Doing Justice! Doing Just This! Practicing justice in transdisciplinary and transformative research

Transformative research pushes the boundaries of science with a strong focus on engaging with societal problems. Transdisciplinary research provides us with the knowledge and tools to work together with a set of diverse societal actors in addressing these societal problems. But, how just are these practices? We came together in a summer school organised by the Leibniz Research Network "Knowledge for Sustainable Development" and the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development in June, 2023 to discuss this question. This collection of ideas and reflections was a mode of organising some of these thoughts and for establishing exchange.

We started by asking a set of basic questions: why does practising justice matter to us in our role of transformative and transdisciplinary scholars? How do we understand the concept of justice? How do we begin to put this into practice? What methods can help guide us? What experiences and lessons can we share from these attempts of putting justice into practice? We have learnt that there are plural ways of understanding and motivations for engaging with justice. In this collection, we have attempted to remain open to these multiple understandings of justice and tried to bring them in conversation with one another. We have also realised that there are many challenges at institutional and social level that we are just learning to identify. We invite you to have a read and help us take this conversation further. We extend this invitation to scholars who are engaged in TTR and are teaching concepts, methods and approaches of TTR, practitioners who join processes of knowledge co-creation in transdisciplinary research settings, and facilitators and artists who co-design and co-create transformations.