Julia M Wittmayer
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 182449 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Julia M Wittmayer |
| NOMBRES | Julia M |
| APELLIDO | Wittmayer |
| FIRMA | WITTMAYER J M |
| AFILIACIONES | Erasmus University Rotterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4738-6276 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 46 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 843 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 44 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2010 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
Reimagining Research Ethics for the Participatory and Transformative Turn
As academic research becomes more participatory and transformation-oriented, university ethics governance faces mounting pressure to move beyond procedural compliance. Existing ethics review systems are often criticised for risk aversion and standardisation, yet less attention has been paid to how ethics governance is enacted, interpreted, and negotiated by those who administer it. This study examines how institutional ethics review can function …
Mainstreaming citizen science in policy
The potential of citizen science remains underutilised in conventional policy practice for various reasons – a compelling one being that the policy system itself must adapt to leverage this potential. This paper aims to explore what mainstreaming citizen science in policy entails and how it can be realised. We define mainstreaming as the ongoing, incremental processes of creating and re-forming the institutional conditions that enable policy-maki…
Transformative Tensions in the Ivory Tower
For universities to move towards positive societal impact and take a leading role in societal challenges, they need to address the fundamental institutional barriers against transformative forms of academic work. While current institutional experiments are often conceived from within the current logic of (public) academic institutions, this paper focuses on an organization that developed based on a transdisciplinary and transformative logic, the …
Reconfiguring Relationships
Neither right nor wrong? Ethics of collaboration in transformative research for sustainable futures
Transformative research is a broad and loosely connected family of research disciplines and approaches, with the explicit normative ambition to fundamentally question the status quo, change the dominant structures, and support just sustainability transitions by working collaboratively with society. When engaging in such science-practice collaborations for transformative change in society, researchers experience ethical dilemmas. Amongst others, t…
The potential of citizen science to transform science
Globally, environmental crises are at a critical point. Findings from scientific research are crucial to understand these issues and to inform new policies to address them. Yet the rapidity with which society, industry and lifestyles are changing is not matched in dynamism by institutionalised science, where institutional structures slow the rate of adaptation. In this paper, we propose that citizen science can act as a bridge between the ideal a…
Unravelling the discursive dynamics of counternarratives in the Dutch energy transition
Explores how (counter)narratives shape discourses in Dutch energy transition. • Highlights the dual role of discourses in maintaining and transforming energy systems. • Identifies strategic discursive practices for narrative reproduction. • These include positioning of radical content, marginal content, and coalition building. • Refines understanding of narratives against fossil fuel-based pathways. Decarbonization of the energy system to combat …
Public participation in the development of electricity grid infrastructure
Plans are in place across Europe to update and develop energy infrastructure to decarbonise the system in the years ahead. Alongside this, calls have emerged for more participatory approaches to new energy infrastructural projects involving a wider range of stakeholders, including those at the local community level. This paper investigates the deployment of a public engagement strategy by the Irish Transmission System Operator (TSO) concerning el…
Speeding-up wind energy developments
The rapid expansion of low-carbon energy technologies across European regions has been argued to be essential in tackling climate change, necessitating the transition of energy systems towards renewable energy technologies, including wind energy. To accelerate wind energy developments, policies have been put in place to speed up planning and implementation in several European countries in recent years. However, the impacts of these policies remai…
Mainstreaming storylines of a social innovation
Coping with transition pain
Advancing the understanding of social innovation in sustainability transitions
The increasing academic interest in social innovation for addressing societal challenges is mirrored by a growing recognition by policymakers of its potential relevance. Considering that social innovation research has largely emerged outside the field of sustainability transition, the core aim of this special issue is to introduce the diversity of perspectives on social innovation to the sustainability transitions research community, and in doing…
Making sense of power through transdisciplinary sustainability research
