Labs to choose from

Upon registration, you will be able to register for the following labs:

 

From interpretation to transformative action: critical pragmatism through transdisciplinary action research

Chair : Joshua Cohen (Delft University of Technology)
Second Chair : Tamara Metze (Delft University of Technology)
Third Chair : Nanke Verloo (University of Amsterdam)

 

Climate change, democratic backsliding, growing inequality and Generative AI engender turbulence for our

societies and institutions. These developments beg the question of what importance there still is for critical

interpretivist scholarship, apart from exposing and making sense of power imbalances that may be

amplified.

Inspired by pragmatism (Dewey, 1927), the policy sciences of democracy (Lasswell, 1951) have a legacy of

engaging with decision-making on real-world problems. In the past decades, the policy sciences have made

an argumentative turn by unpacking the power relations and discourses that are at play in policymaking

(Van Hulst et al., 2025). Since a decade, we have also observed a resurging interest in critical pragmatism,

where critical theory is combined with engagement with practice (Forester, 2013; Avelino & Grin, 2017;

Metze 2020; Verloo, 2026). Scholars working within this stream are moving from pure critical interpretation

to transformative action (Wagenaar, 2011; Greenwood, Ravn & Bartels, 2025). The promise is that

approaches such as transdisciplinary research (Regeer, Klaassen & Broerse, 2024) and action research

(Bartels & Wittmayer, 2018; Bartels, Greenwood & Wittmayer, 2020) support researchers and practitioners

to translate criticism into action and work on transformative system change.

However, these approaches are not without challenges. Collaboration between scholars of different

disciplines and between scholars and practitioners can be notoriously difficult (Keestra and Verloo, 2020).

Moreover, transdisciplinary and action research often suffer from power imbalances, ethical challenges and

a lack of fit with and impact on existing institutions (Wittmayer, Bartels & Larrea, 2021; Cohen, 2022; Cohen,

2024; Wittmayer et al., 2024; Loorbach & Wittmayer, 2025; Van Hulst, Holstead & Metze, 2026). These

challenges require reflective practice and learning between different approaches.

Aim of the session, kinds of participants and key questions

In this lab session we aim to provide an open space for participants who have been working with, or are

interested in learning from, critical pragmatism and transdisciplinary and/or action research approaches.

With them we hope to explore the potential value, promises and pitfalls of the combination of

transdisciplinary action research for critical pragmatist scholarship. To further practice, we want to learn

from concrete cases to answer the following key questions:

Conceptual questions

- What is critical in critical pragmatism?;

- What is trans in transdisciplinary research?;

- What is action in action research?;

- What is transformative in transformative change?;

- How can we further connect transdisciplinarity with action research (TAR)?;

Practical questions

- What methodological approaches do researchers use to set up TAR?;

- What processes/repertoires do teams need to conduct TAR in practice?;

- How do we conduct TAR in settings where power imbalances are historically high?;

- How do we leverage TAR to support bottom-up movements?;

- How can we engage in ethical TAR while working from within the academic system?;

We are also open to other conceptual/practical questions that participants find relevant.

We intend this to be an interactive lab session where we build on a selection of concrete cases taken from

the experiences of the participants and panel conveners to provide an answer to the above questions. For

this we have come up with the following basic set-up of the session:

- Introduction of the lab theme and the potential questions;

- Possibility for participants to present and select cases of projects;

- Reflective guided group work around concrete cases to answer above questions;

- Collective analysis of the inputs and co-formulating a first programmatic call to action.

Expected outputs

- We intend to co-develop a programmatic publication with a call to action and an exposition on ways in

which critical pragmatist scholars can organize a process for TAR that contributes to transformative action

and change;

- If interest arises during the session, we may explore possibilities for further outputs such as a special issue

We are also open to other outputs that participants deem relevant.

