Litnet

John van Breda is a research associate with the Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST) at Stellenbosch University. Prior to the CST, John was actively involved in building and managing an inter-faculty Hub for Transdisciplinarity, Sustainability, Modelling and Assessment – known as TsamaHub – for working on a wide range of sustainability challenges across disciplines and departments at SU. This TsamaHub work also included developing a transdisciplinary doctoral programme – known as TRECCAfrica – and leveraging the necessary international funding for conducting this intra-Africa doctoral programme.

John holds several post-graduate degrees in philosophy, theology and sociology. In his PhD he developed the notion of methodological agility as broad approach for tackling sustainability transitions in and under radically different contextual conditions. At the methods level, John has translated this broad approach into an innovative Narrative Action Research (NAR) method for doing transformative transdisciplinary research (TTDR), particularly when facing complex socio-ecological systems challenges in the context of the Anthropocene.