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The term transformation has become ubiquitous across contemporary political, social, and academic discourse. Social transformation is invoked to describe how problematic social processes might be changed for the better. Government transformation identifies possibilities for improving institutions, administrative practices, and modes of governance. Technological transformation promises new capacities and possibilities for social and economic progress. At the same time, transformation does not necessarily imply only improvement or even emancipation. Democracies may transform into autocracies; social inequalities may deepen and become institutionalized; political orders may become increasingly unstable as demographic change becomes more prominent; and the climate is transforming in unpredictable ways that threaten existing forms of life. Transformation, then, is neither inherently desirable nor undesirable. In the absence of a theory of transformation, we ask: How do we know what transformation is, where it can be found, what makes it possible, and how it has occurred in the past?

This course approaches transformation through the lens of problematization: the articulation of a specific set of difficulties within a socio-political, institutional, and behavioral context that can be addressed through multiple possible solutions. Problematization shifts attention away from transformation as an apparently self-evident (and even self-explanatory) process. Instead, it affords a critical observation of particular situations which only become recognizable in terms of transformation given the existence of specific epistemological frameworks. Rather than taking transformative practices or processes on their own terms, the course asks what forms of knowledge, categories, distinctions, and diagnostic devices make particular transformations thinkable and actionable in the first place. The course explores a series of epistemologies and diagnostic devices through which transformation can be conceptualized, anticipated, or enacted. Instead of reading about transformations as specific events, we explore ideas which, taken together, might constitute something like plurivocal epistemologies of transformation. These include wicked problems, risk, ungovernability, pluriversal thinking, and disorientation. These terms offer specific and always situated problematizations within concrete historical contexts. They allow us to interrogate contemporary transformation by asking: What must be known before something can appear as a problem that requires transformation? How are objects of transformation constituted through specific conceptual and theoretical frames?

The course literature is deliberately interdisciplinary and draws on political and social theory, philosophy, anthropology, and journalism, as well as feminist and trans theory. The aim is not to establish a single universally applicable epistemology of transformation, but to develop a critical capacity to recognize the different epistemic arrangements through which transformation becomes conceivable.

The course meets every two weeks, on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively, in an intensive seminar format. Students are expected to engage closely with substantial readings and to come prepared for sustained discussion. The seminar emphasizes individual and collective interpretation as well as conceptual experimentation. Students should understand the seminar as a space for reflection on different epistemological frameworks for studying transformation as part of their own PhD research.

Depending on class size, course participants will collectively develop a publishable glossary on Epistemologies of Transformation. The glossary represents a collective effort to map the diverse epistemological frames that have justified transformation in the past and continue to justify it today.

Further information on teaching evaluation: https://www.leuphana.de/en/teaching/quality-management/evaluation/course-evaluation.html