Jane Palmer – Integration and Implementation Insights

Pause… How art and literature can transform transdisciplinary research

August 3, 2023August 23, 2022

By Jane Palmer and Dena Fam

authors_jane-palmer_dena-fam — 1. Jane Palmer (biography)
2. Dena Fam (biography)

What might make us stop and think differently about the ways in which we interact with our environment and others, human and nonhuman? What kind of knowing about acute threats to the natural environment will sufficiently motivate action?

We suggest that art and literature can offer us a pause in which we might, firstly, imagine other less anthropocentric ways of being in the world, and secondly, a way into Basarab Nicolescu’s “zone of non-resistance” (2014, p. 192), where we become truly open to new transdisciplinary forms of collaboration.

Writers, artists and scholars have canvassed many ways of ‘pausing’ our accustomed thought processes: mindfulness and ‘mindwandering’, and solitude, as well as post-representational research, which is sensory, affective and exploratory. We are interested particularly in the kind of ‘pause’ that constitutes a transformative experience that changes our relations with others, human and nonhuman.

Doing a transdisciplinary PhD? Four tips to convince the examiners about your data

November 12, 2020March 20, 2018

By Jane Palmer, Dena Fam, Tanzi Smith and Jenny Kent

author-mosaic_jane-palmer,_dena-fam_tanzi-smith_jenny-kent — 1. Jane Palmer (biography)
2. Dena Fam (biography)
3. Tanzi Smith (biography)
4. Jenny Kent (biography)

How can research writing best be crafted to present transdisciplinarity? How can doctoral candidates effectively communicate to examiners a clear understanding of ‘data’, what it is and how the thesis uses it convincingly?

The authors have all recently completed transdisciplinary doctorates in the field of sustainable futures and use this experience to highlight the challenges of crafting a convincing piece of research writing that also makes claims of transdisciplinarity (Palmer et al., 2018). We propose four strategies for working with data convincingly when undertaking transdisciplinary doctoral research.

Storytelling ethnography as a way of doing transdisciplinary research

January 7, 2022November 29, 2016

By Jane Palmer

Storytelling ethnography is a valuable tool if your research traverses several disciplines and aims for insights that transcend all of them. Stories not only integrate knowledge from diverse disciplines, but can also “change the way people act, the way they use available knowledge” (Griffiths 2007).

The special qualities of transdisciplinarity are:

its potential for integrative inquiry and emergent solutions,
its engagement with community and other non-academic knowledges, and
the breadth of its outcomes for researchers, participants and the wider community.

These are also qualities of what I call storytelling ethnography.