On the 16th May 2024, CCHPR and the Faculty of Education convened a symposium for early career researchers at the University of Cambridge on the theme of ‘Transformational Ways of Living and Learning’. The event included a range of research presentations, plenary talks, elevator pitches, and discussions around the theme.
The concept of transformation is gaining increasing attention across multiple disciplines within the Social Sciences and beyond. As society grapples with a range of urgent challenges – from the transition to net-zero, to the entrenchment of socio-economic inequalities, and the questions raised by the growth of artificial intelligence – there is a pressing need for research to come up with ways to understand these shifts and to contribute to emerging dialogues around how to move forward. The cross-disciplinary symposium brought together PhD students and postdoctoral researchers from various disciplinary backgrounds – including Education, Land Economy, Criminology, Geography, and Architecture – for timely conversations around some of these crucial issues.
Symposium attendees focus on a wide range of topics in their day-to-day research practices, from identifying psychopathy across different cultural contexts, to understanding identity development among youth in rural Zambia, investigating how online technologies may transform teachers’ learning, and designing and building housing that can be disassembled at the end of its lifespan. Amidst the sharing of this wide range of ideas, key areas of common interest quickly became apparent during the symposium – in particular a shared commitment to research which holds potential for helping to address long-standing inequalities. Presenters emphasised the hope for a better future which is implicit in many understandings of what it means to enact transformation. Notably, while ‘transformation’ is often understood to have positive connotations, attendees drew attention to the need to acknowledge and interrogate the negative, sometimes unintended, consequences of attempts to transform society.
While ‘transformation’ is a rather abstract and ill-defined concept (Richardson et al., 2023), by examining transformative processes at the local level, presenters took a real-world practical focus, and lent substance to the idea of what it means to transform. Presentations considered a range of different places, highlighting spatial inequalities in processes of transformation, and emphasising the need to be cognizant of context. Symposium attendees were clear about the need to take into account the structural factors which can limit transformation, and to consider how efforts to transform aspects of society fit into broader systems, including policy contexts and infrastructural networks.
Early career researchers raised important questions around the temporal aspects of transformation. It was acknowledged that transformations rarely happen overnight, and that some forms of transformation will require a long-timescale to gain traction. Meanwhile, others asked what it means to be waiting for transformation, and importantly, considered who sets the agenda for transformation and determines when it has occurred.
The symposium represented an opportunity for early career researchers to engage with research beyond their immediate fields of interest, and to build networks with colleagues from a range of disciplines to begin to answer some of the key questions raised by the prospect of transformation. As a multi-faceted process with a variety of material, social, and political dimensions, researching transformation is a complex endeavour, and researchers are grappling with a wide range of methodological considerations – from how to measure transformation, to how the process of doing research transforms us as researchers.