If transdisciplinary sustainability research is to contribute to sustainability transitions, issues of power dynamics need to be understood and accounted for. However, examples of concrete methods that put this into practice are sparse. This paper presents a conceptual and methodological framework that develops a better understanding of the power phenomenon, while providing actionable knowledge. By focussing on the context of social innovation in…
Transforming universities
The dominant model of universities, especially in the social sciences, is often based upon academic disciplines, objectivity, and a linear knowledge-transfer model. It facilitates competition between academics, educating students for specific professions from an objective, descriptive, and neutral position. This paper argues that this institutional model of universities is inadequate to contribute effectively to societal transitions towards just …
Power to, over and with
This paper explores how power relations are manifested, altered and/or reproduced in processes of social innovations in energy transitions (SIE). We explore this research question by developing an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary power heuristic building on different dimensions of power: power to, power over and power with. This conceptual framework helps us analyse the power dynamics in multiple types of SIEs that aim to contribute to sus…
How to account for the dark sides of social innovation? Transitions directionality in renewable energy prosumerism
Social innovation is gaining attention as a pivotal dimension of socio-technical transitions with renewable energy prosumerism as a prominent example. However, this example also highlights that social innovation evokes concerns about purposes, beneficiaries, normative dilemmas and legitimacy. This paper addresses recent calls to confront the perceived 'dark sides' of social innovations. As debates on these dark sides often get stuck in either nai…
Creating actionable knowledge one step at a time
Social movements in energy transitions
Pathways towards low-carbon energy transitions have become a priority in 21st century Europe. The commitment to lowering carbon dioxide emissions have triggered changes to current fossil fuel-based energy systems. Over the past decade, fossil fuel energy pathways have been characterized by closures of sites, continued extractions and new explorations, demonstrating processes of (dis)continuation. This paper contributes to the recent line of work …
A typology for unpacking the diversity of social innovation in energy transitions
Academic research and policy have focused on sustainable energy transitions for addressing the societal challenge of climate change for a long time, but the concept of ‘social innovation’ has only been recently taken up. This concept refers to different social phenomena relating to changes in socio-technical systems. Moving beyond narrow perspectives on social innovation, this article asks how we can capture the diversity of social innovation, ta…
Biting the bullet
From early on, reflexive governance approaches have been problematised for lacking explicit consideration of formal governance and decision-making structures. Developed over two decades ago, transition management is not an exception; it has been specifically critiqued for being democratically illegitimate and depoliticising issues. Contributing to these debates, this article develops a legitimacy framework for understanding how transition managem…
Thinking, doing, organising
This article positions collective renewable energy prosumerism as a social movement that engages in energy system transformation. Collective renewable energy prosumer initiatives engage in ‘prefigurative’ work through their discursive framings (ways of thinking), their activities (ways of doing) and their understanding and enactment of social relations (ways of organising). The core of this article is a comparative analysis of the prefigurative w…
Introduction
Bibliography: Wittmayer, Julia/Bartels, Koen/Larrea, Miren: Introduction: Action Research, Policy and Politics. Special Issue of the International Journal of Action Research, IJAR – International Journal of Action Research, 1-2021, pp. 3-17. https://doi.org/10.3224/ijar.v17i1.01
Introduction to “Zooming in and out
Translocal empowerment in transformative social innovation networks
This paper contributes to public and academic discussions on empowerment and social innovation by conceptualizing the mechanisms of empowerment from a social psychology perspective, and empirically exploring how people are empowered through both local and transnational linkages, i.e. translocal networks. Section 2 conceptualizes empowerment as the process through which actors gain the capacity to mobilize resources to achieve a goal, building on …
Towards a theory of transformative social innovation
Transformative social innovation and (dis)empowerment
This article responds to increasing public and academic discourses on social innovation, which often rest on the assumption that social innovation can drive societal change and empower actors to deal with societal challenges and a retreating welfare state. In order to scrutinise this assumption, this article proposes a set of concepts to study the dynamics of transformative social innovation and underlying processes of multi-actor (dis)empowermen…
Transition versus transformation
Actor roles in transition
