Latest contribution
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.
Recent contributions
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. To do this, i2S is building a curated repository, which, over time, aims to provide the basis for a full discipline.
Improving how we do research with indigenous and local communities
By Roxana Roos
How can we best include the perspectives of indigenous and local people in global change research? What are the major challenges in doing research with and within local and indigenous communities? How can we best deal with such challenges?
More and more, global challenges like climate change are being felt locally, and indigenous peoples are often the most vulnerable. The inclusion of the perspectives of indigenous and local people when developing ways to respond to societal challenges is increasingly the norm in the scientific world. For response strategies to be effective, communities need to be involved in their development. This is true for a whole range of topics, from social justice to climate adaptation. But getting local communities involved in research by ‘outsiders’ can be a challenge for a multitude of reasons.
I propose eight important barriers to the participation of local and indigenous communities, along with potential solutions, based on the experiences of practicing researchers who have worked with such communities in the Philippines, Mexico, Russia (Siberia), Greenland, Norway (Svalbard), Canada, Germany, Greece, Colombia, Vietnam, Mongolia, Bangladesh, France, and New Zealand.
Change planning: Dreamer, realist, critic
Edited by Gabriele Bammer
How can change be planned for in an effective way that creatively develops new ideas, plans the practicalities of their implementation and assesses risks?
The process described here is also referred to as Walt Disney circle, Disney creative strategy, and Disney brainstorming method, and is adapted from Nauheimer (1997).
Planning change involves four phases. The first three phases, in turn, are to 1) create new ideas, 2) plan the practicalities of their implementation and 3) assess the risks. Phase 4 is an iterative phase that reviews further input needed in each of the first three phases.
The process is conceived as involving three roles: dreamer, realist and critic. The idea of separating the process into these three roles is to ensure that each is fully considered without interference from the others.
Five questions for considering political context
Edited by Gabriele Bammer
How can researchers rapidly assess the political and institutional environment in which they are trying to exert influence? Why does understanding context matter?
Developing a rich, detailed understanding of the political environment in which a problem needs to be addressed can be a never-ending research project, not only because of the depth of scholarship that can be brought to bear, but also because political environments are often unstable and rapidly-changing. Few research projects have the luxury of large budgets and long time horizons in which to fully comprehend the environments that they seek to influence. Instead, practical rapid assessment tools can be valuable and improve the effectiveness of research input and actions.
One such tool for rapidly assessing political context was published in 2014 as part of the Rapid Outcome Mapping Approach: A Guide to Policy Engagement and Influence by John Young and colleagues and a modified version is reproduced here.
Highlighted contributions
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.
What strategies can be used to build trust at the science-policy interface?
A Partnership Outcome Spaces framework for transdisciplinary student-staff partnerships
By Giedre Kligyte, Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer, Jarnae Leslie, Tyler Key, Bethany Hooper and Eleanor Salazar
How can universities leverage students’ perspectives to create pathways towards lasting organisational change in higher education? How can we conceptualise institutional impact and outcomes of transdisciplinary student-staff partnerships?
Why student-staff partnerships?
Student-staff partnerships is an emerging approach to collaboration between students and staff members to create more egalitarian learning cultures in universities.
Principles for welcoming all voices
By Keith McCandless
Which principles would allow us to manage and lead groups that aspire to include all voices in shaping next steps and the future?
Liberating Structures is an approach to working together that puts innovative and facilitative power in the hands of everyone. It does this through 33 adaptable microstructures that allow groups of people of any size to be all-inclusive and to unleash everyone’s power.
Liberating Structures is based on ten principles that help guide choices and keep a community together while moving toward their set purpose.
Liberating Structures practice and principles come alive through active engagement. The path is co-evolving, iterative, and mutually shaped. As shown in the table below, each principle is couched as follows: When Liberating Structures are part of everyday interactions, it is possible to…
Each principle is accompanied by ‘Must Do’s’ and ‘Must Not Do’s’, also presented in the table below.