-----------------------------------

 

Recreating citizenship in the classroom

Chair : Andreea Nicutar (Central European University - GmbH)

 

Our panel’s operative question is this: how can we make knowledge-production more just in the complex of

academia, public policy, and non-governmental spaces of intervention for the common good when precisely

what is “common good” has functioned for centuries in Western states/modernity as a horizon of acceptance

of some deserving lives, measured against others, marked officially or not as abject, non-deserving. The

premise is that Western citizenship inherently operates as a technology of differential valuation of lives,

legitimized and normalized by scientific knowledge. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) reminds that for indigenous

people colonized by European states science is (still) felt to be dangerous, a preeminent name for

normalized destruction of alterity, of non-Western ways of knowing and relating in a shared world. The

hierarchy of lives operates still as a fundamental logic that legitimizes state violence and the sovereign

decision that grants acceptance as “integration” into citizenship dehistoricized and politically neutralized to

the extent that its logic of valuation makes difficult to imagine and practice solidarity across the divide

between deserving and undeserving. This panel addresses this foundational wound of the political

community under sovereign order from one of its most insidious techniques of subjectification: the translator

or mediator, or “bridge” between “cultures”, whose function is to help the accomplishment of integration of

groups racialized, orientalized, interpellated by the call to become modern. This interpellation effaces the

historical investment in dispossession of racialized peoples, as well as the intersected haywire of

superposed exclusions. How do we construct just polities that rehistoricize the right to access to the “good

life” of citizenship as a technology of intergenerational accumulation (for some) through dispossession (of

others)? In occurrence, what [pedagogical practices and what kind of learning material can open up the

imagination as political instrument to encourage other modalities of relating between practices of knowing

and embodied histories of belonging to, and of being displaced? More closely, this panel has the ambition to

bring in conversation experiences of being interpellated as the role model, the bridge-maker, the interpreter

of Romani culture and place it in the ongoing economy of exclusion. Further, we want to invite participants

to let their imagination run with new questions, perhaps never asked before, about how formation in

academic contexts might re-form academia if we started with a lucid interrogation of the address, or

interpellation that give us the desire to want to learn, to educate others and, perhaps, to learn from each other for our collective emancipation from differential qualities of citizenship.

The thematic focus is organized by two questions that aim at a critical understanding of citizenship as an

ongoing, historical process of subjectification: what are presently the main meanings of integration in large

discourses that declare their investment in the wellbeing of minorities and marginalized peoples? And what

sense of the community and citizenship is reinforced by such rhetoric and its technologies of investment in

valuable subjects? However, this panel is aimed not at an analysis of policy discourse, but hopes to make

space for a conversation as broad and as diverse as possible between positions or perspective from people

who feel the interpellation to participate in the work of integration, who cannot avoid the intricate

negotiations spoken, unspoken and sometimes unspeakable, between their various positions and roles

between different locations and their respective sense of burden, responsibility, promise, and hope for

change.

We hope that IPA would benefit from this conversation as a space to further the inquiry about ways to open

the university to other forms of knowing and relating and collaborative alliances between various social

actors for social change as deliberative process. More to the point, a deliberative process that does not

have an already set point of destination (i.e. integration) but one that functions as a willingness to keep open

the question of becoming through mutual learning. The ethos of our inquiry is feminist – opening up the

university through multiplying and deepening the understanding of interdependence and reciprocal care that

can bring about a new sense of citizenship beyond the sovereign logic of inclusion through exclusion of

abject forms of life. It is also an anticolonial ethos, sensitive to the need to ask about specific technologies

and structures that erase forms of living and relating that cannot be controlled by the disciplinary logic of

sovereignty and are not legible as valuable for the biopolitics of modern citizenship.

Concretely, we ask: can we use the call to include the lived experience of various forms of marginality, and

in particular here the experience of racialization as exclusion from participation to legitimate scientific

knowledge, to push beyond a mere additive accrual to an academic discourse that does little to contest the

lines of exclusion of sovereignty? What is an inclusive and just society for a feminist? For an antiracist

student? For a critic of sovereign borders?