To date, the field of transition research lacks a suitable vocabulary to analyse the (changing) interactions and relations of actors as part of a sustainability transition. This article addresses this knowledge gap by exploring the potential of the concept of \\'roles\\' from social interaction research. The role concept is operationalized for transition research to allow the analysis of (changing) roles and relations between actor roles as indic…
Transformative innovation and translocal diffusion
Narratives of change
Alongside current policy discourses on the transformative potentials of social innovation, social innovation initiatives also construct their own accounts of how society can be transformed and by whom. Building on state-of-the-art futures studies and narrative research and their linkages, this article unfolds these narratives of change (NoC) by social innovation initiatives. A tripartite framework is used to analyse and discuss the content, const…
Action, research and participation
Ten essentials for action-oriented and second order energy transitions, transformations and climate change research
The most critical question for climate research is no longer about the problem, but about how to facilitate the transformative changes necessary to avoid catastrophic climate-induced change. Addressing this question, however, will require massive upscaling of research that can rapidly enhance learning about transformations. Ten essentials for guiding action-oriented transformation and energy research are therefore presented, framed in relation to…
Elucidating the changing roles of civil society in urban sustainability transitions
Beyond instrumentalism
Social innovation is an important dimension of current transformations in energy systems. It can refer to alternative business models, novel policy instruments, financing schemes, participatory governance approaches to energy questions, or new discourses. Its significance for energy systems is often considered in narrow instrumentalist terms, reducing it to a tool serving particular policy objectives. Grounding the concept in social science and h…
Making sense of sustainability transitions locally
Today’s society is facing a broad array of societal challenges, such as an unstable economic system, climate change and lasting poverty. There are no straightforward solutions, rather these challenges ask for fundamental societal changes, that is, sustainability transitions. Faced with the question of how these challenges can be understood and dealt with, we argue for action research as a promising approach. Focusing on their localized manifestat…
Biting the bullet
From early on, reflexive governance approaches have been problematised for lacking explicit consideration of formal governance and decision-making structures. Developed over two decades ago, transition management is not an exception; it has been specifically critiqued for being democratically illegitimate and depoliticising issues. Contributing to these debates, this article develops a legitimacy framework for understanding how transition managem…
Game-changers and transformative social innovation
This editorial introduces the special feature on the role of game-changers, broadly conceptualized as macro-trends that change the "rules of the game," in processes of transformative social innovation. First, the key concepts are introduced together with the academic workshop that brought together 25 scholars, from across a wide range of disciplines, to discuss the role of game-changers in transformative social innovation, resulting in the 9 cont…
Experimenting with alternative economies
A typology for unpacking the diversity of social innovation in energy transitions
Academic research and policy have focused on sustainable energy transitions for addressing the societal challenge of climate change for a long time, but the concept of ‘social innovation’ has only been recently taken up. This concept refers to different social phenomena relating to changes in socio-technical systems. Moving beyond narrow perspectives on social innovation, this article asks how we can capture the diversity of social innovation, ta…
Unpacking the social innovation ecosystem
Social innovation is on the rise as a mode of governance through which to address societal challenges. Seeking to empower SI initiatives, researchers and policy makers are concerned with the development of supportive “ecosystems”. This concept usefully calls attention to the distributed nature of SI agency, but many questions remain on the kinds of network constellations involved. This contribution unpacks the “SI ecosystems” concept, specifying …
Power to, over and with
This paper explores how power relations are manifested, altered and/or reproduced in processes of social innovations in energy transitions (SIE). We explore this research question by developing an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary power heuristic building on different dimensions of power: power to, power over and power with. This conceptual framework helps us analyse the power dynamics in multiple types of SIEs that aim to contribute to sus…
Symposium introduction
Critical policy analysts aim to serve policy actors in dealing with the intricate problems they face by facilitating productive communication, critical learning and sustainable change. Action research is a valuable approach for living up to this ambition. As it is rarely used in the field of critical policy analysis, this symposium further explores what action research has to offer. In this introduction, we draw out the main principles, practices…
