Local coordinators at the Ethiopian partner universities in Addis Ababa, Bahir Dar and Mekelle as well as the project coordinator at University for Continuing Education Krems offered insights into initial conditions for transdisciplinary research practices in Ethiopia at the Transgress Conference in Graz in April 2025.
The conference “Re-/Searching to Transgress: Collaborative Formats and Practices of Social-ecological Transformation”, organized by the Department of Geography and Regional Science at the University of Graz set out to bring together experiences and expertise from different research fields that deal with formats and practices of transdisciplinary collaboration and explore pathways to societal change.
The presentation by the GIRT project titled “Particularities of conducting transdisciplinary processes on questions of urban transition in Ethiopia: Reflections on expectations and challenges” was held in a hybrid way: Tania Berger from University for Continuing Education Krems was present in Graz while Atsede Desta, Kumela Gudeta and Daniel Semenugus were connected online.
Reflections in this contribution originated from the first three years of the research project GIRT, funded by the Austrian Partnership Programme in Higher Education and Research for Development (APPEAR). The GIRT project looks at women’s daily lived experiences in urban slums and informal settlements in Ethiopia, catering for the housing needs of a substantial proportion of urban populations. Still, lack of tenure security and basic infrastructure, inadequate building stock and unhygienic living conditions render inhabiting informal settlements difficult for most residents. Women’s livelihoods, due to care obligations, lack of income opportunities and low political representation are especially challenging. GIRT seeks to employ transdisciplinary methods to engage with local stakeholders in the three cities Addis Ababa, Bahir Dar and Mekelle and strives to identify scalable approaches for improving living conditions in selected settlements.
The contribution at the Transgress Conference elaborated on the particularities of conducting transdisciplinary processes on questions of just transition in Ethiopian contexts of urban renewal, urban sprawl and post-conflict land redistribution. Substantial input came from the experiences of researchers at partner universities in Ethiopia with backgrounds in social sciences, architecture and engineering sciences, geography and urban planning. These were complemented by observations of the project coordinator based in Austria.
In its attempt to initiate local transdisciplinary processes focusing on women's real-world problems in informal settlements, the GIRT team encountered several systemic constraints that have only partly been described in transdisciplinary literature so far. We understand these constraints as peculiar to the Ethiopian context and see value in acknowledging the specific local contexts under which transdisciplinary processes are implemented.
