Learning for Change: On leaving the ivory towers
The TRANSIT Learning 4 Change conference has brought together a great diversity of individuals concerned with Transformative Social Innovation. Particularly inspiring were the ‘critical talks’ of three members of the International Advisory Board, (Ariel Gordon, Edina Vadovics, and Gilda Farrell) introduced by IAB chairman Tim O’Riordan. Through different themes they confronted the audience with thought-provoking questions. Just as they have been challenging the TRANSIT consortium over the course of their near-finished research project, their questions typically reminded of the societal stakes involved with TSI research – thereby also raising the recurring issue of how that research could make a difference in addressing urgent societal problems.
The questions raised easily succeeded in firing up the discussion tables. At my table, the third round was particularly inspiring as we discussed the question raised by Gilda Farrell. Critical, passionate and experienced as she is, she took us along in her 25 year retrospective on the TSI efforts of herself and colleagues. “When we imagine ourselves in the future (25 years from now) looking back at our work today, what may turn out to have been our blind spots regarding transformative change?”
One answer brought forward at the table was that it would be sad to have to realize that one had somehow forgotten to tell the stories of successful Transformative Social Innovation: the stories of individuals and collectives who turned convictions into new practices, who managed to organize themselves, who went about acquiring the resources needed, and who actually succeeded in getting the new social relations disseminated or institutionalized in one way or another. Likewise, it was discussed how fear of failure, complacency and wrong assessment of current priorities would be painful to look back upon. Quite unavoidably in this meeting of researchers, activists, entrepreneurs, policy makers and other ‘practitioners’ of social innovation, also the societal role of science and researchers came up: what if we’d realize only years later how we had persisted in classical modes of hyper-specialized, objectivist, introverted, academia-confined, disengaged knowledge production…failing to descend from the ‘ivory tower’ and being left with filled bookshelves as mere witnesses of a disintegrating society?
The possible drama of science and scientists failing to make a difference speaks to many of us, of course. The earlier passionate efforts of Marxism, urban sanitation movement, the Vienna Circle, Karl Popper’s pleas for an Open Society, the critical-theoretical warnings for the many guises of fascism et cetera are unfortunately not outdated, as authoritarian rule and structural societal problems persist. Researchers keep being hindered or even imprisoned for arbitrary reasons; evidence and argument are still, or once again, easily ignored or swept from the table. So it may turn out eventually that researchers have failed to descend from their ivory towers, underestimating or depreciating what they could have achieved through action research, transdisciplinary efforts, consultancy and responsiveness to ‘grand societal challenges’. On the other hand, it would be no less tragic – and this is my personal concern as a researcher- to find out that we had forgotten to man (M/F) our ivory towers, to resurrect the ones that have been destroyed, and to invest in the equipment and highly skilled people to make them effective. Or to realize how we’d been following our practically engaged passions, whilst lacking the overview and the systematic search for these ‘blind spots’ raised in Gilda Farrell’s question.
The picture shows the European Southern Observatory telescopes in the Chilean Atacama desert. For practical reasons it’s not made of ivory, money being dedicated to getting the equipment and observation right, but the range of sight for those we’ve trusted to watch on our behalf is enormous.
