On 11th October 2022, the PREMISS team organises a roundtable on transdisciplinarity with three speakers from South Africa, one of our key partner countries. This session is part of the capacity building effort set up within PREMISS.
Professor Barend Erasmus is a South African expert in the field of climate change impacts and natural resource management. In 2018, he was a chapter lead author on the IPBES Global Land Degradation and Restoration Assessment, with a focus on land degradation and human wellbeing. The report, and the author team, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020 and 2021 for its impact and innovation. The networks and insights from this process continue to shape and influence his thinking. He spent 16 years at the University of the Witwatersrand establishing and building the Global Change Institute (GCI). GCI is a donor-funded, interdisciplinary research entity that focuses on helping society transform to a more sustainable future. This task requires researchers to think differently about how they work with industry, society and government, and he still actively participates in such processes in various fora. He will address transdisciplinarity in higher education, its challenges for scholarship, practice and governance.
Dr. Hester du Plessis holds a PhD in Philosophy (UNISA) and a Master’s Degree in Art Theory and Practice (TUT). She is a Research Associate in the Humanities Dean’s office, Faculty of Humanities, University of Pretoria (UP) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Future Africa Institute (FAI) at UP. She previously served as Chief Research Specialist and Head of Science Communication at the Research Use and Impact Assessment (RIA) unit of the Human and Social Science Council (HSRC) in South Africa. Her research is centered on epistemology and philosophy and follows a transdisciplinary approach by joining together science and the humanities by means of current debates in societal transformations and the precaritisation of knowledge generation. She is currently engaged in two international projects, namely Knowledge from precarity and mobility: The Endangered Humanities and Partnership for research to enhance methodologies in Sustainability Science (PREMISS) She will talk about the development of the concept of transdisciplinarity.
Complementary to Dr. du Plessis’s contribution, Prof. Liesel Ebersöhn will focus on resilience studies and examples of transdisciplinary research. Prof. Liesel Ebersöhn is a registered educational psychologist and expert on social dimensions of resilience that support positive health and wellbeing outcomes in severely challenged Southern African spaces. Through engagement in global education and poverty think tanks, panels and boards she is influential in Global South education development circles and actively supports education policy reform in the Global South based on evidence of resilience-enabling transformation in Africa. She is a recipient of numerous scientific association-, national- and institutional awards. She is the World Education Research Association President Elect.
The workshop will take place from 9h-11h (South Africa- France), 14h-16h (Vietnam), 15h-17h (Taiwan). Contact jeanne.cottenceau@ird.fr to get connection information if you wish to participate to this enriching session!