some of the major foundational movements in critical social theory, so that they can continue to explore contemporary expansions of those movements in their own research. It is organized as an intensive discussion seminar over the course of four weeks (with two 3-hour sessions/week). […]
Transformative & Participatory Qualitative Research Approaches & Methods provides PhD candidates and early-career scholars conceptual and hands-on methodological engagement with transformative, participatory and action research approaches that use creative and arts-based research methods and techniques to foster the inclusion and engagement of diverse, often marginalised perspectives and to bring into focus, examine and transform narratives, […]
The focus for the 28 October 2020 Transformative Learning Hub gathering was how to engage with anti-oppression in our research, teaching and societal engagement. Why Anti-Oppression? Prompted by the murder on George Floyd and the global growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, a dialogue with colleagues at CSPS resulted in the decision to adopt […]
𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 ‘𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐦’ 𝐚𝐧𝐝 ‘𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐭’ 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐜? What are the challenges activists and marginalised groups face? How do Covid-19 restrictions deepen and disclose existing inequalities and injustices? How do physical distancing and quarantine life shape, limit and open up new avenues for activism and resistance? These questions are central […]
The 2020 CSPS Annual Day was held online on 8 October 2020. The interactive session was organised around the metaphor of trees growing together in a forest. Imagine for a moment each CSPS member as an individual ‘tree’ within the broader CSPS and WUR ‘forest’, a superorganism of sorts in which we together grow, adapt […]
One of teaching’s key objectives is to nurture students’ growth into active and informed citizens and changemakers, equipped with knowledge, skills and attitudes that enable them to creatively and critically respond to the complex challenges of our times. Yet many of our teaching practices in the realm of higher education are outdated, too often focusing […]
The Transformative Learning Hub (TL Hub) seeks to blur the boundaries conventionally drawn between research and teaching. Organised as a horizontal community of learners, it expressly brings together researchers, educators, students, changemakers and activists across different disciplines and fields at Wageningen University and beyond who are committed to engaging with transformative learning theory and practices […]
To kick off the CSPS Year of Anti-Oppression the Political Ecology reading group met on October 15th to discuss Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism. Nine people attended the reading group from within and beyond CSPS, which signals a growing interest and commitment to exploring this topic together. Dr. Sierra Deutsch facilitated our meeting with the following ground […]
In Bukavu, a rapidly growing city in the troubled east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, neither claimants of land nor claimants of authority can solely rely on one identity or institution in order to secure their claims. Lasting recognition of claims requires constant renegotiation across a shifting diversity of competing individuals and their practices; […]
In an increasing multicultural society, the stories we tell of the past can bring us together or push us further apart. Through travel and tourism we encounter new cultures and perspectives on such stories of the past in certain places. The stories of slavery as told through slavery heritage tourism, is not merely ready-made but […]
How do urban gardens work as sources of food? That is, in a nutshell, the central question of this thesis. Urban gardening and other food alternatives have received growing attention in relation to issues such as food quality and the environmental impacts of food production. However, we know little about how urban gardens actually provide […]
The CSPS Foodscapes cluster is looking for BSc and MSc students interested in researching emerging foodscapes in times of uncertainty. Covid-19 has displayed many of the vulnerabilities and externalities of our current corporate food regime, such as unequal access to food, the dependence of our food supply on global supply chains, the exploitation of (migrant) […]
For more information: https://www.wur.nl/nl/activiteit/Understanding-the-psychological-and-social-environmental-determinants-driving-young-infant-feeding-practices-among-Rwandan-households-a-salutogenic-approach.htm The defense will be livestreamed via the following link https://weblectures.wur.nl/P2G/Player/Player.aspx?id=C217
Political ecologists recognize that environmental issues are political and therefore intricately tied to social and economic issues. We also understand that such issues have shared (political) root causes and that addressing ecological problems means addressing social and economic problems at the structural level as well. And although the PE Reading Group has included readings by […]
cover image by 帅 郭 via Pixabay For more information and to register: https://www.wur.nl/en/show/Critical-Gender-Studies-in-the-Life-Sciences-domains-.htm Introduction & objectives of the course Today, research in the life sciences done to support sustainable development is increasingly interdisciplinary and demands better understanding of roles of gender and other differences, such as race and colonial history. This course directly enables […]
