Latest contribution
Participatory countermapping
By Moné Vasquez Ladron de Guevara and Pablo Mansilla Quiñones.
2. Pablo Mansilla Quiñones (biography)
How can Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant and peasant communities, as well as others, co-create maps that capture their memories, practices, and territorial knowledge, especially in contexts marked by territorial or environmental conflict, and in histories and geographies shaped by coloniality? How can territorial representations and the spatial organization imposed by extractivist processes that dispossess people of their land be challenged? How can the scientific-technical rationality underlying conventional mapmaking―rationality that often erases multiple, subaltern forms of territoriality and knowledge embedded in these territories―be questioned?
Countermapping can also be considered to be a participatory action research process that supports territorial struggles through the production of maps grounded in local knowledge.
There is no universal methodological formula for this tool. Rather, a situated methodology is required that can be adapted to each context and the ways in which people live and connect to their territories. We propose a five-stage process and then discuss ethical considerations, as well as strengths and challenges.
Recent contributions
Transdisciplinary learning as U-shaped learning
By Gemma O’Sullivan.
What is involved in transdisciplinary learning?
The transdisciplinary learning process can be seen as the development of two capacities: knowledge integration and actionable knowledge (closing the knowledge-action gap).
Integration capacity refers to the ability to integrate knowledge from different disciplines, epistemologies, cultures, communities and individuals across society to collectively achieve a greater understanding of, and solutions for, complex problems.
Actionable knowledge capacity refers to the ability to create knowledge that leads to action.
The two capacities―integration capacity and actionable knowledge capacity―are connected and enabled by a ballast of interpersonal, intrapersonal and cognitive competencies.
Researcher motivations affect equitable collaboration with local and indigenous peoples
By Roxana Roos.
What motivates researchers in choosing to work with local and indigenous communities? How do these motivations shape how much say local and indigenous people actually get in the research that affects them? What do researchers need to do to ensure that collaboration is equitable?
Here, I describe two clusters of motivations.
The first cluster revolves around verbs such as “understand,” “collect,” “study,” and “know.” Researchers in this group are largely driven by personal interest, curiosity, and a professional identity (“I am an anthropologist. It is my job to find out how people live”). Here, the researcher is the active party: they interview, observe, analyze, and publish. The local and indigenous people, on the other hand, play a more passive role; their practices and narratives are studied rather than being part of a partnership.
The multidimensional process of co-creation: Five consistent dimensions
By Katrina Messiha.
How can we avoid co-creation being used as a general term for any form of stakeholder engagement? Are there key dimensions that co-creation processes should aim to consider?
Based on analysis across 9 research fields, several types of co-creation and explicit theories, colleagues and I (Messiha et al., 2025) argue that co-creation is a multidimensional process, with five dimensions:
- Multi-stakeholder collaborative action;
- Process of co-learning towards innovation;
- Contextual knowledge production;
- Generating meaning; and
- Open, trustful and inclusive dialogue.
These dimensions offer a conceptual tool for planning, examining and strengthening co-creation research.
Fulfillment, balance and process: Co-active coaching principles for team science
By Joanna Kaniewska and Gemma Jiang.
2. Gemma Jiang (biography)
What is Co-Active Coaching and how can it be applied in teams?
Co-Active Coaching (Kimsey-House et al., 2018) is a coaching method built on the premise that people are naturally creative, resourceful, and capable of finding their own answers. Rather than acting as an expert or trainer who gives solutions, the coach partners with coachees in a collaborative process that helps them gain clarity, make intentional choices, and create meaningful change.
In this i2Insights contribution, we focus on the three core principles of Co-Active Coaching—fulfillment, balance, and process—and show how they can be used in teamwork.
Fulfillment: reconnecting people to their purpose
Fulfillment coaching is about connecting work to meaning. It can be particularly useful when team members are disengaged, anxious, or questioning the value of their work.
Highlighted contributions
An analytical framework for knowledge co-production
By Marianne Penker
How can students and academics starting out in transdisciplinary research begin to come to grips with knowledge co-production?
Colleagues and I developed a useful analytical framework comprising the following four elements:
- typology of actor roles (who?)
- research phases (when?)
- objectives and forms of actor integration (why?)
- types of knowledge (what?).
These four elements are illustrated in the figure below.
The development of the framework was based on the literature and our experiences in running a doctoral school on transdisciplinary sustainability research (see Enengel et al. 2012).
Improving facilitated modelling
By Vincent de Gooyert
Here I explore two outcomes of facilitated modelling – cognitive change and consensus forming – and ask: how can achieving those outcomes be improved?
But first, what is facilitated modelling?
Facilitated modelling is an approach where operational researchers act as facilitators to model an issue collaboratively with stakeholders, usually in a workshop. Operational research, also known as operations research, seeks to improve decision-making by developing and applying analytical methods.
Two central aims of facilitated modelling are to achieve cognitive change and to form consensus.
Cognitive change is the idea that participants of facilitated modelling workshops come in with a certain worldview, and that the intervention leads them to learn about the issue and accordingly change their minds.
Decolonising your writing
By kate harriden
As an Indigenous person, it is draining, infuriating and tedious to consistently encounter recently written academic material that invokes, seemingly uncritically, colonial tropes. Paired with these tropes is usually a mix of arrogance, condescension and ignorance on which notions of ‘western’ superiority are based. I am Totally. Over. It. Not only are these tropes inaccurate and offensive, they allow the colonized researcher to avoid critiquing the impacts of colonization and (un)conscious biases in their work.
If you don’t understand ‘the problem’, chances are you are part of it, so sit down and open your mind as we go through this together. Hopefully the tips provided on how to decolonize your academic writing will start your journey into decolonizing writing.
Learning to recognize colonial writing
Undoubtedly you have read substantially more academic material imbued with colonial values and assumptions than decolonial academic material.
Lessons for strengthening community-university partnerships
By David D. Hart, Bridie McGreavy, Anthony Sutton, Gabrielle V. Hillyer and Darren J. Ranco
In an increasingly polarized world, how can partnerships between communities and universities strengthen the kinds of deliberative and democratic practices that might help address many local and global challenges? How can such partnerships improve practices that involve listening and responding across differences (the deliberative part)? How can they help find ways to make shared decisions and take joint actions, knowing that complete agreement or mutual understanding may never be possible (the democratic part)?