Over the last five years, the Transition Movement has inspired communities across the globe to take action on some of our most urgent contemporary problems, including climate change, increasing scarcity of cheap energy, and loss of resilience. In the process, it has become known as one of the world’s most creative and dynamic social movements, with Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development at Surrey University, describing it as “the most vital social experiment of our times.”

As the Transition movement deepens and matures, the mutual benefits of close collaboration between Transition activists and academic researchers are becoming increasingly clear. Academic funders are attaching increasing importance to the practical outcomes of research and the involvement of non-academic stakeholders in the planning stages of new projects. While within Transition, there is increasing recognition of the unique and valuable contributions academic researchers can make. This has led to a recent successful application to the AHRC’s Connected Communities Programme, and the identification of a number of specific research needs including: evaluating and improving process and practice in Transition, monitoring and documenting its impacts on community resilience, and shaping new agendas and collaborative models for post-carbon research.

The Transition Research Network is a self-organising group of academics & community activists who aim to:

• help advance understanding and practice in Transition
• support Transition groups to address their research needs
• help transform the crisis in our universities into an opportunity for positive change in research culture, making research relevant, fulfilling, and fun.

 Following on from our first meeting in Manchester (28th November 2011), our second meeting, will develop the network further through:

• World Café discussion on key research needs of the Transition movement and how to support them
• envisioning a distinctively Transition research strategy though the world’s first research ‘permablitz’
• Open Space discussion about whatever you choose to bring
• finding research partners to identify and undertake vital transdisciplinary research and access appropriate funding calls to do so

 By the end of the day, we hope to have identified some specific projects that groups within the network are ready to take forward, come up with a vision about what we want to achieve as a network, and to have a better idea about how best to organise to achieve our goals. We’d love you to join us and become part of it. The event is free to attend, and open to academics, researchers, transition practitioners, community activists, and anyone else interested in research and Transition.

Contacts: Tom Henfrey (t.w.henfrey@durham.ac.uk) and Michelle Bastian (michelle.bastian@manchester.ac.uk)

To book tickets go to: 

http://researchingtransitionplymouth.eventbrite.co.uk