It is a consensus that no single actor has been and will ever be able to identify the possibilities for overcoming the complex challenges to preserve the Amazon and only a transdisciplinary-systemic approach, and intentional collaborations can address the enormous environmental and social issues facing the region. For this reason, the Transdisciplinary Network of the Amazon (RETA) was created in 2011 as a space of plurality to promote dialogue and participatory governance processes in particular at the Purus-Madeira rivers interfluve, in the central region of the Amazon. RETA is not an NGO, but a network. Formed by collectives, community organizations, social movements, and governmental and non-governmental institutions, the network develops initiatives that build socio-political capabilities among local actors. For RETA, territorial governance should be a process of collective action aimed at agreeing on strategies for the desirable future of a territory. A list of organizations participating in the network can be found at the end of the document. RETA plays a fundamental role in the areas surrounding the BR-319 federal highway, a highway that runs through a pristine part of the Amazon rainforest built by the military dictatorship in 1973.

Vaporia Collective members have participated as researchers and makers with myriad forms of media for co-creatively designing images, narratives, stories and experiences as conditions for transformations. Projects include artistic and sensory ethnographic film/video works, installations, performances, actions, exhibitions and other experience and curatorial initiatives.

Past and ongoing work includes cinema and media installations exploring experiences at the end of life, ethnographic video and service design with public library workers serving communities impacted by incarceration, designing spaces and programs for restorative justice, convening and facilitating dialogues for suicide prevention, guiding wise practices through Indigenous and traditional knowledges, and other embodied and spirit-centered ways of knowing and being through collective fabulation for collective liberation.

John A. Bruce, Erin Dixon, Carlos Medellín, Hala Abdel Malak, Paweł Wojtasik.

The Transdisciplinary Design MFA academic program, offered at our New York City campus, addresses pressing social, economic, political, and environmental issues by uniting the theoretical focus of the social sciences and the transformative possibilities of artistic and design practices. Our curriculum brings together research- and action-oriented approaches in the exploration of political and philosophical questions and develops operational capacities aimed at advancing equity and justice. Our students collaboratively consider issues from multiple perspectives and at a range of scales, generating theoretical discourses that radically critique while proposing alternatives through collective fabulations, strategic propositions, and aesthetic exploration.

The Fall 2023 studio joins the ongoing research led by TD faculty John A. Bruce, Eduardo Staszowski, and Jen van der Meer within collaborations concerning efforts for restorative justice in Canada, with Reconciliation Canada and other associated movements, and for efforts to redress devastation in the Brazilian rainforest, with the Transdisciplinary Network of the Amazon, RETA, not an NGO but a network formed by individuals, collectives, community organizations and social movements.

The Consortium for Transdisciplinarity (CT/d) provides a structure and set of opportunities that allow students, faculty, and partners to realize the potential in The New School’s unique structure: an art and design school alongside an elite graduate school of social sciences and humanities. It is designed to activate and coordinate transdisciplinary opportunities by opening an expansive and synchronized institutional space for transdisciplinary research, teaching and learning, and community action. The consortium brings together the proven strengths of three key transdisciplinary units that bridge the persisting university divide between design and the academic social sciences and humanities. Integrating these active and prominent units—a research lab (GIDEST), a teaching lab (MFA Transdisciplinary Design), and an applied lab for community-based projects (Parsons DESIS Lab)—into a new constellation, CT/d creates a cross-divisional ecosystem of research, teaching, and social action. CT/d establishes learning partnerships with individuals (residents, fellows) who are actively engaged in social practice and are perhaps affiliated with advocacy, activist, or movement organizations aligned with their practice.