Latest contribution
Cultivating epistemic humility in research teams
By Faye Miller.
What makes it so challenging for research teams to be truly receptive to being wrong? And what can teams do to make doubt expressible and useful?
Being aware that knowledge is always situational, incomplete, and prone to error, as well as the willingness to hold opinions tentatively, be receptive to change, and recognise the boundaries of understanding, are all components of epistemic humility. Humility about what one knows and can know is an intellectual quality in individual researchers. Yet epistemic humility also has a structural dimension: which doubts get expressed, whose knowledge is heard, and how teams handle what they don’t yet know, are challenges that go beyond the individual researcher to shape how research teams function.
This i2Insights contribution is an attempt to highlight two challenges that need to be addressed:
- the confidence trap, built on the pressure to exude certainty, and
- the silence trap, arising from the social dynamics that can suppress productive doubt.
Recent contributions
Tinkering workshops: Exploring children’s perceptions of problems and potential solutions
By Ina Opitz, Melanie Kryst, Pia von den Benken and Audrey Podann.
2. Melanie Kryst (biography)
3. Pia von den Benken (biography)
4. Audrey Podann (biography)
How can children’s everyday experiences and perceptions of problems and solutions be made accessible for potential inclusion in transdisciplinary research? How can these processes also be used to familiarise children with the fundamentals of transdisciplinarity?
We have developed a three-hour “tinkering workshop,” based on design science principles, to encourage children to think about their environment and identify problems and solutions in a playful and creative way.
Our tinkering workshop is suitable for children aged between 9 and 12 years. We have tried it out in four workshops with a total of 56 children, focusing on the problem of plastic waste.
Modifying the Delphi method with continuous real-time data analysis
By Benedikt Steiner.
How can the Delphi method be modified to provide data aggregation and visualisation in real time? Which aspects of the Delphi method are preserved and which are changed? How does such a modified method work best?
A brief overview of the Delphi method
The Delphi method is a structured elicitation process that invites experts to explore complex, uncertain or contested topics. It aims to make the assumptions, expectations, and uncertainties of the experts involved explicit.
Key characteristics include:
- anonymity of participants, reducing social pressure and dominance effects
- iterative assessment, allowing experts to reflect and revise their judgments
- controlled feedback, showing aggregated group responses
- aggregation, rather than forced agreement.
Transdisciplinarity in education: Aligning conceptualisation, configuration and competencies
By Hussein Zeidan.
How can we move from broad visions of transdisciplinarity to concrete educational practices that students can meaningfully engage with? What kinds of course designs genuinely support learning in complex, real‑world settings? And how do we ensure clarity, for both students and educators, about what these courses are meant to achieve?
These questions sit at the heart of many conversations among educators seeking to bring transdisciplinarity into their teaching practice. We want students to learn how to navigate complex problems, draw on multiple ways of knowing and develop the mindsets that allow them to work across boundaries with confidence. Yet the very flexibility that makes transdisciplinarity appealing can also make it difficult to design courses that are clear, supportive and aligned.
The essential conditions for, and characteristics of, complexity
By Jean Boulton.
What are the underpinning necessities or conditions—the essential ingredients—that lead to and engender the qualities or characteristics of the complex world, especially its processual and emergent nature?
Three conditions for complexity: the essential ingredients
A watch or intricate machine is not complex. Nor is a saucer of water. So, when do we regard something as complex? What are the necessary conditions for complexity fully to be realised?
These are:
- open boundaries
- diversity
- reflexive inter-relationships among constituents.
Let’s look at each of these in more detail.
Highlighted contributions
Understanding the links between coloniality, forced displacement and knowledge production
By Alemu Tesfaye and Truphena Mukuna
2. Truphena Mukuna (biography)
What is the relationship between coloniality, forced displacement and knowledge production? How is this relevant to decolonization efforts?
The history of forced displacement can be traced back to the colonial era, during which European powers established colonies in various parts of the world, displacing and often subjugating indigenous populations. The displacement of indigenous peoples often involved the forced removal from their ancestral lands and the disruption of their social and cultural systems.
In this context, knowledge production was used to justify and legitimize the displacement of indigenous populations.
Diffusion of innovations
By James W. Dearing
How—and why—do people decide to try new things?
Studies of diffusion have frequently demonstrated a mathematically consistent sigmoid pattern (the S-shaped curve, see figure below) of over-time adoption for innovations. Innovations include new beliefs, practices, programs, policies, and technologies.
The “S” shape is due to the positive engagement of informal opinion leaders in talking about and modeling an innovation for others to hear about and see. The initial slow rate of adoption gives way to a rapidly accelerating rate, which then slows as fewer non-adopters remain. Alternatively and more commonly, when informally influential people do not get positively engaged or when they ignore or actively reject an innovation, diffusion does not occur and the resulting slope of a cumulative curve stays flat or turns negative.
Children as research actors
By Frédéric Darbellay and Zoe Moody
2. Zoe Moody (biography)
From a transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge perspective, how can children’s capacity for reflection, analysis, curiosity, discovery and creativity be recognized? Why and how can the involvement of children in the research process be promoted by giving them a co-researcher status? Based on our experience of research on and with children, we present the main issues and potential of this type of research.
1. Research with Children
Recent developments in the fields of childhood studies and children’s rights studies highlight the benefits of carrying out research with and for children rather than about them.
Research with children is based on a horizontal model of knowledge production, that recognizes children as the real experts on what it is like to “be a child.” Combining children’s insider views of their experiences with the outsider views of adult researchers allows movement beyond the possible replication of research about children and production of original and innovative knowledge.
A practical framework for transforming academia through inter- and transdisciplinarity / Un marco práctico para transformar el mundo académico mediante la interdisciplinariedad y la transdisciplinariedad
By Bianca Vienni Baptista and Danilo Streck
2. Danilo Streck (biography)
A Spanish version of this post is available.
How can the role of inter- and transdisciplinarity be re-imagined at higher education institutions?
This i2Insights contribution presents a practical framework developed with Julie Thompson Klein and based on fifteen case studies from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, Latin America, and North America that described how inter- and transdisciplinarity have been institutionalised in higher education.
Our framework is a practical tool that offers a means to rethink or imagine how interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary initiatives are (or will be) embedded in institutions and with which purposes.