Overview

This CES Winter School is a 2^nd Edition of the previously named “Sustainable development, complexity and change: thinking and practices for the SDG and other objectives” CES Winter School, held on December 2020. It is based on a logic of deep interdisciplinarity, oriented towards promoting productive, collaborative, critical and creative dialogues between different disciplines and modes of thinking, between theory and research and the practices that “in the real world” enact and realise, critique or present alternative or complementary proposals to current global challenges.

While the international political agenda is guided by the concept of sustainable development, both the concept and it’s expression, configured in the 17 SDG and their indicators, remain under discussion, raising issues about their adequacy to places, contexts and specific problems, about the practices that sustain the concept of sustainable development and the degree of congruence between the thinking underlying such political agendas, the complexity of the world and the actions informed by such thinking. The question needs to be raised that an insufficient recognition of the complexity of the problems that sustain local and global policies and the realities they aim to dress, as well as of the need to develop modes of thinking and practices congruent with such complexity, may prevent or limit the success of this international agenda, even leading, in unpredictable ways, to the configurations of new, more or less preferred or unwanted realities.

In this Winter School, we propose to address key global challenges, exploring a variety of critical, alternative and complementary views on how to address their complexity. As such, the School will combine lectures/seminars and guided and creative moments of group discussion aimed at the integration of knowledge and experiences towards the production of new ideas and projects.

We will target the following Challenge themes:

_Being and Thinking Together (in) Complexity

_Knowing Together: Grasping the Complexity of the World

_Living Together: Peace and Communities of Well-Being

_Learning and Teaching Together

_Changing and Acting Together

The School will welcome the exhibit of posters from doctoral or postdoctoral researchers which will be the target of a critical re-construction process throughout the School. It also welcomes indirect participation from diverse organisations, practitioners and activists, who are willing to share informative materials about their work around global challenges and which will be made available in the School Social Media pages.

The wider audience interested in the themes of the School is invited to follow our daily reports and to interact with the group by posing questions and raising issues through our Facebook page.

TARGET-PARTICIPANTS
The School welcomes the participation of researchers, doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, practitioners of NGO and NGDO, activists

OFFICIAL LANGUAGE
The official language of the School will be English.
Oral fluency of the English language is not a requirement but participants are expected to have minimal skills at the level of Oral and Written Understanding.

IMPORTANT DATES
Open call for applications: 7 June 2021
FIRST CALL - Deadline for application: 10 September 2021
FIRST CALL - Communication of acceptance: 24 September 2021

SECOND CALL - Deadline for application: 14 October 2021
SECOND CALL - Communication of acceptance: 20 October 2021

THIRD CALL- Deadline for application: 1st November 2021
SECOND CALL-Communication of acceptance: 3rd November

Registration and payment for 1st and 2nd Call : 31 October 2021
Registration and payment for 3rd Call: 10 November 2021
Preparatory induction meeting (mandatory for participation): 2nd week of November 2021 (day and time to be announced)
School days: 16, 17, 18, 19, 22 November 2021 (extra day: 23 November 2021

COORDINATION
Rita Campos (CES-UC), Ana Teixeira de Melo (CES-UC), Philip Garnett (York Management School e York Cross-Disciplinary Centre for Systems Analysis, University of York, UK), Leo Caves (Independent researcher, PT, collaborator of the Centre for the Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Associate do York Cross-Disciplinary Centre for Systems Analysis, University of York, UK).

Note: The team of coordinators leads and integrates the central team of the project “Building Foundations for Complex Thinking to Promote Positive Change in Complex Systems” which aims at objectives aligned with those of the Winter School.