In the third contribution to our ‘Exploring transformative research’ blog series, we talk with Saskia Ruijsink about her work for the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Sustainability, where she is setting up an agenda for urban sustainability.
As scientific coordinator of the Cities Hub at the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Sustainability (LDE CfS), Saskia is setting up an agenda for urban sustainability where the knowledge and expertise of these universities are combined to contribute to academic, social, and economic challenges. Within the LDE Centre for Sustainability, there are three knowledge hubs (a Cities Hub, an Agrifood Hub and a Circular Industries Hub). Those hubs engage in various research and education activities that aim for societal impact. One of the activities of the hubs is the organization of thesis labs where students can do their thesis research. Within the hubs, researchers from the universities and partners from practice organize workshops and lectures, and students are exposed to the process of developing knowledge and research together and to create a product that is relevant to both academia and societal partners.
The difference between impact and transformation
Saskia recognizes that there is a difference between impact research and transformative research. While both approaches are about doing something that has a direct effect on reality, impact research can have a much smaller effect: “it can be relatively like one on one, you could have one partner that you work with, and you do one course and you make an impact with that. It doesn’t have to be systemic yet”. The impact of transformative research is bigger, as “I think about transformation as moving into a next status, next stage, another thing. So that implies for me, systemic change”. Impact oriented research is easier to ‘tick the box’, to say that impact has been made, while it is much more difficult to say that something has transformed. Moreover, transformative research is often a “longer term process where you’re trying to deliberately contribute to a process of larger systemic change”. Saskia sees her work for the Cities Hub as impact oriented with a tendency of being transformative. A concrete example is the thesis lab, which focuses on relatively concrete challenges, but at the same time, it is transformative because it aims to educate future leaders on how to look differently at the challenges they are facing in terms of collaborating with other actors.
“I see that there is maybe also a shift going on in that it becomes more accepted, and I think it’s also influenced by funding schemes that require certain impact activities. They kind of force researchers who are less inclined towards those types of research to also see that they somehow have to address it to a certain extent in order to get enough funding.”
Previously, organizations that were more impact-oriented rather than research-oriented were considered to not have enough academic credibility. Now, there is a lot of interest in these organizations, as they have useful experience with making impact. It seems that universities each have a different relationship to the term impact as well. Saskia experiences that at the TUDelft, sustainability seems to be engrained in everyone, while at the EUR, there is a tendency to want to make impact, but it is less concretized towards particular sustainability challenges. Perhaps technical universities have always been more impact oriented because they are coming up with solutions all the time, and there is a strong relation to certain industrial sectors. At the social sciences, there is usually not as much emphasis on solving problems.
Challenges and risks in collaborative research
Even though universities can play a key role, there are still many challenges in facilitating and carrying out transformative research and education. To list a few that Saskia mentioned:
- In the thesis labs, working with societal partners can be challenging in the sense that a partner pays a certain amount to join in the lab, but students are not providing a service to them. Expectations should be clear: students are doing research relevant to societal partners. This challenge is not only apparent in the thesis labs, but also in transdisciplinary collaborations in general: "It is super useful to collaborate with a lot of partners from practice, but there’s also a risk that you act almost as a consultant, trying to fulfil their demands’. On the other hand, university partners find it challenging to become concrete and to assure the practical relevance of their work. They can develop knowledge that is academically relevant and can be published, rather than knowledge that is practically relevant.
- Saskia encounters multiple challenges relating to institutionalisation, such as the slow process of funding streams and the temporary status of the funding of innovative spaces and activities. On the other hand, a more institutionalised position makes experimentation with different types of research more difficult: “We should be, I think, a bit more encouraged to take risks in these things as well, because without, we cannot innovate”. When it does not institutionalize, working on a project becomes a second priority for those involved: “If it is something you do almost like as a hobby because you care so much about it, … you get the people who are passionate. But it cannot stay a hobby for too long, it has to materialize in some real work with budget behind it”.
- While impact research is not easy, the growing attention for it creates the risk that it becomes too popular, while it is not always the most suitable research approach: “There is a risk that at some point in time, it becomes kind of popular to say ‘things have to be transdisciplinary’, and when it becomes a check the boxes, it does not work in my opinion. I think you need real questions, that are really suitable for such challenges, and accept that certain things are also perfectly done in a disciplinary way”. This type of research is also not for everyone, and luckily so: “I also really think that we need some people in the ivory tower, who just only look at that thing, without being distracted by practicalities, because that is also where innovation comes from”.
What is next for Saskia?
Next on the agenda for Saskia is to further strengthen the position of the LDE CfS Cities Hub, as the LDE CfS and other LDE centres are temporarily funded until 2024. Together with the LDE CfS team she will engage in imagining what the organization wants to become in the future, and to set their own vision and strategy for that. Saskia is keen on working with research and partners to develop joint initiatives for enhancing urban sustainability and circularity. This will include setting up new thesis labs, working on an offer for professional training and education as well as setting up transdisciplinary research projects. Find more information about the Cities Hub online.
We hope you enjoyed reading this piece. It is part of our series “Exploring transformative research”. In a first working paper, DIT has started off drawing an ideal-type picture of what Transformative Research could mean. This blog series is meant to take a step back and to explore the many facets of transformative research in practice as well as to discuss and trace the changes necessary in universities and the academic system to enable such research. We are interested in questions such as: How are researchers doing research that addresses societal challenges and/or contributes to making our societies more just and sustainable? In which ways are they innovating the way research is done? What are they struggling with in doing so? Why are they doing transformative research and what excites them about it? If you have a story to share about doing transformative research yourself, please reach out to the DIT platform.