November 2026 - January 2027Life as a Lab — A Practitioner Inquiry into Method
Call for fellows
about the institute
The Institute for Practical ekoPhilosophy teaches and researches philosophy as a practical response to the crises of our time.
We believe that many people are living with a fundamental confusion about how to live ethically, morally, and sustainably. Our approach is to treat life as a lab, conducting experiments that shift philosophy from an intellectual exercise to a tool of personal and social change. Through rigorous academic research, self-guided courses, and thought leadership, we help people treat their own lives as sites of transformation — not just of self, but also of the collective.
about the fellowship
Research on transformation has expanded considerably over the past two decades. Much of it, however, is conducted by researchers who study transformation without undergoing it. The result is a body of knowledge that describes change from outside the process it describes, and that is therefore limited in what it can know.
First-person and participatory methods offer an alternative, but they remain methodologically underdeveloped.
Goethean phenomenology offers one way into that gap. In the lineage running from Goethe through Bortoft and Holdrege, perception itself is trained rather than replaced by instruments, and the phenomenon is allowed to disclose itself rather than being explained by a hypothesised mechanism behind it. This approach was developed largely for the study of plants, colour, and living form. It has rarely been turned toward the life of the person doing the studying.
This is what the fellowship sets out to do. We take the Goethean method as a starting point and ask what happens when the phenomenon under study is one's own life in the process of changing. Fellows therefore work on two objectives at once.
The first is their own life: each fellow formulates a question of ultimate importance, designs experiments that bear on it, lives them, and documents what discloses itself.
The second is the method and the theory behind it. The cohort facilitators Leonie and Jes bring the current state of their thinking and the cohort tests it against what they are actually encountering in their own inquiries and traditions. Fellows are asked to respond critically.
Our guiding question
What does it mean
to be human?
Alongside the guiding question, the fellowship pursues four lines of inquiry:
01 What does rigour mean when the researcher and the research site are the same?
02 Which elements of a phenomenological method transfer across worldviews, and which are inseparable from the tradition that produced them?
03 How can lived experience be documented so that it becomes evidence without ceasing to be experience?
04 What conditions — temporal, relational, material — does this kind of inquiry require in order to be sustained in messy, ordinary life?
Structure and Commitment
The fellowship runs for three months (November, 3rd 2026 to February, 2nd 2027) and requires approximately four hours per week.
Weekly cohort call.Tuesdays, 7:00-8.30pm CET, online. Attendance is expected.
Experiments.Fellows design and conduct experiments in their own lives. In most cases this does not require additional hours, since it concerns how existing time is lived.
Documentation.Fellows keep a structured weekly log following a shared format. This log constitutes the primary research material of the project.
Public reflection.Fellows share one short video per week on Instagram, communicating an experience, an insight, or a difficulty. Fellows without a public account may publish through IPeP's channels.
Reading.Some additional reading might be required (e.g. texts from Goethe, Bortoft, Holdrege, and from various traditions and interests represented in the cohort).
what the fellowship offers
A small honorarium (200Euro/month). We are well aware that this is symbolic. If money is an issue, please contact us.
Training in a phenomenological method.
A, what will be, — we are sure of it — wonderful working cohort, meeting weekly over three months (break over Christmas).
A certificate of fellowship from IPeP.
The possibility to explore your own life as lab as a potential transformative practice
The fellowship is not a taught course. Fellows are co-investigators. The direction of the inquiry will be shaped by what we encounter.
How to apply
Applications are submitted by email to info(at)institute-pep.com by 15 September 2026. Please include:
A CV. Any format. We are as interested in practices, apprenticeships, and lived commitments as in formal qualifications.
A video of roughly one minute in which you say why you want to be part of this, and from which tradition or practice you think. Filmed on a phone is exactly right. It should not be polished, edited, or AI-enhanced — we would rather see how you speak when you are working something out than watch a finished statement. The same holds for the CV: please write it yourself.
Send the video as an attachment or a link (WeTransfer, Google Drive, or similar). The video also serves a practical purpose. Fellows share a short public reflection each week, and it is worth both of us knowing in advance how it feels to speak to a camera without a script.
Shortlisted applicants will be invited to a conversation in late September. Selection considers the composition of the cohort as a whole alongside individual applications, so a strong application may not be selected if the cohort is already well represented in that tradition.
If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out.
