Announcing the launch of a new research network: Transformations, fUTures and jusTIce for Sustainability (TUTTIS)

An invitation and call to join the TUTTIS!

On behalf of the Radboud Centre for Sustainability Challenges, we share this call to join the TUTTIS: Transformations, fUTures and jusTIce for Sustainability.

Do you work on transformations? Then your work is inherently orientated toward the future.

Are you interested in thinking more about how current decisions impact justice – now and in the future, how today’s decisions are influenced by and do influence anticipations of futures?

 We are living through an age of polycrisis. These rupture the foundations of modern thought, sending ripples across all scholarly disciplines. In particular, the sustainability crises that societies are facing forces not only a reflexive approach to the planetary boundaries, but also to justice. The consequences of unsustainable actions (e.g., global warming) are unequally distributed, affecting particularly the regions and groups within society that are least responsible for causing it (e.g., through their limited emissions). A new approach to thinking about polycrisis needs to be fostered; an approach that is genuinely interdisciplinary and collaborative: futures thinking. Futures thinking focuses amongst others on implicit and explicit futures that actors are anticipating in the present. 

What do we do? TUTTIS is bringing together a diversity of thinkers from across different disciplines @ Radboud to be part of a network that will foreground futures thinking to discuss, understand, research, and theorize just transformations for sustainability. We would like to find synergies, patterns, relations, trade-off etc. between the concepts of anticipation, futures, justice, responsibility, and agency in a way that has not been elaborated before. Tuttis aims to contribute to science, namely developing interdisciplinary research projects and articles,  and to practice, namely, engaging with stakeholders and citizens to discuss long-term uncertainty, visions and expectations of the future.

Who can participate? We invite scientists @RU who wish to address one or more of the concepts above. Your area of interest, or topic of research, may be on a variety of themes, linked to sustainable crises in which transformations are deemed necessary. For example, climate change, energy, climate adaptation, agriculture, biodiversity, water, transportation, urban growth, etc.  We encourage both conceptual and empirical thinkers that draw on the interrelation between the mentioned concepts in the form of discourse analysis, case studies, longitudinal or comparative research, amongst others.

 Interested, ideas, suggestions: Please contact Sietske.veenman@ru.nl, and mention in the title TUTTIS.