In her inaugural lecture, Julia Wittmayer explores what it means for the academic world to fulfil its responsibilities in a time of ‘polycrisis’: these interrelated crises linked to climate, biodiversity, geopolitics and social justice, which are no longer future scenarios but lived realities, such as forest fires, heat stress and food insecurity. She argues that traditional academic ideals — individual excellence, neutrality and detachment from society — become problematic when they prevent us from engaging meaningfully with these persistent and ‘thorny’ issues.

As Chair in Transdisciplinarity and Societal Transformations, her work will continue to focus on transitions-in-the-making: ongoing processes in which people, organisations and institutions search and learn about the future they would like to see realised. She sees transformative research as crucial here—research that is done with societal partners and combines a fundamentally critical perspective with a relational worldview and a reconstructive, pragmatist ethos.

At the same time, such research challenges the rules of the academic game: funding, ethics, and what counts as “good” and legitimate research. Julia’s agenda is to study and shape the institutionalisation of transformative research, with care and caution, so it does not become a rhetorical placebo but a genuinely critical and democratic practice. This chair offers a chance to rethink how we organise academic work so that it helps address, rather than reinforce, the polycrisis.

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