Pre-Conference Workshops (August 18)
Wanderers Protea Hotel, Johannesburg
Our half-day workshops provide an engaging space for learning, connection, and hands-on exploration of thought-provoking topics. Led by experienced facilitators, these interactive sessions explore critical subjects such as sustainability, governance, decolonization, and creative futures. Participants will engage in small-group discussions, hands-on activities, and real-world case studies, gaining practical tools and fresh perspectives, – all in a welcoming and dynamic setting. Plus, enjoy a refreshing tea break with snacks as you recharge and connect with fellow participants.
Transformative Researchers with Impact
[August 18, 09:00-12:00 SAST]
Facilitator: Karen O’Brien
Researchers and research-related professionals around the world are working from a deep commitment to contribute not only to knowledge production, but to results that address global challenges. Recognizing their stake in the outcomes, they are interested in narrowing the gap between knowledge and action in a transformative way.
Despite this commitment and the enormous time spent on research-related activities, many feel that they are not realizing their full potential for impact. Embedded in an academic system and culture that promotes competition, elitism, hierarchy, and overwork, researchers sometimes experience a sense of insignificance, overwhelm, and potential burnout.
We invite researchers, research-related professionals and practitioners to address these pressing questions and issues in this workshop. Participants will be introduced to an innovative “framework for action” for transformations to sustainability, as well as tools to help them explore and develop their own capacities and collaborative power.
The workshop will be framed and facilitated by Professor Karen O´Brien, a scientist at the forefront of research on climate change and transformations to sustainability. The event is organized by cCHANGE in collaboration with the Transformations Community.
Workshop: Envisioning Pluriversal Futures Through Fashion and Culture
[August 18, 09:00-13:00 SAST]
Facilitator: Clarice Garcia
This 4 hour workshop aligns with the conference theme, ‘Bridging and Bonding,’ and invites participants to collaboratively explore how design and foresight practices can foster diverse and pluriversal narratives about sustainable futures in light of cultural and societal transformations. Using fiction and fashion artefacts as a medium for creative futures-thinking, attendees will investigate the cultural values and beliefs shaping visions for transitions towards sustainable and inclusive worlds.
Participants will self-identify as having Global North or Global South cultural backgrounds and engage in a structured envisioning process. Working in culturally distinct groups, they will co-conceptualise fictional fashion artefacts and future scenarios through drawing and descriptive text.
At the conclusion, a facilitated discussion will encourage reflection on the differences and similarities in narratives, values, and perspectives between Global North and Global South groups. This workshop aims to highlight the influence of cultural contexts on futures thinking and challenge universalist approaches to design and foresight. By comparing alternative visions, participants will share insights into pathways for making these practices more inclusive, democratic, and pluriversal.
(Un)-Blanketing Indigenous Climate Observatories: A Co-Reflective and Co-Creative Session on How to Work Knowledges Together to Support Local Communities.
[August 18, 09:00-13:00 SAST]
Facilitator: Lizette Reitsma
Positioned within the bridging and bonding theme, we propose a collaborative exploration of what an Indigenous Climate Observatory could look like, which, through local knowledges, supports local action. As a foundation for the exploration, we build on observatories that were already made within the Indigenous Climate Observatory project that we have been running over the past 3 years. Within those climate change observatories, we brought together researchers and institutions working to understand climate change, and Indigenous communities who experience climate change in their daily lives. The proposed interactive session will take participants through our journey of creating observatories and share our insights. To make the observatories concrete, we used blankets and stamps to align our understandings of the observatories, how we observe changes within those observatories and what those changes mean. By now, we have a collection or co-created blankets, and the collection is growing. In the interactive session, we will create a blanket in which we bring together our reflections on what Indigenous Observatories could be and how they could be used for taking action and supporting change. In this session, we aim to bring together a wide variety of people, both those who participate and facilitate.
The Labour of Transformative Learning at the Fenceline Between Protected Areas and Communities
[August 18, 09:00-12:00 SAST]
Facilitators: Jane Burt, Clayton Zazu, Marie-Tinka Uys, Wayne Twine, Hilde Bakker
Transforming learning at the fenceline requires deep engagement with the unseen labour involved in reshaping knowledge, relationships, and systems. Transforming the Fenceline is a transformation learning course in the Greater Kruger area for community engagement practitioners. From 2023 to 2024 realife Learning codeveloped the course with WWF South Africa, the Organisation of Tropical Studies, the Southern African Wildlife College, Wits University, Kruger2Canyons Biosphere, and others. This workshop will build on these experiences to critically examine the multiple layers of labour involved; including that of learners, course designers, mentors, facilitators, and those engaged in curriculum collaboration and evaluation.
Rather than seeing learning as a simple transfer of knowledge, this workshop positions it as a social, critical, and networked process shaped by power, epistemic justice, and material conditions. Participants will engage in dialogue with those who undertook this labour, collectively identifying what enables and inhibits transformation, both within and beyond our control.
Through creative facilitation, concept development, and real-time feedback, participants will develop and stress-test ideas for transformational learning in their contexts. The workshop offers a reflective yet practical space to explore what it takes to move from aspiration to implementation, ensuring learning is sustainable, just, and rooted in lived experience.
