Latest contribution
Actor constellation role plays
By Alexandra Frangenheim.
How can transdisciplinary researchers gain a better understanding of systemic and multi-causal problems, including recognising different thought styles, appreciating the complexity of intervening, and anticipating points of conflict?
Actor constellation is a role play for identifying the relevance of various actors involved in specific problems. It is useful for problem framing when a research team is formed, for example to plan empirical inquiries or to identify relevant actors for addressing research questions. It also enables researchers from different disciplines and practitioners to uncover hidden dynamics and possible systemic solutions to the problem of interest, and to unlock the potential of shifting perspectives to ultimately develop new narratives.
When research participants represent relevant actors in a role play, their implicit assumptions about relationships, structures, interaction and actors’ knowledge are made explicit.
Recent contributions
The Möbius strip of knowledge: Rethinking the boundaries of knowing / Le ruban de Möbius du savoir : repenser les frontières de la connaissance
A French version of this post is available
How can we move beyond current definitions of disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, which reproduce a logic inherited from classificatory and cumulative thinking that rests on the principles of classical logic – identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded third? Instead how can we think about knowledge as mutually transforming, traversing, and reinventing itself in line with research processes that do not follow a linear progression but unfold through movements of torsion, resonance, and tension? How can we think about the dynamics of knowledge less as a trajectory than a living space in continuous transformation?
Tenth annual review
By Gabriele Bammer.
This is the tenth annual “state of the blog” review.
What are the major achievements of i2Insights for 2025? What have been the main themes of the contributions made? How do these reflect the aims of i2Insights?
This is the last post for 2025. We’ll be back on January 13, 2026 and already have a number of great contributions to start the new year.
Achievements
We celebrated three major achievements in 2025.
1. Our 10th anniversary
In November i2Insights marked its 10th birthday as a global, comprehensive, living toolkit.
We are particularly delighted that INTEREACH (Interdisciplinary Integration Research Careers Hub) is devoting its 2025-2026 webinar series to spotlighting themes from i2Insights.
Six key steps for stakeholder engagement
By Khara Grieger, Kimberly Bourne, Alison Deviney and Nourou Barry.
2. Kimberly Bourne (biography)
3. Alison Deviney (biography)
4. Nourou Barry (biography)
How can you systematically plan stakeholder engagement? What are the key issues that need to be considered? What guiding questions can help?
STEP 1: Identify and clarify engagement goals
Spend time at the beginning of the engagement process to clearly identify why you are engaging with stakeholders. Common goals include sharing knowledge or information; collecting insights, perspectives, or information from stakeholders; and co-creating or co-designing solutions. Other potential goals may include building trust and improving transparency, enhancing collaborations and partnerships, and improving the implementation of decisions.
Navigating power: A partial pragmatic map
By Katie Moon.
In research, how can we start to appreciate unexamined assumptions about what power is, where it resides, how it works, and who holds it, especially how these assumptions influence not only the problems we recognize, but the solutions we pursue? And importantly, who decides? How can we get a better idea of how power informs how we act: what interventions we attempt, whose knowledge we value, whose interests we centre, and what consequences we anticipate?
In this i2Insights contribution I provide an intentionally simplified orienting map that disaggregates power into six dimensions that mirror the ways researchers tend to separate and locate power into distinct domains to rationalise and evaluate interventions. I match these dimensions to three onto-epistemological frames—objective, constructionist, and relational—which were described in a previous i2Insights contribution A guide to ontology, epistemology, and philosophical perspectives for interdisciplinary researchers.
Highlighted contributions
Improving cross-disciplinary collaboration with strategy knotworking and ecocycle planning
By Nancy White
How can cross-disciplinary teams improve their project results and cross-team learning, especially when they are part of a portfolio of funded projects?
I have worked with cross disciplinary teams in international agriculture development, ecosystems management and mental health. For the most part, these are externally funded initiatives and have requirements both for results (application of the work) and for cross-team learning. Often there is not useful clarity about how funder and grantee agendas work in sync. And there is rarely opportunity or support for shared optimization and exploration across different portfolios of funded work.
I have used the six knotworking questions plus ecocycle planning from Liberating Structures to make it possible for a group to look back critically, assess the current state, and prospectively generate options to move forward.
Understanding diversity primer: 8. Personality
By Gabriele Bammer
What is a useful way of understanding personality and why is it important? How could personality affect how problems are framed, understood and responded to? How does personality affect how well those contributing to the research work together?
Personality is one of the most evident ways in which people differ. A useful way of coming to terms with this aspect of diversity is to focus on traits that predict behaviour. The HEXACO model is considered to be valid across cultures and focuses on 6 traits:
- Honesty-Humility
- Emotionality
- eXtraversion
- Agreeableness
- Conscientiousness
- Openness to experience.
Adaptive skilling
By Seema Purushothaman
How can tribal societies forge a healthy equilibrium wherein short-term gains in livelihoods can be achieved without permanent loss in quality and security of tribal life? Are there lessons beyond the developmental journeys of the marginalised to how societies can craft informed, deliberative and adaptive mechanisms to generate blended knowledge that links diverse systems of learning and practice?
We suggest that the answer lies in adaptive skilling (Purushothaman et al., 2022).
What is adaptive skilling?
The process of adaptive skilling is more than mere avoidance of deskilling or just ensuring the continuity of individual and social learning. It also differs from a ‘reskilling’ approach that brings back traditional skills or brings in alien and unsustainable skills.
Stakeholder engagement: Learning from Arnstein’s ladder and the IAP2 spectrum
By Gabriele Bammer
What can researchers interested in stakeholder engagement learn from two classic frameworks on citizen involvement in government decision making – Arnstein’s ladder and the IAP2 (International Association for Public Participation) spectrum of public participation?
Arnstein’s ladder
Sherry Arnstein (1969) developed an eight-rung ladder, shown in the figure below, to illustrate that there are significant gradations of citizen participation in government decision making.
The two bottom rungs are manipulation and therapy. Manipulation refers to putting citizens on “rubberstamp advisory committees or advisory boards” (p. 218) to “educate” them or engineer their support. Therapy involves changing the citizen view of the problem.