MATIN TransitionS Seminar

Managing and Assessing Transition Innovation Network

Thursday, October 2, 2025
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LEST, Salle Côté Jardin

To start the 5th season of MATIN, we are extremely pleased to welcome Natalia Bobadilla (Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, LabEx ICCA–ACT) on "Art-design based methods in organisations: reimagining knowledge, practice, and collective action"

This presentation will examine the triple role of art-design based methods as alternatives to conventional approaches in research and practice. Drawing on international projects and academic articles, it will explore how art can serve at once as a resource to access new and situated knowledge, as a method for research and practice, and as a tool and device for mobilizing and organizing collective action.

The presentation will build on cases from European projects on restructuring (La lutte Lejaby, Chaffoteaux, 501 Blues, Civic city….) ranging to recent experiments of prototyping in alternative cultural places. In dialogue with Howard S. Becker’s reflections on art as a way of “telling about society”, the presentation will show how art opens up ways of knowing, sensing, and disseminating that traditional methodologies often overlook, while also highlighting the challenges that accompany such approaches.

The seminar is hybrid. Participants attending onsite will enjoy a tarot reading.

Bio
Natalia Bobadilla is Associate Professor in Strategy and Organization at the University Sorbonne Paris Nord (LabEx ICCA–ACT). Her research focuses on the effects of organizational transformations (space, time, socio-materiality) on creativity and innovation, and on the management of alternative, creative, and R&D organizations. She uses longitudinal, ethnographic, processual, and art-based methods. She has participated in collective research projects, notably Arts and Restructuring and Arts and Critical Management Changes. She is currently coordinating the European project Alter-Places: Alternative Cultural Places Laboratories for sustainable practices, ecological transition and urban resilience in the post-Covid era?

Sources: 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1350508415616033

https://shs.cairn.info/revue-gerer-et-comprendre-2015-2-page-67?lang=fr

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08985626.2018.1539125

https://hal.science/hal-03507126

https://www.dysfunction-journal.net

https://alterplaces.com

Photos 

The Alter Places team testing the ALTERMANCY: Arcana of the Underground 

Photos by: Ophélie Loubat

Women “shouting out in anger” – Lejaby Struggle (photos by Vincent Gautier)

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