How do we follow with rigor and tenderness the ebbs and flows of young students navigating the call, the

interpellation and the personal desire to become good and dignified, effective and articulate, powerful

representatives of their communities against the background of that necessary critique of “integration”

discussed above? How do we respond to the hope, loss of hope, sense of duty and obligation, desire to

individuate and transform inherent in the promise of academic education against the background of a

necessary critique of colonial modernity?

• What can we borrow and adapt from the older and more recent feminist and decolonial calls to multiply forms of knowing and being?

• How do we teach and discuss in classrooms about pathways of academic education and its inherent promise of socio-economic advancement by centering also the multiple modalities through which this promise reproduces a global economy of destruction of lifeworlds, essential resources for wellbeing and collective survival?

Beyond a sterile methodological warning against extractivist science, how can we concretely practice other

forms of scientific production, with different and more varied collaborators, human and more-than-human?

-----------------------------------

 

MEDICULTURAL LAB: Critical (self-)reflection to media presence of disability

Chair: Maria Rita Hoffmann (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)

Second chair: Maria Magdolna Flamich (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)

 

Inclusion starts inside us. We decide who to accept, respect and include in our world. To navigate in the countless human diversity-related stimuli, however, might be challenging as it depends on numerous factors such as social and cultural background, education, policies, lawas and presence of the people concerned. The Media, Disability and Culture Lab (MeDiCultural Lab) focuses on disabled people’s presence, enciurages and supports critical, self- reflective navigations in the sensitive field of disability with the help of disability narratives. Disabled people make tremendous efforts to voice their values. Despite these efforts, they often feel ignored. This phenomenon, however, is inexplicable, especially if we take into consideration the numorous conventions, treaties  policies, directives and guidelines to help understanding human differences. Some kind of a gap between disabled people and the mainstream is clearly visible in most countries though the level differs. This phenomenon indicates some questions the MeDiCulture Lab addresses.

Aims

Media, disability and culture are the keywords of the lab. We, in the lab community, aim to critically approach the media presence of disability in the context of various cultures. We aim to encourage self-reflection regarding our own attitudes towards disability, inspiration porn, ableism and diversity.

Questions to be discussed

• What factors hide behind the phenomenon?
• How brave are we to face and criticize our own attitudes?
• how much are disabled people responsible for the images they create of themselves?
• And to what extent are they responsible for roles societies dedicate to them?
• What steps could be taken for a world that accepts, respects and make the most of human diversity?

Material

Essays, media presence includig TEDTalks, musical performances

Method

Critical self- and group reflections, discussions, role-plays.

Outcomes

Critical inclusive thinking, inclusive communication techniques, self-reflection, acquiring the dignity of giving and accepting help, techniques to promote belonging.

-----------------------------------

 

Reading academic literature in times of AI

Chair : Merlijn van Hulst (Tilburg University)

Second Chair : Kirsty Holstead (Wageningen University)

Third Chair : Shirley Kempeneer (Tilburg University)

Fourth Chair : Albert Meijer (Utrecht University School of Governance)

 

We aim to start a conversation about the reading of academic literature, in order to 1. share reading

experiences and practices; and 2. ask attention for the differences and similarities of humans and

non-human reading. Many researchers are wondering about reading in times of AI. We think that reading

must be unpacked to better see what it actually entails. In our academic lives we have read thousands of

pages yet not talked about reading as such too much. In addition, while the writing that AI/LLMs (Large

Languages Models) can do has been a central topic for some time, the reading they might do for us/with us

is still underexplored. Opportunities and downsides should be discussed. We intend to learn about the topic

together. This can make us more confident in deciding when and how to work with AI/LLMs, and when to

abstain from doing so.

This workshop will be for interest to participants in the conference from all contexts, disciplines,

backgrounds, and career stages. We all read and experience reading. It might be especially helpful for

researchers who need to “review the literature” and wonder about ways to do that that fit our

interpretive-critical paradigm. The Lab will have a format that allows for everybody to engage as intensely as

they like. We will encourage dialogue and also (respectful) dissensus within it.

On the basis of our conversation at IPA we will develop a short note with critical insights and practical tips

on reading in times of AI. These might be used in teaching as well is for research in the institutes that we all

work.