Welcome to our toolbox
The CSS Literacy Toolbox offers tools developed to support critical reflection and practice within TTCIs. While tools supporting natural science literacy or collaboration across disciplines and stakeholders are more widely available, tools focused on CSS — especially for confronting discursive and structural power — remain rare.
Our toolbox addresses this gap by offering practical, reflective methods to help researchers and practitioners identify, engage with, and respond to power dynamics embedded in institutions, processes, and knowledge systems. CSS perspectives view these dynamics as central to achieving transformative change.
Before you explore the toolbox.
Types of Power Our Tools Engage With
🗣️ Discursive Power
-
Power that acts through discourses (how something is talked about and represented), which shape what’s visible, valued, and legitimized.
-
Influences whose knowledge counts and which solutions are thinkable.
-
Includes framing power.
🏛️ Structural Power
-
Power that is reinforced through societal structures and institutions, rules, norms, and everyday practices.
-
Includes:
-
Operational Power — formal/informal rights and access
-
Rule-making Power — “power to make rules… and to bias rules towards certain values” (p. 3)
-
Source: Arias-Arévalo et al. (2023), p.3
CSS Literacy TooLbox.
Explore the tools.
Picture this: Seeing through Epistemic Lenses
Engage with flexible epistemic identities.
This tool helps participants explore how natural scientists and social scientists approach knowledge differently.
It promotes interdisciplinary perspectives, critical awareness and respect for differences in epistemic identity.
⏱ 70 min | Discursive Power (Framing Power)
The power of representation
Practice active listening as a way to reflect on how representation shapes power.
This tool helps you reflect on how being represented—or not—sends subtle but powerful messages about whose perspectives matter. It encourages participants to explore how these dynamics shape who gets to contribute to shape a shared future.
⏱ 15–20 min | Structural Power
