Re-Imagining Tomorrow through Arts and Sciences
RASL Minor

Core Tutors:

Irina Shapiro

Maaike van Papeveld

Content:

The RASL Minor ‘Re-Imagining Tomorrow through Arts and Sciences’ is an award-winning elective programme that offers you the opportunity to engage with situated societal issues in transdisciplinary ways, in collaboration with cultural partners from Rotterdam. By bringing together students from a range of academic and artistic backgrounds, the minor invites you to create and experiment with alternative approaches to knowledge production and research.

Re-imagining tomorrow requires recognizing that disciplinary ways of knowing and doing are not neutral or fixed: they are imaginative structures that create and reinforce specific ways of seeing and shaping the world. This programme challenges you to interrogate those structures and explore how they might be transformed. It emphasizes experimentation, collaboration, and situated research as part of the learning process.

The urgency of the RASL minor is informed by our current predicament – the ‘clusterfuck of world-historical proportions’ – which demands new forms of research and learning. To re-imagine our collective futures, we must come together in diverse ensembles to explore how we might live and work in more socially and ecologically just ways. The minor invites you to co-create and mobilize such ensembles through a ‘learning by doing’ approach (or experiential learning), engaged transdisciplinary research and imaginative interventions.

The concept of transdisciplinarity triggers our engagement with different ways of knowing across and beyond arts and sciences. Transdisciplinarity is a contested and fuzzy concept. In a very general sense, we take it to mean “the academic acknowledgement that we cannot get out of this mess alone”. It involves the critical questioning of disciplinary structures and hierarchical divisions of knowledge forms, as well as the ongoing exploration and creation of new modes of working together across difference. In the RASL minor, we do not treat transdisciplinarity as a single method or means towards an end – solving a problem – but rather as the object of collaborative, open-ended practice. Precisely what transdisciplinarity means and looks like in practice is the very question you will work with and through in this minor.

We focus on how we might integrate ways of knowing that are considered incommensurable – not having a common basis, measure or standard of comparison. To do so, we 1) explore existing transdisciplinary art-science practices and related theories in Thematic Sessions in relation to which you develop your own research; 2) encourage you to develop their own tools and methods through an experiential learning process through Cultural Partner Collaborations; and 3) base our teaching, assessment and collaboration on particular values that allow us to stay with the tensions of doing art-science transdisciplinary education (Transdisciplinary Skills Sessions)  

In short, this minor is as much about the how of learning and research as it is about the what of doing transdisciplinarity. You are encouraged – together with your tutors, peers and cultural partners – to co-develop a transdisciplinary approach that responds to the particularities of your project’s context. This is not a pre-scripted path but a collaborative journey.

What we offer:

Thematic Sessions
To explore existing TD art-science practices and theories, we offer weekly Thematic Sessions, where we focus on themes and examples that bring together different, and often clashing, ways of knowing. This includes studying what we mean with ‘sciences’ and ‘arts’, and how these have been brought in conversation with each other in different collective and individual research practices. Examples from previous years have included: De Waag Future Lab, TBA21–Academy, Octavia’s Brood, Ronald Rael, Feral Atlas, Sissel Marie Tonn.

In these sessions, we engage in a variety of activities, among which practice-led workshops, screenings, lectures, close-listening and close-reading. The purpose of the Thematic Sessions is to allow you to position yourself in relation to other practices and consider how you might contribute to the field with your own project. At the foundation of this lies an understanding of the possibilities and limitations inherent to your own discipline(s), knowledges and skills. To develop this understanding, you practice with mapping and sharing these with your peers, and work towards an individual transdisciplinary research project.     

Cultural Partner Collaborations
But we do not end there: we also create the conditions to develop your own approaches for bridging the supposed incommensurability between different ways of knowing and challenge the hierarchy that structures them. In the Cultural Partner Collaborations, you work in small teams and respond to a particular issue brought forward by a cultural partner from Rotterdam. This anchors the project in a real-world context, and allows you to consider the sensibilities and ethics central to collaborative efforts.

The aim of the project is to develop and practice with transdisciplinary research tools, methods and approaches in order to re-imagine the issue proposed by the cultural partner. By asking you to re-imagine an issue, we consider how the particular issue is currently imagined and approached, as well as explore alternative articulations and engage with an approach that puts these alternative notions to practice. By working with a cultural partner, you engage with concrete social, political, and cultural dynamics that allow the research to be context-sensitive, situated, and socially responsive.

In this challenging, collaborative process, you are guided in weekly meetings by tutors who are experts in transdisciplinary art-science research. Tutors centralise the noticing, attending to, and staying with tensions that emerge throughout the process, and work with you to explore how to make these tensions productive. The project culminates in an interactive presentation, where you and your team members share your re-imagined approach, and a collective publication, which presents the project to a wider audience.

