I was born and live in South Africa. Currently, I’m a research associate with the Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST) at Stellenbosch University (SU). Prior to the CST, I was actively involved in building and managing the — an inter-faculty institution of Transdisciplinarity, Sustainability, Modelling and Assessment — for working across many different academic disciplines and departments at SU on a wide range of sustainability-related challenges. Amongst many of its projects, the TsamaHub developed a transdisciplinary doctoral programme – known as TRECCAfrica – leveraging the necessary international funding for conducting this intra-Africa doctoral programme. In 2015, the TsamaHub submitted a successful proposal to the National Research Foundation (NRF) to establish a new ‘flagship project’ in the areas of sustainability, complexity, transdisciplinarity at SU, which became the CST.
I hold several post-graduate degrees in philosophy, theology and sociology. In my PhD I developed the notion of methodological agility (MA) as a means for switching between the mono-, multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary research methodologies, for tackling sustainability transitions in and under radically different contextual conditions in the world today. For example: the need for transitioning form fossil fuels to renewable & sustainable energies sources may be CLEAR, but the many different transitioning path-ways of doing this are not necessarily STRAIGHTFORWARD at all — especially if this implies navigating JUST TRANSITIONING processes.
Narrative Action Research (NAR) — the different aspects of which are explained in more detail on this website — is only one approach of how to be methodically agile — at the methods level.
My contact details are as follows:
Dr John van Breda
Email.1: jrvb@sun.ac.za
Email.2: johnrvanbreda@gmail.com
Website.2: www.ma4ttdr.net
Mobile: +27(0)76-877-0744