There is an urgent need to engage with deep leverage points in sustainability transformations—fundamental myths, paradigms, and systems of meaning making—to open new collective horizons for action. Art and creative practice are uniquely suited to help facilitate change in these deeper transformational leverage points. However, understandings of how creative practices contribute to sustainability transformations are lacking in practice and fragmented across theory and research. This lack of understanding shapes how creative practices are evaluated and therefore funded and supported, limiting their potential for transformative impact. This paper presents the 9 Dimensions tool, created to support reflective and evaluative dialogues about links between creative practice and sustainability transformations. It was developed in a transdisciplinary process between the potential users of this tool: researchers, creative practitioners, policy makers, and funders. It also brings disciplinary perspectives on societal change from evaluation theory, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and more in connection with each other and with sustainability transformations, opening new possibilities for research. The framework consists of three categories of change, and nine dimensions: changing meanings (embodying, learning, and imagining); changing connections (caring, organizing, and inspiring); and changing power (co-creating, empowering, and subverting). We describe how the 9 Dimensions tool was developed, and describe each dimension and the structure of the tool. We report on an application of the 9 Dimensions tool to 20 creative practice projects across the European project Creative Practices for Transformational Futures (CreaTures). We discuss user reflections on the potential and challenges of the tool, and discuss insights gained from the analysis of the 20 projects. Finally, we discuss how the 9 Dimensions can effectively act as a transdisciplinary research agenda bringing creative practice further in contact with transformation research.
The debate on tourism in cities, both academically and in practice, has for a long time taken place in relative isolation from urban studies. Tourism is mostly addressed as an external agent and economic force that puts pressure on cities rather than as an interdependent part of city systems. The recent debate on city touristification and excessive dependence on the visitor economy, as well as the associated processes of exclusion, and displacement of local city users, serves to highlight how tourism is an integral part of urban developments. A wider urban perspective is needed to understand the processes underlying the tourism phenomena and more transdisciplinary perspectives are required to analyze the urban (tourism) practices. The current article seeks to contribute to such a perspective through a discussion of the literature on urban and tourism studies, and related fields such as gentrification, mobilities, and touristification. Based on this, theoretical reflections are provided regarding a more integral perspective to tourism and urban development in order to engage with a transversal urban tourism research agenda.
This project develops a European network for transdisciplinary innovation in artistic engagement as a catalyst for societal transformation, focusing on immersive art. It responds to the professionals in the field’s call for research into immersive art’s unique capacity to ‘move’ people through its multisensory, technosocial qualities towards collective change. The project brings together experts leading state-of-the-art research and practice in related fields with an aim to develop trajectories for artistic, methodological, and conceptual innovation for societal transformation. The nascent field of immersive art, including its potential impact on society, has been identified as a priority research area on all local-to-EU levels, but often suffers from the common (mis)perception as being technological spectacle prioritising entertainment values. Many practitioners create immersive art to enable novel forms of creative engagement to address societal issues and enact change, but have difficulty gaining recognition and support for this endeavour. A critical challenge is the lack of knowledge about how their predominantly sensuous and aesthetic experience actually lead to collective change, which remains unrecognised in the current systems of impact evaluation predicated on quantitative analysis. Recent psychological insights on awe as a profoundly transformative emotion signals a possibility to address this challenge, offering a new way to make sense of the transformational effect of directly interacting with such affective qualities of immersive art. In parallel, there is a renewed interest in the practice of cultural mediation, which brings together different stakeholders to facilitate negotiation towards collective change in diverse domains of civic life, often through creative engagements. Our project forms strategic grounds for transdisciplinary research at the intersection between these two developments. We bring together experts in immersive art, psychology, cultural mediation, digital humanities, and design across Europe to explore: How can awe-experiences be enacted in immersive art and be extended towards societal transformation?
The HAS professorship Future Food Systems is performing applied research with students and external partners to transform our food system towards a more sustainable state. In this research it is not only a question of what is needed to achieve this, but also how and with whom. The governance of our food system needs rethinking to get the transformative momentum going in a democratic and constructive manner. Building on the professorship’s research agenda and involvement in the transdisciplinary NWA research project, the postdoc will explore collective ownership and inclusive participation as two key governance concepts for food system transformation. This will be done in a participatory manner, by learning from and with innovative bottom-up initiatives and practitioners from the field. By doing so, the postdoc will gain valuable practical insights that can aid to new approaches and (policy) interventions which foster a sustainable and just food system in the Netherlands and beyond. A strong connection between research and education is created via the active research involvement of students from different study programs, supervised by the postdoc (Dr. B. van Helvoirt). The acquired knowledge is embedded in education by the postdoc by incorporating it into HAS study program curricula and courses. In addition, it will contribute to the further professional development of qualitative research skills among HAS students and staff. Through scientific, policy and popular publications, participation in (inter)national conferences and meetings with experts and practitioners, the exposure and network of the postdoc and HAS in the field of food systems and governance will be expanded. This will allow for the setting up of a continuous research effort on this topic within the professorship via follow-up research with knowledge institutes, civic society groups and partners from the professional field.
The Dutch main water systems face pressing environmental, economic and societal challenges due to climatic changes and increased human pressure. There is a growing awareness that nature-based solutions (NBS) provide cost-effective solutions that simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits and help building resilience. In spite of being carefully designed and tested, many projects tend to fail along the way or never get implemented in the first place, wasting resources and undermining trust and confidence of practitioners in NBS. Why do so many projects lose momentum even after a proof of concept is delivered? Usually, failure can be attributed to a combination of eroding political will, societal opposition and economic uncertainties. While ecological and geological processes are often well understood, there is almost no understanding around societal and economic processes related to NBS. Therefore, there is an urgent need to carefully evaluate the societal, economic, and ecological impacts and to identify design principles fostering societal support and economic viability of NBS. We address these critical knowledge gaps in this research proposal, using the largest river restoration project of the Netherlands, the Border Meuse (Grensmaas), as a Living Lab. With a transdisciplinary consortium, stakeholders have a key role a recipient and provider of information, where the broader public is involved through citizen science. Our research is scientifically innovative by using mixed methods, combining novel qualitative methods (e.g. continuous participatory narrative inquiry) and quantitative methods (e.g. economic choice experiments to elicit tradeoffs and risk preferences, agent-based modeling). The ultimate aim is to create an integral learning environment (workbench) as a decision support tool for NBS. The workbench gathers data, prepares and verifies data sets, to help stakeholders (companies, government agencies, NGOs) to quantify impacts and visualize tradeoffs of decisions regarding NBS.