How to account for the dark sides of social innovation? Transitions directionality in renewable energy prosumerism
Social innovation is gaining attention as a pivotal dimension of socio-technical transitions with renewable energy prosumerism as a prominent example. However, this example also highlights that social innovation evokes concerns about purposes, beneficiaries, normative dilemmas and legitimacy. This paper addresses recent calls to confront the perceived 'dark sides' of social innovations. As debates on these dark sides often get stuck in either nai…
Thinking, doing, organising
This article positions collective renewable energy prosumerism as a social movement that engages in energy system transformation. Collective renewable energy prosumer initiatives engage in ‘prefigurative’ work through their discursive framings (ways of thinking), their activities (ways of doing) and their understanding and enactment of social relations (ways of organising). The core of this article is a comparative analysis of the prefigurative w…
Coping with transition pain
The economic crisis as a game changer? Exploring the role of social construction in sustainability transitions
Loorbach, D., F. Avelino, A. Haxeltine, J. M. Wittmayer, T. O'Riordan, P. Weaver, and R. Kemp. 2016. The economic crisis as a game changer? Exploring the role of social construction in sustainability transitions. Ecology and Society 21(4):15.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08761-210415
Advancing the understanding of social innovation in sustainability transitions
The increasing academic interest in social innovation for addressing societal challenges is mirrored by a growing recognition by policymakers of its potential relevance. Considering that social innovation research has largely emerged outside the field of sustainability transition, the core aim of this special issue is to introduce the diversity of perspectives on social innovation to the sustainability transitions research community, and in doing…
Creating actionable knowledge one step at a time
Introduction to “Zooming in and out
Making sense of power through transdisciplinary sustainability research
If transdisciplinary sustainability research is to contribute to sustainability transitions, issues of power dynamics need to be understood and accounted for. However, examples of concrete methods that put this into practice are sparse. This paper presents a conceptual and methodological framework that develops a better understanding of the power phenomenon, while providing actionable knowledge. By focussing on the context of social innovation in…
Conserving Conflict? Transfrontier Conservation, Development Discourses and Local Conflict Between South Africa and Lesotho
The role of partnerships in ‘realising’ urban sustainability in Rotterdam's City Ports Area, The Netherlands
Making sense of sustainability transitions locally
Today’s society is facing a broad array of societal challenges, such as an unstable economic system, climate change and lasting poverty. There are no straightforward solutions, rather these challenges ask for fundamental societal changes, that is, sustainability transitions. Faced with the question of how these challenges can be understood and dealt with, we argue for action research as a promising approach. Focusing on their localized manifestat…
Symposium introduction
Critical policy analysts aim to serve policy actors in dealing with the intricate problems they face by facilitating productive communication, critical learning and sustainable change. Action research is a valuable approach for living up to this ambition. As it is rarely used in the field of critical policy analysis, this symposium further explores what action research has to offer. In this introduction, we draw out the main principles, practices…
Action, research and participation
Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions
Shifting Power Relations in Sustainability Transitions
This paper contributes to understanding transition politics by conceptualizing (shifting) power relations between actors in sustainability transitions. The authors introduce a Multi-actor Perspective as a heuristic framework for specifying (shifting) power relations between different categories of actors at different levels of aggregation. First, an overview is provided of how power and empowerment have been treated in transition research, and re…
Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions
Elucidating the changing roles of civil society in urban sustainability transitions
Experimenting with alternative economies
The economic crisis as a game changer? Exploring the role of social construction in sustainability transitions
Loorbach, D., F. Avelino, A. Haxeltine, J. M. Wittmayer, T. O'Riordan, P. Weaver, and R. Kemp. 2016. The economic crisis as a game changer? Exploring the role of social construction in sustainability transitions. Ecology and Society 21(4):15.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08761-210415
Ten essentials for action-oriented and second order energy transitions, transformations and climate change research
