responsivity

In all we do and say, we respond to a world that precedes us as our responses shape the world. Responsive Research takes this position as a starting point to understand current conditions, being receptive, responsive, active and reflexive enough to contribute to transformation. Thereby, responding becomes encounter, learning, intervention, closure of a question – a new beginning. 

Responsivity is, above all, an attitude. It is based on listening and approaching the Other and bears potential to overcome hegemonies, balance power relations and bring diversity into fruition while acknowledging the situatedness of all thinking and doing. It considers the limitation of any single perspective, as a matter of principle, and the ability and right of research by all humans. At the same time, it is a rationality, an epistemological foundation and methodological orientation for inter- and transdisciplinarity.

responsive research

departs from problematising and interogating into complex problems to respond to the need of creating more healthy, just, equal and coherent societies. Unlike a disciplinary logic of research, which continually expands the boundaries of knowledge within a specific research tradition, the primacy of problematising the world around can lead to unique reserach fields and teams. Thereby, responsivity plays out in different ways. It creates connectivity between different ways of knowing, acting and being, values plurality, and strengthens the ability to deal with difference. A responsive research rationality allows for dealing with differences as complementarities with profound consequences for the idea of research, professional identities and belongings. It requires a rethinking of who should be considered a researcher, of mechanisms of knowledge legitimization and social action, as well as on research methodologies and the landscape of institutions.

philosophical background

We draw on philosophies of difference and in particular the work of Bernhard Waldenfels who developed a responsive rationality, consisting of a thinking that is founded neither in unity nor in difference. It submits to this duality by thinking radically from the ‘in-between’. This in-betweenness is constituted by what happens to us and how we respond to it, considering any form of expression as a response – but not as a linear temporality of a before and an after, but as being entangled and mutually constitutive. A responsive rationality recognizes the complementarity of different world-views and epistemologies, knowledges and practices and acknowledges the limitation of all ways of knowing, acting and being. It does not claim unity or unification, but, on the contrary, considers the difference as constitutive. In this sense, in-between spaces can become new sites of intervention and places of mutual learning that endue ambiguity and contradictions.