Anthropometric determinism, the 19th century notion that the human body, individual personalities, cultural traits, and social groups can be reduced to numbers, is back. The critical social sciences were, essentially, forged alongside, and fighting against, this idea that informed pseudoscientific practices, namely Euro-American racist ideologies at the heart of so many anti-immigrant and refugee sentiments, […]
Can online meetings be generative and energizing! Yes, they can! On June 10th, we had the fourth meeting of our U.lab 2x journey, in which teachers and students at Wageningen University explore how to integrate head, heart and hands in Higher Education. Since The Netherlands went into ‘intelligent lockdown’ mid-March, we have been organizing our […]
Tuesday June 9 | 15.00 CEST | ZOOM (link will be shared after registration) The CSPS Foodscapes Cluster warmly invites you to join this online public lecture. Please share with others that might be interested! To register, please fill in this form: https://forms.gle/tC9wHCs8cHh8QNgo8 Foodscapes after Covid: from corporatism to the politics of possibility The pandemic […]
Thursday May 14, 2020 | 11.00 am (CET)| Weblectures.wur.nl Syed Omer Husain will defend his PhD-thesis ‘(De)coding a technopolity: Tethering the civic blockchain to political transformation‘. See the abstract below. The full thesis can be downloaded from WUR Library after the defence ceremony. The ceremony will be live-streamed by Weblectures.wur.nl but is recorded and can be viewed […]
What would a healthy, generative Higher Education system look like? That’s the question we explore in the 4th session of our U.lab 2x project “Building Vertical Literacy in Higher Education” on May 6th, 2020. Using a method called ‘Social Presencing Theatre’ (SPT), we embodied various stakeholder roles to sense what the system feels like […]
The PhD course Critical Perspectives on Social Theory gives participants an opportunity to intensively engage with some of the major foundational movements in critical social theory, so that they can continue to explore contemporary expansions of those movements in their own research. It is organized as an intensive discussion seminar over the course of four […]
As all of us watch, experience and manage the challenges and opportunities of these days, we are also forced to be lone warriors in self-quarantining and virtualising many private and academic aspects of life… Therefore, CSPS started a drawing challenge as an alternative way of giving our eyes a break and our brain a calming […]
** Special online discussion on rural-urban relations** by Bettina Bock and Jessica Duncansource cover photo: Daily Mail How are the interactions and dependencies between rural, peri-urban and urban areas changing at this moment? Let us know! Comment at #ROBUST #RuralUrban The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the foundation of our societies, painfully demonstrating the enormous difference […]
Wipe the dust, exhaleUncover hidden treasuresSense the space and shine! This haiku summarizes some of the outcomes of today’s online session of the U.lab 2x project ‘Building Vertical Literacy in Higher Education’ at Wageningen University. The aim of the session was to establish a shared understanding of the current reality of the higher education system […]
Even though the Rural-Urban edition of the Informed Cities Forum, scheduled to take place on 2-3 April 2020 in Lucca, Italy, was canceled, we believe that fruitful discussions are possible, even when we can’t meet in person. We are happy to invite you to join us for an Informed Cities webinar with Carolyn Steel, who was […]
‘It feels like spring!’ On a rainy day in Wageningen, that’s the sensation that remained after an intensive morning of working together with over 20 teachers, educators and students from Wageningen University and outside. During this introduction session of the U.lab 2x project ‘Building Vertical Literacy in Higher Education’ we worked with tools offered by […]
For three days (July 8 – 10, 2019) artists, academics, and diverse economies thinkers gathered together in Wageningen to discuss their work and understandings of art and diverse economies. The workshop was organized by Oona Morrow, Anke de Vrieze, and Chizu Sato, and drew upon the past exchanges around art and diverse economies within the Community […]
During the last three days of January 2020, the Foodscapes cluster of CSPS organised a writing retreat in Utrecht. We had rented two rooms in the Kargadoor, a socio-cultural centre which uses the income from the rooms for its cultural activities. Our rooms offered place for twelve writers at a time. A total of fifteen […]
February 21 | 13.30 -16.00 | Lumen 1 + 2 By Edward Huijbens (GEO), Bas Amelung (ESA), Machiel Lamers (ENP) and Arjaan Pellis (GEO) This event will facilitate healthy and critical discussion amongst scholars and students alike on how to engage with the current global crisis of climate change to which international travel is a […]
This course offers advanced instruction in the skills needed to successfully write and present an academic research paper, as well as in professionalization for an academic career more generally. Lessons will address the various stages of paper writing (outlines, abstracts, literature reviews, overall structure, writing style and strategies, submission for publication), conversion of papers into […]