Meaning ∞ Making: Artistic Transgressive & Transformative Research in the Polycrises
[August 18, 14:00-17:00 SAST]
Facilitators: Dylan McGarry, Neil Coppen, Mpume Mthombeni
This workshop uses a ‘call and response’ Empatheatre methodology, to develop a collaborative intelligence with participants that supports not only academic rigor, but political, cultural, emotional and spiritual rigour in our research praxis. The workshop interrogates the last decade of transgressive and transformative arts-based research led by Empatheatre, a collective of artists, theatre makers, musicians, writers, Indigenous leaders, customary rights holders, citizens and scientists emerging from South Africa. Participants will have the potential to navigate case studies in local and international contexts, and surface practices and principles of how to conduct grounded, collaborative, co-designed and public forms of enquiry in complex, risk-laden and constantly shifting learning environments. The workshop is designed to allow participants to “choose their own adventure” in how they would like to draw from the body of work in ways that are useful to their own contexts, questions and struggles. Working at the intersection between social and ecological justice, and supporting scholar activist research, the Empatheatre facilitators will use short films, interactive dialogical tools and other modalities to explore ways in which we can create ‘in-movement’ research, that can handle the many shifting realities we face today in the climate and poly crises. See www.empatheatre.com for more information.
Leveraging Anticipation and Imagination in the Governance of Threshold Changes in Social-Ecological Systems
[August 18, 14:00-17:00 SAST]
Facilitators: Carina Wyborn, Laura Pereira, Michele-Lee Moore, Joost Vervoort, Manjana Milkoreit, Carla Alexandra
Many iconic social-ecological systems are on the threshold of transformational change. In some cases, change will be triggered by ecological degradation, in others by positive strategic efforts to reorganise society. People living and working within these systems are facing a horizon of dramatic change, grappling with hope and grief in anticipation of what may come.
While some places have faced life-altering disruptions through colonisation and cascading disaster-events, others are yet to face dramatic ruptures to their social-ecological fabric. This workshop will wrestle with the governance challenges and tensions associated with imagining and acting on anticipated future changes, while attending to historical and contemporary dynamics driving change.
The workshop will centre creative practices as tools to bring together diverse ideas and challenge power structures to engage with governance dynamics in contested and uncertain places. Participants will explore practical frameworks (i.e. ‘resist, accept, direct’) and creative interventions (i.e. participatory theatre) to enable challenging conversations and build possibilities for hope and agency.
Discussions will focus on definitions, processes, challenges, and practices, alongside fostering a network for critical reflections. We will share practices and articulate a repertoire of skills to support decision-making in threshold changes and develop a bank of possibilities for those navigating complex spaces.
Bridging the Gap - Getting Money Where it Needs to go. A Collaborative Learning Workshop.
[August 18, 14:00-17:00 SAST]
Facilitators: Katharina Weber, Heidi Barends
The accelerating loss of biodiversity and widespread deforestation threaten the planet’s ecological balance, undermining critical services like climate regulation, water management, and biodiversity preservation. Addressing these crises requires financial mechanisms that prioritise conservation and the equitable allocation of resources.
This 3-hour workshop explores the question: How do we get money where it needs to go? Using the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) – a visionary proposal introduced by Brazil at the COP 16 Biodiversity Summit. As a starting point, participants will examine ways to address current market failures in finance. The TFFF proposes direct payments for the preservation and restoration of tropical forests, explicitly valuing their ecosystem services to move ecological sustainability to the forefront of global financial systems.
Through experiential learning, participants will simulate a world with radically different power dynamics. By assuming diverse roles – including indigenous communities, traditional leaders, financiers, environmental advocates, and future generations – participants will explore how shifting power structures impact conservation outcomes and resource flows.
Facilitated by the head of sustainable finance at Absa, a pan-African bank, and a PhD student from the University of Amsterdam, the workshop links academia and practice as well as Global South and Global North perspectives.
Designing Inspiring Workshops in Transdisciplinary Research on Transformations: Tools, Concepts, and Proficiencies
[August 18, 14:00-17:00 SAST]
Facilitators: Susanne Moser, Connie Nshemereirwe
This workshop is aimed at researchers experienced in transdisciplinary ways of working, and who are interested in developing trainings or courses in trandisciplinary work for others. The workshop is also meant for academics or “pracademics” who consider themselves “boundary spanners”, i.e., someone who works with academic researchers and societal actors on sustainability or transformations projects. A global consortium of leading TD scholars/thought leaders and practitioners, including trainers from five continents, has developed a guide which aims to lead TD scholars interested in training others through the process of designing audience-tailored, interactive trainings and identifying relevant and appropriate modules and materials. This workshop will give participants opportunity to practice designing an inspiring training workshop or course, using the guide, and experiencing selected interactive tools from the guide to get an experiential taste of what the guide offers. The immediate benefits/outcomes include: (1) practice using the design guide by going through the process of designing an interactive and inspiring training or course in TD; (2) first-hand experience of using selected tools commonly used in a transdisciplinary project; (3) direct access to the full training design guide and related training tools; and (4) connection to others learning to train people in TD.
TC/ESG25 Conference
Aug 18–21, 2025
Johannesburg, South Africa
TCX-York
June 25–27, 2025
University of York, UK
TC/ESG25 Conference starts in:
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