Navigating inter- and transdisciplinary PhD supervision: Practical questions for students and supervisors

By Erika Angarita, Anna Hajdu, Yanyan Huang, BinBin Pearce, Guadalupe Peres-Cajías, Hussein Zeidan and Yuanyuan Zhu.

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1. Erika Angarita; 2. Anna Hajdu; 3. Yanyan Huang; 4. BinBin Pearce; 5. Guadalupe Peres-Cajías; 6. Hussein Zeidan; 7. Yuanyuan Zhu (biographies)

How can a student and their supervisors develop a shared map for a PhD project when they come from different disciplinary traditions, hold different assumptions about knowledge and quality, and operate within institutional systems that are still largely structured around single disciplines? How can they navigate what may feel obvious to one and may be invisible to another?

We developed a structured checklist of questions designed to support supervision conversations and reduce tensions resulting from unspoken assumptions. The checklist aims to be a guide for thoughtful, ongoing reflection between supervisors and doctoral students. These questions cover five areas where misunderstandings commonly arise:

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A framework for considering context in evaluation of transdisciplinary research projects

By Julia Schegg, Rea Pärli, Manuel Fischer and Eva Lieberherr.

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1. Julia Schegg (biography)
2. Rea Pärli (biography)
3. Manuel Fischer (biography)
4. Eva Lieberherr (biography)

How do contextual factors influence the effects of transdisciplinary research projects? How can assessment of transdisciplinary research move from only considering outcome effectiveness to understanding the reasons behind how and why something works?

Our framework considers both context and the effects of transdisciplinary research projects, as summarised in the figure below. Each aspect of the framework is described in more detail.

Context

We based the conceptualization of context for any given problem on three established frameworks from policy studies, emphasising system conditions, public action resources and events.

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Developing a conceptual framework to support communication, collaboration and integration

By Hanna Salomon, Jialin Zhang and Sabine Hoffmann.

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1. Hanna Salomon (biography)
2. Jialin Zhang (biography)
3. Sabine Hoffmann (biography)

How can the process of developing a conceptual framework in an inter- and transdisciplinary research project itself create valuable space for reflection, alignment, and learning?

What we have found when developing a project-specific conceptual framework is that the process is as important, if not more important, for the research team than the emerging conceptual framework itself. The process provides space and time to discuss and deep-dive into concepts and terms used within the research team leading to much needed discussions and insights for the individual researchers.

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The Cultiv8 tool Part 2: Actionable insights for navigating power

By Sobia Khan and Julia E. Moore.

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1. Sobia Khan (biography)
2. Julia E Moore (biography)

How can we move beyond considering power as the source of implementation challenges and bottlenecks, and instead focus on how we can change or shift the nature of power? How might you experience implementation differently if you knew how to unpack power dynamics and had strategies to navigate power in your implementation practice or research?

This i2Insights contribution is a companion to our previous post on cultivating trust. Trust and power go hand in hand and can’t be dealt with in silos – when considering trust, you also need to consider power and vice versa. The framework presented here helps to understand the dimensions of power and actionable steps for navigating each of these dimensions. Here we describe a second aspect of the Cultiv8 tool to unpack power dynamics.

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The Cultiv8 tool Part 1: Actionable insights for cultivating trust

By Julia E. Moore and Sobia Khan.

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1. Julia E Moore (biography)
2. Sobia Khan (biography)

What are some useful ways of thinking about trust when developing plans to implement your research or strengthen your team? More importantly, what are some practical ways to build trust both as an individual and as an organisation?

Indeed, when asked about some of the most challenging parts of implementing changes and taking part in research collaborations, people often talk about trust. Trust is essential for equity and for working with people in effective ways, but so few of us are trained in how to build trust.

This i2Insights contribution provides a practical approach to thinking about trust, along with actionable steps to cultivate trust to help you achieve your goals, whether you are working with others to implement evidence or looking to strengthen your team dynamics.

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From slogan to practice: Restoring transdisciplinarity as a serious way of working

By Hussein Zeidan.

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Hussein Zeidan (biography)

Do you sense a growing gap between the promise of transdisciplinarity and the way it is often practised? Have you recognised instances where a paper praises integration, yet treats it as little more than a symbolic gesture, instead of a serious intellectual and ethical commitment?

How did we get here, and how can we reclaim transdiscipinarity from superficial habits that weaken its potential?

How did we get here?

The rise of transdisciplinarity has been remarkable. Funding agencies promote it. Universities showcase it. New centres and programmes are built around it. This visibility has helped many people experiment with new forms of collaboration.

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A framework for navigating the impact of using artificial intelligence on collaborative research communication

By Faye Miller.

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Faye Miller (biography)

How can research teams recognise when their use of artificial intelligence is affecting their ability to integrate different knowledge and perspectives? How can they navigate the impact of artificial intelligence on their collaborative processes?

When research teams use artificial intelligence in collaborative work, new complexities emerge, especially subtle shifts in communication patterns that can fundamentally alter how teams integrate different perspectives and knowledge forms. Consider an environmental team relying on artificial intelligence summaries across hydrology, ecology, and policy. They might miss crucial disciplinary nuances, or follow its “evidence-based” recommendations that may clash with community priorities.

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Three lessons for designing serious games for educational settings

By Alice H. Aubert.

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Alice H. Aubert (biography)

What is Triadic Game Design and what lessons does it provide for designing and analysing serious games in an educational setting?

Triadic Game Design

The Triadic Game Design is a design framework for serious games that defines three essential, interrelated elements—Reality, Meaning, and Play—that need to be integrated and balanced (Harteveld 2011).

Reality ensures the game represents the real world sufficiently (ie., in a valid and reliable way that can be understood by the target players). Subject-matter experts model the Reality in the game focusing on the problem, its influencing factors, and relationships.

Meaning pertains to the game’s purpose and its transference to the real world, to create added value through playing the game.

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Moving from epistemic paternalism to transformative transdisciplinarity

By David Ludwig and Charbel N. El-Hani.

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1. David Ludwig (biography)
2. Charbel N. El-Hani (biography)

How can we overcome the epistemic paternalism that has long shaped relations between science and society? How can a transformative vision of transdisciplinarity emerge from the interplay between epistemic diversity and epistemic decolonization? 

Demands for transdisciplinary research reflect an intricate politics of knowledge that can be described through a triad of paternalism, diversity, and decolonization. Epistemic paternalism has become widely criticized in many debates about development and modernization. For example, international development projects are often deeply paternalistic by assuming that science and technology of the “developed world” should be simply exported into the “underdeveloped world,” where they are imagined as generating economic growth and societal progress.

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Recognize and value linguistic and conceptual pluralism!

By Ulli Vilsmaier.

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Ulli Vilsmaier (biography)

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.

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Training specialists to solve wicked problems

By Vladimir Mokiy.

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Vladimir Mokiy (biography)

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.

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Participatory content analysis

By Andréanne Chu Breton-Carbonneau.

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Andréanne Chu Breton-Carbonneau (biography)

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.

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