Transdisciplinary methods with a forest scent. The 2nd TdAcademy Summer School, northeast Berlin

In the second edition of the collaboration of the Summer School between the team of TdAcademy of the ZTG and the ISST of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, a group of doctoral and master students and researchers from both universities spent a week working and learning about the science of transdisciplinarity, based on the example of the social and field conflicts of North Brandenburg.

The International Summer School - Transdisciplinarity methods and tools for dealing with sustainability and land use conflicts 2023 brought together in Bad Freienwalde, North Brandenburg, Germany, doctoral and master's students from various disciplines, from engineering and environmental studies to social sciences and humanities. The main objective of the Summer School was to introduce participants to the concepts and challenges of transdisciplinary research and practice.

The summer school started on Saturday 16 September at a typical open-air brewery in Berlin, to enjoy a first contact before starting the program the next day. The participants and organizers, forming a group of about 22 researchers and students from all over the world, including countries as distant as China and Ethiopia, entered for a week, in a process of learning and developing transdisciplinary research. The program has included various social and environmental activities, such as excursions to various organic farming initiatives, the visit to the fall festival of NABU, in the reserve of the Schorfheide-Chorin Biosphere, as well as a meeting with the driving group of Haus mit Zukunft areaAuse withün Forest In addition, the participants received first-hand information from the professors of the Hochschule für nachhaltige Entwicklung Eberswalde (University of Eberswalde for Sustainable Development) on the use of the territory and the associated conflicts in this rural area at risk of depopulation. 

As a result of the Summer School, the participants presented their group work on the last day (September 22). This included the development of a research question and a project proposal including transdisciplinary research methods. In general, the participants benefited from the diversity of experiences of others, gained new inspiration for their work and established relationships that, we all hope, last beyond the summer school! The school has been organized by Gemma Tejedor and Jordi Segalàs, with the collaboration of Na Liang, PhD student (UPC) and Martina Sch·fer, Emilia Nagy and Annabell Lamberth (TUBerlín), in the context of tdAcadademy. 

It is also the opportunity to (re)discover the video report of the 2022 edition of the TdAcademy Summer School, which took place in Catalonia, in the Alt Empordà: