Mission
The KiTeS group is dedicated to analysing and improving the contribution of Knowledge to Transformations in Society to address intersecting societal and environmental challenges, including growing disparities and inequities, climate change, and biodiversity loss. These transformations will involve deep changes in political, economic, and cultural institutions and structures and the paradigms, values, and knowledge systems that underpin them.
Knowledge practices, including science, education, technology, and design, can play an important role in supporting these needed transformations. Nevertheless, we see that dominant knowledge practices can often support the status quo and can even block change. For example, when innovation systems serve vested economic interests, when education trains students to be effective in unsustainable societies, or when science excludes alternative paradigms and ways of knowing. Therefore, understanding and supporting societal transformations, requires critical examination and transformation of these knowledge practices.
The KiTeS group works across diverse disciplines and scholarly fields and draws on critical, historical, participatory, design-oriented, and arts-based methods and approaches. We work in different domains such as science and innovation policy, higher education, and environmental governance and we collaborate closely with policy makers, social movements and grassroots organisations, cultural institutions, scientists and engineers, and business and financial institutions. Guided by values of justice, pluralism, sustainability, and care, our work is aimed at creating spaces for collaboration, critical analysis, reflection, and learning.