The most critical question for climate research is no longer about the problem, but about how to facilitate the transformative changes necessary to avoid catastrophic climate-induced change. Addressing this question, however, will require massive upscaling of research that can rapidly enhance learning about transformations. Ten essentials for guiding action-oriented transformation and energy research are therefore presented, framed in relation to…
Actor roles in transition
To date, the field of transition research lacks a suitable vocabulary to analyse the (changing) interactions and relations of actors as part of a sustainability transition. This article addresses this knowledge gap by exploring the potential of the concept of \\'roles\\' from social interaction research. The role concept is operationalized for transition research to allow the analysis of (changing) roles and relations between actor roles as indic…
Transformative social innovation and (dis)empowerment
This article responds to increasing public and academic discourses on social innovation, which often rest on the assumption that social innovation can drive societal change and empower actors to deal with societal challenges and a retreating welfare state. In order to scrutinise this assumption, this article proposes a set of concepts to study the dynamics of transformative social innovation and underlying processes of multi-actor (dis)empowermen…
Game-changers and transformative social innovation
This editorial introduces the special feature on the role of game-changers, broadly conceptualized as macro-trends that change the "rules of the game," in processes of transformative social innovation. First, the key concepts are introduced together with the academic workshop that brought together 25 scholars, from across a wide range of disciplines, to discuss the role of game-changers in transformative social innovation, resulting in the 9 cont…
Transition versus transformation
Unpacking the social innovation ecosystem
Social innovation is on the rise as a mode of governance through which to address societal challenges. Seeking to empower SI initiatives, researchers and policy makers are concerned with the development of supportive “ecosystems”. This concept usefully calls attention to the distributed nature of SI agency, but many questions remain on the kinds of network constellations involved. This contribution unpacks the “SI ecosystems” concept, specifying …
Narratives of change
Alongside current policy discourses on the transformative potentials of social innovation, social innovation initiatives also construct their own accounts of how society can be transformed and by whom. Building on state-of-the-art futures studies and narrative research and their linkages, this article unfolds these narratives of change (NoC) by social innovation initiatives. A tripartite framework is used to analyse and discuss the content, const…
Translocal empowerment in transformative social innovation networks
This paper contributes to public and academic discussions on empowerment and social innovation by conceptualizing the mechanisms of empowerment from a social psychology perspective, and empirically exploring how people are empowered through both local and transnational linkages, i.e. translocal networks. Section 2 conceptualizes empowerment as the process through which actors gain the capacity to mobilize resources to achieve a goal, building on …
Towards a theory of transformative social innovation
Beyond instrumentalism
Social innovation is an important dimension of current transformations in energy systems. It can refer to alternative business models, novel policy instruments, financing schemes, participatory governance approaches to energy questions, or new discourses. Its significance for energy systems is often considered in narrow instrumentalist terms, reducing it to a tool serving particular policy objectives. Grounding the concept in social science and h…
How action research can make deliberative policy analysis more transformative
Hajer and Wagenaar originally proposed Deliberative Policy Analysis (DPA) as an approach suited to transforming a policy world characterized by complexity, pluralism and unpredictability. Because its transformative ambitions have long remained unfulfilled, DPA has begun embracing a variety of Action Research (AR) approaches committed to generating policy change in a world beset by multiple sustainability crises. However, a systematic assessment o…
Transformative innovation and translocal diffusion
Thinking, doing, organising
This article positions collective renewable energy prosumerism as a social movement that engages in energy system transformation. Collective renewable energy prosumer initiatives engage in ‘prefigurative’ work through their discursive framings (ways of thinking), their activities (ways of doing) and their understanding and enactment of social relations (ways of organising). The core of this article is a comparative analysis of the prefigurative w…
Introduction
Bibliography: Wittmayer, Julia/Bartels, Koen/Larrea, Miren: Introduction: Action Research, Policy and Politics. Special Issue of the International Journal of Action Research, IJAR – International Journal of Action Research, 1-2021, pp. 3-17. https://doi.org/10.3224/ijar.v17i1.01
Sociology (34 obras) · Political science (32 obras) · Sustainability and Climate Change Governance (26 obras) · Economics (18 obras) · Transformative learning (18 obras) · Computer Science (17 obras) · Sustainability (17 obras) · Engineering (16 obras) · Social science (16 obras) · Epistemology (13 obras)