Partners in previous years have included:
            Gemaal op Zuid: https://hetgemaalopzuid.nl
            Zöop: https://zoop.earth/nl/
            Museum Boijmans van Beuningen: https://www.boijmans.nl/en
            Roodkapje: https://roodkapje.org

Transdisciplinary skills sessions
The Transdisciplinary Skills Sessions focus on specific aspects of art-science transdisciplinary research, such as ethics, methods/procedures, collaboration, and making public. These sessions provide both a theoretical repertoire and practical tools, and they include in-class exercises.

A minor in two parts (mandatory for WdKA students, optional for other students)
In the second part of the minor, which is mandatory for WdkA students but optional for EUR and Codarts students, students are invited to explore how transdisciplinarity takes shape within their own artistic and research practices. While in part one the parameters of collaboration and the broader thematic framework were provided at the outset, part two challenges students to develop a project grounded in their own (research) interests. In addition to a continuation of the Thematic Sessions and weekly tutor meetings, students participate in the Keywords Track, during which students, in close collaboration with tutors, develop prompts for transdisciplinary thinking-making-doing and work on a collective publication. Find more information about the Keywords Track and publication from 2024-2025 HERE.

Learning objectives

You are able to identify and describe the strengths and weakness of your own discipline(s) and ways of knowing, and communicate these to others.
You have a general understanding of scientific practice, artistic practice and art-science transdisciplinarity.
You are able to formulate a relevant and urgent societal issue in collaboration with a cultural partner;
You are able to collaboratively develop a transdisciplinary research method/approach that re-imagines the societal issue;
You are able to situate your research project in relation to existing academic, artistic, and/or societal practices;
You are able to critically reflect on how you engage with, and position yourself in relation to, your fellow students, the research topic, the relevant audiences, and the context in which you work;
You are able to justify and take responsibility for the choices you make throughout the learning and research process
 

What we expect:

We expect students to have a curious, respectful and open-minded attitude towards other ways of knowing and making. Transdisciplinary research is highly collaborative in nature, and so students should be willing to work with others and commit to a challenging collaborative process. Because transdisciplinary research can take many forms and is shaped by its particular context, team configuration, cultural partner, societal issue and other influences, students are expected to work independently, self-organize, take ownership of their learning process and take the lead in exploring topics and directions they are interested in.

Research methods and approaches

Students develop their own transdisciplinary art-science method/procedure/tool.

Components

Research and practice

Deliverables

Individual research report
Team project (includes interactive presentation and publication)
Working method

 Individual and collaborative (Part I only)
Assessment

Individual and collaborative (Part I only)

What we expect:

We expect students to have a curious, respectful and open-minded attitude towards other ways of knowing and making. Transdisciplinary research is highly collaborative in nature, and so students should be willing to work with others and commit to a challenging collaborative process. Because transdisciplinary research can take many forms and is shaped by its particular context, team configuration, cultural partner, societal issue and other influences, students are expected to work independently, self-organize, take ownership of their learning process and take the lead in exploring topics and directions they are interested in.

Research methods and approaches

Students develop their own transdisciplinary art-science method/procedure/tool.

Components

Research and practice

Deliverables

Individual research report
Team project (includes interactive presentation and publication)
Working method

 Individual and collaborative (Part I only)
Assessment

APPLICATION PROCESS (KOM)

Are you a student from another educational institution and would you like to follow a minor at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences? If so, you must apply in two steps:

Step 1
Register for the minor of your choice via the blue Apply button. You can find this button at the top right of the minor’s page.
Download the learning agreement and complete it.
Submit this learning agreement to the examination board of your study programme.
Once the examination board has granted approval, register for the minor in Step 2 no later than 01-07-2025 at 9:00 a.m.

Step 2
After approval, register via OSIRIS Application of Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences using the link below (first create an account).

https://osiris.hr.nl/osiris_aanmeld_hrprd/Welkom.do?proces=KOM2609&opleiding=MINOR-WDK-VT 00

Part of the application process is uploading the following documents:

The learning agreement, signed by you and by your institution;
A scan or photo of your passport or ID card.
 
You will be informed by Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences whether your application has been approved.

In OSIRIS Application, you must also upload the Proof of Paid Tuition Fee (BBC) for the academic year in which you wish to follow the minor. This can be done from 01 May 2026onwards. You can request the BBC from your institution after you have signed or issued an authorization for the payment of the tuition fee for the relevant academic year. You may also choose the option for your institution to send the BBC directly to collegegeld@hr.nl.

You will receive a notification from Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences once your application has been approved.