Latest contribution
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.
Five typical steps
Recent contributions
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.
I argue that the chaos in the world is usefully explained as:
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.
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.
Highlighted contributions
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.
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.