Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach

PROGRAM

Meta-, Inter- & Trans‑Science

T4EU Autumn School

for Master’s and Doctoral Students

23.11.2026 – 27.11.2026

Many of today’s challenges resist explanation from a single disciplinary angle. Mental health, digital wellbeing, educational inclusion, sustainability, migration, ageing, social inequality and many others are not problems that belong to one field. They are complex human and societal realities shaped by biological, psychological, cultural, technological, contextual and political forces. Understanding them requires more than placing fields next to each other. It requires learning how to ask better questions across boundaries. Before chosing a method, collecting data or discussing results, research begins with a more fundamental act that is deciding what counts as a problem.

This workshop invites participants to explore that often invisible moment when complex human challenges are transformed into researchable questions.

I bring together perspectives that are very close to my own academic path, including psychology, neuroscience, education, political sciences, health and social innovation. What interests me is not only how these fields may offer different answers but how they often lead us to see the problem itself differently.

This three-session seminar treats posthumanist and post-anthropocentric philosophy not as a set of doctrines to be summarized but as a method of thinking and writing to be practiced. Working with Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Eduardo Kohn, Timothy Morton, and Reza Negarestani, students develop the capacity to perceive, articulate, and compose from a position that no longer assumes the human at the centre. The seminar follows an indoor–outdoor–indoor arc: an opening session overviews the state of ecological crisis, pitfalls of anthropocentrism and introduces theory fiction as a genre in which philosophical argument and speculative narrative become indistinguishable; a middle session moves into a nearby ecological site for guided fieldwork in multispecies attention and autoethnographic notation; a final session returns indoors as a writing workshop in which students draft and present a short theory-fiction text grounded in their field observations. The deliverable is a polished short text per student – a posthumanist artifact rather than a report about posthumanism.

The workshop aims to familiarize students with linguistic issues that have long been raised by philosophers and are now being explored through empirical research. These include the problem of the contextuality of meaning: does a minimal meaning exist in the basic units of language (lexemes or sentences), or does meaning always depend on the context and situation in which an utterance occurs? Is there a universal structure underlying natural languages (a common generative base, or a basic set of elementary verbs such as „eat,” „drink,” „catch,” and „walk”)? And finally, how does the brain process language? What do we know about this, and what can empirical research tell us?

All these questions lead to a fundamental issue: Do natural languages influence scientific thinking?

The workshop will be divided into two parts. In the theoretical part, we will discuss these issues and develop simple experiments in small groups. In the practical part, we will attempt to conduct these experiments in the laboratory, using an eye tracker and/or EEG.

This workshop is designed to guide participants through the process of drafting their own research project in the emerging field of Neuro Game Studies, with particular emphasis on laboratory‑based methodologies. Working hands‑on, attendees will develop the core structure of a research proposal modeled on the application format of the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) — including research questions, theoretical justification, methodological design, work plan, and expected impact.

The session combines metascientific reflection with practical research design. Participants will explore how game‑related phenomena can be investigated through cognitive, neurobiological, and systems‑thinking approaches, and how these perspectives can be integrated into a coherent, fundable research framework. The workshop also introduces tools for planning empirical studies, including neurocognitive protocols, behavioral tasks, and mixed‑method strategies relevant to laboratory environments.

Projects initiated during the workshop may be continued online after the event, with the possibility — depending on feasibility and interest — of further development, data collection, and eventual publication of results.

The activity is co-financed by the project International from the beginning – wsparcie umiędzynarodowienia financed by the National Agency for Academic Exchange under the STER Programme.

More: https://us.edu.pl/szkola-doktorska/en/ster/