Transitions — an overview

Transitions at CRT are understood as multidimensional processes unfolding across scales—from inner shifts in perception and consciousness to large-scale systemic transformations. We see them as emerging from the interplay of crisis and creativity, collapse and renewal, ecological urgency and epistemic transformation.

Transitions, as envisioned at CRT, are not merely responses to crisis—they are invitations to reimagine the very foundations of what we value, and how we live, know, relate, create, and design: a civilizational reimagining.

Our approach is grounded in relational thinking that suffuses human and more-than-human worlds, opening pathways for just and meaningful engagements rooted in ecological balance, cultural knowledge, and planetary coexistence.

Vision and Long-Term Objectives

The Centre for Reimagining Transitions enquires into large-scale macroshifts and subtle microshifts unfolding across human and more-than-human contexts and our modes of understanding and experiencing the world. The Centre seeks to foster capacities for engaging with uncertainty, paradox, and dynamic change by expanding its scope beyond socio-technical and policy-driven frameworks, which usually keep on reproducing the same scenarios they strive to exit from.

To emerge new directions, we foreground the principle that transition frameworks should not only focus on outer systemic change but should simultaneously attend to epistemic, inner, and pedagogical transitions. In doing so, the Centre advances approaches that integrate inner and outer transitions, challenge dominant knowledge hierarchies, and reposition creative and embodied modes of inquiry as critical to engaging with complex change. Relational, aesthetic, and consciousness driven perspectives become central to these approaches.

The Centre values and engages deeply with Indic and Asian thought traditions, contexts and practices as vital philosophical, ethical, and experiential resources for understanding relationality. It is also open to explore the non-dominant, indigenous, vernacular traditions and practices around the world, which largely remain marginalised within current transition studies. Attention is also given to Global South contexts—as both lived realities and geopolitical positions. These traditions and frameworks are approached not as fixed anchors or exclusive foundations, but as living, evolving bodies of transdisciplinary knowledge.

Across its work, CRT attends to the interrelations of ethics, agency, and voice, position transition in the contexts of who can act, who can be heard, and how responsibility is negotiated across human and more-than-human worlds.

Through these orientations, the Centre seeks to enable artists, designers, and researchers to respond creatively to the field of transition studies.

Research Areas

We have 8 key areas of research inquiry that diverse faculty build within the centre.

1. Systems and Relational Futures Reimagining socio-ecological systems through participatory, community-rooted approaches that center relationality over extraction, across human and more-than-human worlds. 
2. Coexistence: Understanding and acknowledging transitions in space and time between humans and more-than-humans. It challenges the Western idea of pristineness and explores the nuances of the entangled lives of people, culture, climate, and biogeography.  
3. Creative Practices in Ecological Humanities: Reanimates transition studies by bringing artistic and aesthetic practices into its core, harnessing creative writing, storytelling, performance, and visual arts as generative modes of ecological sense-making and transformative cultural imagination. 
4. Knowledge Systems: Studies transition in knowledge systems and proposes a paradigm shift in the currently valid Western “scientific” enquiry methods. 
5. Consciousness & Wellbeing: Attends to the inner and experiential dimensions of transitions — making visible and examining the shifts in consciousness, perception and wellbeing that underlie and enable outer change.   
6. Education and Pedagogy -Reimagines learning environments, pedagogies and practices that cultivate the capacities, sensibilities, and orientations needed to navigate a world in profound flux. 
7. Decolonisation and Regenerative Cultures: Reclaiming voice and agency within communities shaped by colonial legacies, to engage simultaneously in a critical act of undoing along with a generative act of renewal across human and more-than-human worlds. 
8. Technology in a Transitioning World: Examining technological advancements through critical, ethical, and convivial lenses to resist solutionist paradigms and centre relational, life-affirming futures over instrumental control. 

CRT – A platform integrating teaching, research, practice, and impact:

CRT’s work unfolds through an integrated research ecology that brings together teaching, inquiry, creative practice, and public engagement. Learning environments function as active sites of research, where students participate as co-producers of knowledge through studios, collaborations, and situated pedagogies. The Centre generates diverse outputs including scholarly publications, practice-research works, exhibitions, performances, and pedagogical frameworks, alongside public-facing engagements such as conferences, workshops, and community dialogues. Through national and international collaborations, knowledge exchange platforms, and funded research initiatives, CRT sustains a dynamic interface between research, practice, and society, extending the impact of transition studies across academic, cultural, and civic contexts.