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Paper short abstract

This presentation examines the reinvention of the Centre for Unusual Collaborations as a prefigurative experiment in radical interdisciplinary research. CUCo’s learning journey rethinks conventional funding and training into an ecosystem of collaboration and invites academics who struggle to fit in.

Paper long abstract

Calls for radical forms of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research (ITDR) increasingly emphasize the need for new institutional and epistemic practices. Yet most initiatives remain embedded in conventional academic incentive structures, where short-term funding schemes, competitive selection, and instrumentalized “training” formats risk reproducing the very conditions they seek to transform. This paper examines the ongoing reinvention of the Centre for Unusual Collaborations (CUCo) as an experiment in prefigurative practice for radical ITDR.

Founded to enable unexpected collaborations across disciplinary and societal boundaries, CUCo developed a portfolio of unconventional methods: interactive and embodied training formats (e.g. embodied activities and speculative scenarios), and funding schemes that deliberately subverted meritocratic norms, including allocating grants through lottery. These interventions aimed to cultivate curiosity, trust, and openness—conditions often cited as essential for transformative collaboration. However, the centre has recently begun to rethink its model. Key motivations include the fragility of project-based funding, concerns that extrinsic incentives may crowd out intrinsic motivations for collaboration, and the realization that CUCo’s distinctive practices were not being fully leveraged.

We describe CUCo’s current development of a learning journey: a collectively designed pathway intended less as a consumable training and more as an initiation into a network. Rather than selecting participants solely through conventional excellence metrics, the initiative seeks to engage researchers who struggle to find institutional homes. In this presentations we describe the process of developing the new learning journey as well as key choices made aimed at prefiguring ITDR beyond their current frontiers.