Latest contribution
Weaving knowledge systems: Honouring Indigenous knowledge
By Chels Marshall, Rosalie Chapple and Joanne Wilson
2. Rosalie Chapple (biography)
3. Joanne Wilson (biography)
What is Indigenous science? How can it be properly recognised? How can we overcome current practices where Indigenous knowledge-holders are generally not regarded as experts, their knowledge is not used as evidence or in decision-making, and non-Indigenous people think Indigenous knowledge needs to be ‘validated’ by Western science?
Lack of recognition of Indigenous data sovereignty raises concerns about the conduct of research – by and for whom? Indigenous cultural knowledge is often used without permission or proper protocols, and is used and appropriated under Western science.
What does successfully honouring Indigenous knowledge look like?
“Our culture is the science.”
Recent contributions
Navigating the complexities of decolonizing knowledge production
By Alemu Tesfaye
Has the movement to decolonize knowledge production caught your attention in recent academic discussions? Do you recognize how colonialism has deeply influenced traditional knowledge systems, embedding biases and inequalities in our academic practices? Given the noble aspiration behind decolonizing knowledge, have you ever paused to critically examine its feasibility and achievability? Are we embarking on a realistic journey towards change, or are we chasing an idealistic endeavor?
Understanding the Challenge
My research journey into decolonizing knowledge production, particularly within the context of forced displacement, revealed stark contrasts between conventional academic narratives and the rich, nuanced perspectives of historically marginalized communities. This experience highlighted the deep-rooted biases and structural inequalities embedded within traditional knowledge systems. Decolonizing knowledge production entails dismantling the structures, biases, and power dynamics that have historically favored Western knowledge systems.
Decision support interventions
By Etiënne Rouwette and Alberto Franco
2. Alberto Franco (biography)
What are interventions to support team decision making? And how can interventions enable team decision making to become a rigorous, transparent and defensible process?
Interventions are procedures designed to improve a decision making process. Within the content of team decision making, an intervention is comprised of designed facilitated activities carried out in order to help a team achieve its goals. Team goals include generating a better and shared understanding of a situation of interest or concern, producing a recommendation on how to respond to the situation, or simply deciding what to do next regarding the situation.
Because team members are likely to have different views and goals regarding the situation, facilitation is central to an intervention. Specifically, facilitated activities are designed to encourage the active participation of team members in discussions, so that a mutual understanding within the team can be achieved. In addition, these activities also play a critical role in fostering the development of integrative solutions that create a sense of shared responsibility for their implementation.
Eight tips for collaborations between researchers and visual artists
By Erin Walsh and Alice Wetherell
2. Alice Wetherell (biography)
Visual abstracts, media releases, infographics, posters, and publications….
More and more often, to enhance their outreach, engagement and impact, researchers need to present their work in a visual way. For some, this can feel like being asked to present their work in a different language. Not everyone has the time or the skills to translate their research into visual form. Working with visual artists can help, but sometimes the barrier between metaphorical text and visual language can make effective collaboration difficult.
What are some easy steps for both researchers and visual artists to make this collaborative process work smoothly?
We are, respectively, a scientific illustrator and multimedia artist. Between us, we have over twenty years of experience helping researchers illustrate their work.
Here are eight tips that we’ve found can make collaboration between researchers and visual artists more efficient, productive, and enjoyable. Seven of the eight tips apply to researchers; five of the eight to visual artists.
Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) 3.0: An updated framework to foster expertise for tackling complex problems
By Gabriele Bammer
How can researchers interested in tackling complex societal and environmental problems easily find and draw on what they need from inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, systems thinking, action research, post-normal science and a range of other ways of combining disciplinary and stakeholder perspectives in order to bring about improvements? How can the necessary expertise be fostered and supported in a systematic way?
These are the questions that I have been addressing for more than 20 years in considering whether a new discipline – Integration and Implementation Sciences or i2S – could provide a way forward. i2S 3.0 is the third conceptualization of this discipline and the current version is summarised in the figure below.
At this stage in its development, i2S is focused on providing a framework and conduit for sharing concepts, methods, processes and other tools that are currently fragmented across inter- and transdisciplinarity, systems thinking, action research, post-normal science and other approaches.
Highlighted contributions
A tool for transdisciplinary research planning and evaluation
By Brian Belcher, Rachel Claus, Rachel Davel, Stephanie Jones and Daniela Pinto
What are the characteristics of high-quality transdisciplinary research? As research approaches increasingly cross disciplinary bounds and engage stakeholders in the research process to more effectively address complex problems, traditional academic research assessment criteria are insufficient and may even constrain transdisciplinary research development and use. There is a need for appropriate principles and criteria to guide transdisciplinary research practice and evaluation.
In response to this need, Belcher et al. (2016) developed the Transdisciplinary Research Quality Assessment Framework based on a systematic review of literature that discussed the definition and measurement of research quality for inter- and trans- disciplinary research.
Give-and-take matrix for transdisciplinary projects
By Michael Stauffacher and Sibylle Studer
2. Sibylle Studer (biography)
Transdisciplinary research projects often have multiple components, including sub-projects that involve co-production with various stakeholders, more standard discipline-based pieces gathering specific understandings of the problem, and investigations into options for transforming the problem situations.
How can the individual parts of transdisciplinary research projects be effectively aligned? How can interactions and integration within the whole research team be improved? What’s needed to make mutual expectations explicit and to identify possibilities for further collaboration?
The give-and-take matrix provides a structured process to:
- Specify links between sub-projects and who will do what
- Connect different contributions
- Identify knowledge to be shared between sub-projects and how that will occur
- Assist with problem framing at the beginning of a project
- Once a project is underway, explore how project results relate to each other and identify useful further analyses
- Provide a way of cross-referencing when a project report is written.
Theory of Change in a nutshell
By Heléne Clark
How can you plan to make change happen or evaluate the effectiveness of actions you took? How can you link desired long-term goals with all the conditions that must be in place? How can you map out a step-by-step pathway that highlights your assumptions and expectations?
Theory of Change (ToC) is a graphic and narrative explanation of how and why a change process is expected to happen in a particular context.
At its heart, Theory of Change spells out initiative or program logic. It defines long-term goals and then maps backward to identify changes thought to be necessary to the goal that need to happen earlier (preconditions).
Theory of Change purports to explain change process in diagrammatically modeling all the causal linkages in an initiative, ie., its shorter-term, intermediate, and longer-term outcomes.
Trust at the science-policy interface
By Chris Cvitanovic and Rebecca Shellock
2. Rebecca Shellock (biography)
How important is trust at the science-policy interface? How can you build trust when working with decision-makers? And how can trust be repaired after a break-down?
How important is trust when working at the science-policy interface?
Trust is important at 3 levels:
- Trust in individuals (eg., an individual researcher and an individual policy-maker), which is important for providing space for open dialogue;
- Trust in the research organisation, which focuses on organisational legitimacy and credibility, and acting in a way that is free of bias;
- Trust in the process by which knowledge is generated and exchanged.