This fall, the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources launched a new Ph.D. program in Transdisciplinary Leadership, Creativity and Sustainability (TLCS).  

This new program is a collaborative response to the growing call for Ph.D. programs, innovative scholarship, and useful leadership practices that can meet the complex interrelated and intersecting challenges of these times (e.g., climate change, systemic inequity, racialized violence, accelerating loss of biodiversity, and more). These challenges require unprecedented capacity to collaborate across differences and navigate uncertainty, contradiction, ambiguity, and incommensurability.

The TLCS Program is designed for leaders, organizers, and practitioners who are committed to applied scholarship that is rooted in transdisciplinarity, creativity and applied leadership in service to a sustainable and equitable future. This Ph.D. program is rooted in a tradition of engaged scholarship that recognizes the inseparability of environmental and social challenges, as well as the interdependence of cultural and biological diversity. This program is designed to prepare students to sustain rigorous and collaborative scholarly knowledge production practices across community, organizational, ecological, and social movement settings to address complex challenges from a place of creativity. The program centers applied leadership and creative practices within a core curriculum that focuses on decolonial, practice-based research methods that draw from and engage with critical theories across arts, humanities, social science, and sustainability fields. The program’s design is anchored by a deep analysis of power, privilege and systems of oppression/domination, ecological and systems thinking approaches, and a solid grounding in theories and practices relating to sustainability, systems change and leadership, and creativity. 

The TLCS Program is housed in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and engages participating faculty from Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources (RSENR), College of Education and Social Services (CESS), College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), and College of Arts and Sciences (CAS). This program is anchored by a network of internationally recognized and distinguished practitioner-scholars who embody relational leadership and collaborative knowledge generation practices rooted in lineages and traditions that are grounded in love, relationship, reciprocity and solidarity. This distance-learning doctoral approach will be accessible to students and emerging scholar-leaders from the United States and abroad while allowing them to stay rooted in their home communities/organizations and address relevant, applied, and timely research questions.

The TLCS program builds on the continued success and model of the Rubenstein School’s Leadership for Sustainability Master's in Professional Studies Program that was launched in 2015. This two-year program is now in its 8th year and continues to support cross-sector leaders from around the country and the world through its distance program that includes intensives, interactive online courses, and professional coaching. The success and approach of the master's program has been a result of the generosity and long-term relationships with our professional affiliate network that includes some of the most formidable, diverse, and innovative practitioners and creatives. These affiliates contribute to the curriculum by designing/supporting learning modules, collaborating on coursework, and providing direct mentoring, coaching, and guidance to students through the program. The master's program has received national accolades (see articles here and here) for its contributions to accessibility, diversity, equity and inclusion within the field of environmental and sustainability leadership. 

This Fall (2022), the TLCS Program will officially welcome 16 students into the Ph.D. program. These include a number of Ph.D. students who have been engaged in a pilot version of this program offered through the Ph.D. in Natural Resources. Mohamad Chakaki is one of these students and describes his experience thus far: 

"The Transdisciplinary Leadership for Creativity & Sustainability Ph.D. program has been a gift for me in these past 2 years. My interdisciplinary background and community-engaged orientation to professional practice made other doctoral programs a challenging fit. I also wanted a program where I could trust bringing my whole self – from the scars of previous academic experiences to the extra-academic lineages that inspire my work in the world – into my field of inquiry. The instructors and classmates in the program have found that rare and delicate balance between being an honest and bold community of learning, while staying heart-centered and deeply relational."

Prospective students may find out more by visiting the Ph.D. in Transdisciplinary Leadership, Creativity and Sustainability website.