Rettschlag, Juliane | Germany

Juliane Rettschlag is a research associate and PhD candidate at the Berlin Ethics Lab at the Technical University Berlin, where she works at the intersection of technology assessment, responsible research and innovation and social philosophy. The focus of her doctoral thesis is the ethics and politics of collaborative research within the context of sustainable transitions in urban mobility. Using participant observation, she examines how transdisciplinary researchers deal with value conflicts and the insights that can be gained from this for transdisciplinary research research designs and education. Juliane is a founding member of the Berlin Ethics Lab and coordinates and conceptualized the Berlin Ethics Certificate, which is offered as part of the Berlin University Alliance and the ENHANCE program of the European Universities of Technology Alliance. As a certified democracy educator and ethics researcher, she teaches and gives workshops on responsible technology design, integrated ethics as well as democracy and media education for research, education, and culture. She holds a master's degree in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology from University of Berlin and a bachelor's degree in Cultural Studies from the University of Leipzig.
 

Project at IAS-STS: The Value of Uncertainty – A Pragmatist Tool to Transdisciplinary Teaching
The presentation refers to my writing project at the IAS-STS/STS Unit, the completion of an article, which is part of my dissertation on value conflicts in transdisciplinary research.The lecture addresses the constitutive role of uncertainty in transdisciplinary higher education. The starting point is experience from a seminar on mobility justice and a critical reading of John Dewey's pragmatic philosophy of democratic education against the backdrop of the diagnosis of current crises in democracy. Based on Dewey's concept of the “undeterminedsituation,” the experiences of students (and teachers) with ambiguity, disorientation, and uncertainty can be read as crucial moments for transdisciplinary learning.As the result of a one-year action research project conducted in a transdisciplinary project seminar on the topic of mobility justice, I present a tool – the triangle of transdisciplinary teaching – that can be used to accompany and navigate the uncertainties of transdisciplinary project work. Our action research design combined protocols, photo documentation, student reflection papers, and a reflexive thematic analysis. By using scaffolding strategies, teachers can guide students through the transdisciplinary process by offering orientation while leaving room for the irritations that accompany student research. Instead of trying to quickly eliminate them, we recommend embracing uncertainty in transdisciplinary learning environments. The tool can also be transferred to other learning environments that focus on collaborative project work with transformative foci.
 

Selected Publications:

Maschinenverhalten, in: Wissensgeschichte des Verhaltes, de Gruyter, 2025.

The Berlin Ethics Certificate: Conceptualizing Interdisciplinarity as a Core Building Block of Ethics in Engineering Education, mit Ammon, Sabine; Kljagin, Alexandra; Vortel, Martina, in SEFI 2022 Proceedings.

Freifunk - Solidarisch Anschluss finden, in: Solidarische Ökonomie als Lebensform, Berliner Akteure des alternativen Wirtschaftens im Porträt, Bastian Ronge (Hrsg.), Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2016