Introduction to Thinking-at-the-Edge for Graduate Students

Are you interested in exploring the experiential dimension of writing a dissertation or master’s thesis? Are you curious to try out a method for harnessing your own embodied understanding in ways that can enrich your research and work-life?

This workshop offers graduate students a taste of Thinking-at-the-Edge (TAE), a core method of Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding (traininect.com) which seeks to expand and refine our capacity to engage with difficult questions, concepts and ideas. With straight-forward steps and starting from the rich ground of felt knowing, TAE can help us think past the “Edge" of what we can easily say. It leverages the power of reflective listening for exploring questions that deeply matter to us or intuitions we may not know how to formulate adequately.

During the session, participants will be introduced to tools for establishing a generous space to deeply and playfully harness the richness of their “felt sense” and for supporting each other in holding the red thread of one’s thinking. Over time, TAE movements will widen practitioners’ conceptual and learned frameworks of thinking and lead to surprising moments of insight that can transform the way you research and relate. 

“Side effects” of this method include:

1. greater patience with oneself and others when thinking;

2. increased aptitude of productively engaging with ambiguity and complexity;

3. greater skills in listening to oneself and others; and

4. confidence to find the words to say what really matters.

Lunch will be provided. This workshop will appeal to graduate students as researchers and writers. This session is co-sponsored by the Contemplative Sciences Center.

About

Dr. Donata Schoeller is a research professor of philosophy at the University of Iceland. She is the academic director of the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership in Higher Education’s program Training Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding, in which seven European universities participate. She is also the principal investigator and conceptual director of the Excellence-grant project: Freedom to Make Sense: Embodied, Experiential and Mindful Research. She has published extensively on the philosophy behind Embodied Critical Thinking, which is an interdisciplinary and practice-based approach that was developed by research groups she has been leading since 2018. Donata Schoeller is also a Focusing and Thinking-at-the-Edge trainer, giving courses internationally.

Among her recent publications are Practicing Embodied Thinking in Research and Learning, together with Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir and Greg Walkderden (eds.), (London: Routledge 2024), Close Talking: Erleben zu Sprache bringen, (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), Saying What We Mean, ed. with Ed Casey, (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2017), and Thinking Thinking, ed. with Vera Saller, (Freiburg: Alber Verlag, 2016).