Julia Wittmayer Hoogleraar
+31 (0)10-4088899
wittmayer@drift.eur.nl
Julia Wittmayer combines a professorship at the Erasmus School of Philosophy (ESPhil) with the role of senior researcher and advisor at DRIFT. Her background is in Social and Cultural Anthropology (Free University Amsterdam) with a PhD in Social Sciences from Erasmus University titled “Transition management, action research and actor roles: Understanding local sustainability transitions”.
Dr. Wittmayer is an influential scholar in the field of transition studies, focussing her efforts on understanding and influencing transition dynamics, always cooperating with various academic disciplines (‘interdisciplinary’) and involving practical experts and their knowledge as an integral part of this shared effort (‘transdisciplinary’).
The instalment of Dr. Wittmayer as professor of Transdisciplinarity and Societal Transformations is an important next step in co-creating the knowledge this present moment requires – combining philosophy with transition studies.
Julia has been involved in and/or leading a variety of research projects, including EU-funded projects such as TRANSIT, Social Innovation Community, MUSIC or InContext. Currently, she researches the social dimensions of and the role of social innovations in energy transitions, leading DRIFT’s work in the PROSEU (2018-2021), SONNET (2019-2022), Energy-SHIFTS (2019-2021) and TOMORROW (2019-2022) EU-H2020 funded projects. Her passion for the role of science in transition has found a new home through her work with citizen science in the ACTION project (2019-2022) and on analysing the use of transition management in Sub-Saharan Africa in the TGroup project (2016-2020).
In addition, she has been engaged in policy advice for local and national government bodies across Europe (e.g. European Environmental Agency, German Environmental Agency (through the TRAFIS project), Dutch Ministry for Public Health and the cities of The Hague or Ludwigsburg), lectures at DRIFT’s Transition Academy and regularly gives guest lectures and presentations to science and practitioner audiences.
