Marianne Penker – Integration and Implementation Insights

An analytical framework for knowledge co-production

September 5, 2023May 30, 2023

By Marianne Penker

How can students and academics starting out in transdisciplinary research begin to come to grips with knowledge co-production?

Colleagues and I developed a useful analytical framework comprising the following four elements:

typology of actor roles (who?)
research phases (when?)
objectives and forms of actor integration (why?)
types of knowledge (what?).

These four elements are illustrated in the figure below.

The development of the framework was based on the literature and our experiences in running a doctoral school on transdisciplinary sustainability research (see Enengel et al. 2012).

Externalizing implicit expectations and assumptions in transdisciplinary research

August 3, 2023January 17, 2023

By Verena Radinger-Peer, Katharina Gugerell and Marianne Penker

authors_verena-radinger-peer_katharina-gugerell_marianne-penker — 1. Verena Radinger-Peer (biography)
2. Katharina Gugerell (biography)
3. Marianne Penker (biography

How can implicit expectations and assumptions of team members in transdisciplinary research collaborations be identified?

We used Q-methodology as a tool to make diverse expectations and perceptions of transdisciplinary research collaborations tangible and thus negotiable.

Q-methodology is an established explorative, semi-quantitative method for investigating distinctive viewpoints of a given population based on inverted factor analysis. While we do not explain Q methodology here, it is increasingly used and we refer those who want to find out more to Watts and Stenner (2012).

One disadvantage of the Q-method is the amount of time and effort that has to be invested in developing the Q-statements. Here we offer the statements we developed through an extensive process in our study for others to use either in their own Q methodology or in surveys.

Ten lessons from a transdisciplinary PhD program in sustainable development

February 13, 2020March 9, 2017

By Marianne Penker

Should a doctoral student specialise in transdisciplinary sustainable development research? What are the opportunities and challenges associated with undertaking a program that requires research integration and implementation?

At the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna in Austria, teams of PhD-students and academic supervisors collaborated with representatives from regions, cities, public authorities, businesses or civil society to solve pressing and often wicked sustainability problems. We learnt the following ten lessons.