Fostering the emergence of transformative practices

The Institute for Advanced Studies in Practices and Arts of Transformation conducts research rooted in action. We address practitioners and practice milieux that recognize the need for transformation - and wish to understand its mechanisms, effects, conditions of emergence and transmission.

Contributions

Our research enriches our understanding of transformative processes, offers concrete pointers for practitioners, and is also disseminated and discussed in various academic communities. We highlight how organizations and individuals can embrace new questions arising from experience to escape from ill-posed problems.

Presentation on transformation practices, arts and environments - Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris - November 2022

Documenting practices and their effects: producing archives (documentation, interviews, accounts of experiments) to understand how transformations manifest themselves and unfold.
Developing a common language: by investigating milieux and analyzing practices, we are helping to formalize a shared vocabulary to facilitate the understanding, transmission and recognition of these processes.
Testing evaluation methods for transformative practices
Understanding the conditions of emergence: exploring the human and material resources required, the ways in which these practices are transcribed and transmitted, and the way in which practice milieux co-produce their conditions of existence.
Develop the field of transformative humanities, mobilizing the arts, design, anthropology and ethnology, the sciences, history, geography, philosophy, psychology, politics, etc., to interrogate from multiple perspectives the requirements and environments necessary for the creation and dissemination of transformative practices.
Supporting transformations over the long term : observe the mechanisms that enable changes to be inscribed in the long term, and take care of their transformative consequences.

Verjat, B. & P. Degeorges 2022 "Designing a transformative ritual with the wolfs coming back", in Transformative rituals: Ways to deal with reactive agents and menaced commons, Belfast (Queen's University), France: European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). [Online]: https://hal.science/hal-04348440.

Verjat, B. & P. Degeorges. From ecological knowledge to an ecology of knowledge: transformative experiments in scientific fields. 2025.

Verjat, B. & P. Degeorges 2025 " Learning from Living Environments: Fostering Eco-Centered Transformative Practices with Farms ".

Degeorges, P. "Making Peace with the Earth-The Diplomatic Turn". Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities 2,^no 1 (2021): 1. https://doi.org/10.46863/ecocene.17.

Degeorges, P. "We 'Are' Earth." Anthropocene 2050, July 24, 2020. https://medium.com/anthropocene2050/nous-sommes-la-terre-4f3d3f527ca1.

Degeorges, P. & F. Benhammou 2023 "Le loup, protégé ou nuisible?", Le Monde diplomatique. [Online]: https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2023/06/BENHAMMOU/65844.