Latest contribution
Recognize and value linguistic and conceptual pluralism!
By Ulli Vilsmaier.
How can we best recognise and value linguistic and conceptual pluralism in naming what we do when we work in international environments? What are the limitations of descriptors such as transdisicplinarity, participatory action research and co-creation?
Terminology is really an issue when working across linguistic, disciplinary and professional boundaries. Working internationally we are now accustomed to using the hyper-centralized language, English; we tend to delegate translation more and more to machine-based algorithms; and we easily forget the consequences of working in a language that is not our mother tongue nor anchored in our cultural and social environment.
A hyper-centralized language has great benefits, but also major weaknesses.
Recent contributions
Training specialists to solve wicked problems
By Vladimir Mokiy.
How can a modern university train highly qualified specialists who are able to rethink and unambiguously solve wicked problems?
Here I build on my previous i2Insights contribution Systems transdisciplinarity as a metadiscipline, the methodology of which aims to unify and generalize complementary and non-complementary disciplinary knowledge and methodologies. This metadiscipline provides the basis of a proposed curriculum for a two-year training program at the masters level. The intention is that specialists would be trained in systems transdisciplinarity using a single curriculum to ensure a uniform level of professional capabilities and competencies.
The curriculum
The curriculum involves the organization of training in four sections.
Participatory content analysis
By Andréanne Chu Breton-Carbonneau.
How can participatory action research with trusted community-based organizations ensure that communities most impacted take part in interpretating the data, turning findings into deeper insights and more meaningful community-led solutions?
Participatory content analysis is a final step in participatory action research and enables a community research team to analyze data to identify content themes, visually map relationships, and derive actionable insights based on local knowledge and lived expertise. The community research team comprises academic researchers, community-based organization partners, and “resident researchers,” who are community members recruited—with support from the community-based organization partners—from groups most impacted by the research area.
Understanding and responding to a chaotic world
By Jamais Cascio.
Is it helpful to conceive the world as Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible or BANI? What do these terms mean and what mental models can help us survive in a BANI world?
I created BANI as an acronym in 2018 to better describe an increasingly chaotic world. BANI is a sense-making framework that recognises recurring themes in disruptions that make it increasingly difficult to understand the big picture and to make decisions. BANI is not saying something about the world, but rather about how we perceive it. It comes from a human inability to fully understand what to do when pattern-seeking and familiar explanations no longer work. It involves seeing the world as it is and letting go of illusions of system strength, control, predictability and certainty. BANI sets out to illuminate systems, but operates at a human level in a visceral and experiential way.
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.
Highlighted contributions
Dealing with differences in interests through principled negotiation
By Gabriele Bammer
How can the interests of a diverse group of researchers and stakeholders tackling a complex societal problem be understood and managed?
Interests arise when a person has a stake in something and stands to gain or lose depending on what happens to that something:
- researchers commonly have a stake in advancing their work and careers,
- stakeholders affected by a societal problem generally have a stake in improving the problem, and
- stakeholders in a position to do something about a problem generally have a stake in improving outcomes for the problem through their sphere of influence.
Interests relate not only to personal conditions or stakes (self-interest), but also to principles such as reducing inequities and promoting justice.
Participatory scenario planning
2. Tanja Hichert (biography)
3. Nadia Sitas (biography)
By Maike Hamann, Tanja Hichert and Nadia Sitas
Within the many different ways of developing scenarios, what are useful general procedures for participatory processes? What resources are required? What are the strengths and weaknesses of involving stakeholders?
Scenarios are vignettes or narratives of possible futures, and when used in a set, usually depict purposefully divergent visions of what the future may hold. The point of scenario planning is not to predict the future, but to explore its uncertainties. Scenario development has a long history in corporate and military strategic planning, and is also commonly used in global environmental assessments to link current decision-making to future impacts. Participatory scenario planning extends scenario development into the realm of stakeholder-engaged research.
In general, the process for participatory scenario planning broadly follows three phases.
A responsible approach to intersectionality
By Ellen Lewis and Anne Stephens
2. Anne Stephens (biography)
What is intersectionality? How can it be used systemically and responsibly?
When you google the term over 66,400,000 results are returned. It is a term used by government and businesses, as well as change agents. But is it helpful and are there ways that we should be thinking about intersectionality and its inclusion in our everyday lives?
After describing intersectionality, we introduce a framework for systemic intersectionality that brings together issues that arise within three social dimensions: gender equality, environments and marginalised voices. We refer to this as the GEMs framework.
What is Intersectionality?
Intersectionality is a term first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. It is a prevalent way to understand the effect of more than one type of discrimination.
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.