The issues of Energy Justice and Just Transitions are highly relevant topics in the context of Sustainability Transitions, and they are researched at the Chair of Environmental and Climate Policy in several research projects. As part of the project Power2U, Dr. Katrin Beer conducted conceptual and practice-oriented work on vulnerable groups and energy justice in the context of Germany’s national energy policy. Based on this work, she contributed to a working paper titled "Doing Justice! Doing Just This! Practicing justice in transdisciplinary and transformative research”, which was published in December 2024 open access on zenodo (license: CC BY).
The working paper was compiled by the Doing Justice Collective, a research group that formed as an outcome of the LRN Summer School “Doing Justice! Doing Just This! Understanding justice in transdisciplinary and transformative research”. The two-day summer school was organized and hosted by the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER) in Dresden, Germany, and took place in June 2023. The event was aimed at postdocs and senior researchers in transdisciplinary research and was the starting point for the formation and long-term exchange of the Doing Justice Collective.
The recently published working paper is the newest version of a living document, which the Doing Justice Collective initiated as an instrument for further exchange and collective work on the topic of justice in transdisciplinary and transformative research after the summer school. It can serve researchers, lecturers and students as a tool for further work and discussions in this field. In the paper, the Doing Justice Collective discusses the following questions and topics:
1. Why does doing justice matter to us?
2. How do we understand justice?
3. How to reflect upon justice?
4. How to do justice?
5. How to put justice into practice?
6. Encouraging others
The collaborative work of the group was presented and discussed in a session titled " From Unspoken to Outspoken: Making voices heard and practicing justice in transdisciplinary and transformative research” on the ITD 2024, a conference organized by the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity (ITD Alliance), in Utrecht, Netherlands, in November 2024. Regarding further work, the Doing Justice Collective published the following statement with the working paper:
“We invite you to have a read and help us take this conversation further. We extend this invitation to scholars who are engaged in TTR and are teaching concepts, methods and approaches of TTR, practitioners who join processes of knowledge co-creation in transdisciplinary research settings, and facilitators and artists who co-design and co-create transformations.”
Links:
Publication: Doing Justice Collective. (2024). Doing Justice! Doing Just This! Practicing justice in transdisciplinary and transformative research. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13766955
Summer school: LRN Summer School “Doing Justice! Doing Just This! Understanding justice in transdisciplinary and transformative research”, June 2023, Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER), Dresden, Germany, https://td-academy.org/events-archiv/lrn-summer-school-doing-justice-doing-just-this-understanding-justice-in-transdisciplinary-and-transformative-research/
Session on ITD 2024: From Unspoken to Outspoken: Making voices heard and practicing justice in transdisciplinary and transformative research, Doing Justice Collective, 7 November 2024, https://www.conftool.net/itd2024/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=111&presentations=show
ITD 2024: Inter- and Transdisciplinarity Beyond Buzzwords: Educational Pathways for Sustainable Research Collaborations, conference organized by the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity (ITD Alliance), https://itd-alliance.org/itd24/
Power2U Homepage: https://www.power2u.ovgu.de/en/