Community Member

What is the role of theory in transdisciplinary research?

August 16, 2023February 17, 2016

By Workshop Group on Theory at 2015 Basel International Transdisciplinary Conference

Theory makes clear what transdisciplinary researchers value and stand for; we therefore have a responsibility to build and articulate it.

If we think about transdisciplinary research as a space situated between different epistemic cultures and practices, as well as being culturally contextualised, we can expect different theories of transdisciplinary research, as well as different significance and functions of theory, and different ways of working with theories, in transdisciplinary research.

Theory can contribute to the identity and development of transdisciplinary research. Theory or conceptual models can provide practical guidance to the challenging problems transdisciplinary research tackles. These can help guide the transdisciplinary research process.

Theory can make certain research fields visible, giving them a place in the landscape of knowledge.

Let’s play: Co-creating award courses for designing, teaching, researching, and facilitating transdisciplinarity – Transacademic Interface Managers as an example

August 14, 2023February 10, 2016

By Katja Brundiers and Arnim Wiek

Tanja Golja and Dena Fam concluded their article ‘Supporting academics learning to design, teach and research td-programs in higher education‘ with an invitation to other higher education and research institutions to share the state of play and their opportunities for collaboration. We are excited to respond to this call.

At Arizona State University (U.S.) various programs exist – across its schools and colleges – that allow students to work in transdisciplinary settings. These programs are avant-garde in many respects, e.g., pedagogical design, students’ learning outcomes, relationships with practice partners, implementation with real-world impact. Our experience with building a transdisciplinary and solution-oriented learning program at the School of Sustainability is documented in the article ‘Integrating Problem-and Project-based Learning into Sustainability Programs‘.

Three options for research impact: Informing, driving, triggering

August 14, 2023February 3, 2016

By Gabriele Bammer

As a researcher, do you seek to inform change, drive it or trigger it? Informing change involves providing the best facts and evidence, driving change means working to achieve a particular research-based outcome, and triggering change involves solving a problem that sets in train a chain of effects that go far beyond the research itself. They involve different skills and have different risks.

Informing is probably the most common way in which researchers seek to achieve impact and much has been written about good communication strategies to make research published in peer-reviewed journals and books more accessible.

Informing is probably the most common way in which researchers seek to achieve impact and much has been written about good communication strategies to make research published in peer-reviewed journals and books more accessible. This includes effective use of social media and producing short, punchy, well-targeted verbal or written articles or briefs.

Can mapping mental models improve research implementation?

August 14, 2023January 27, 2016

By Katrin Prager

We all have different mental models of the environment and the people around us. They help us make sense of what we experience. In a recent project exploring how to improve soil management (PDF 250KB), Michiel Curfs and I used data collected from Spanish farmers and our own experience to develop and compare the mental model of a typical Spanish farmer growing olives with that of a hypothetical scientist. How did their mental models of soil degradation differ? Mainly in terms of understanding the role of ploughing, and the importance of drivers for certain soil management activities. There were only a few areas of overlap: both scientist and farmer were concerned about fire risk and acknowledged weeds. We emphasise the importance of two-way communication, and recommend starting by focusing on areas of overlap and then moving to areas that are different. Without integrating understandings from both mental models, the scientist will carry on making recommendations for reducing soil degradation that the farmer cannot implement or does not find relevant.

Katie Moon and Vanessa Adams used a more elaborate approach to map natural resource managers’ mental models of invasive species management (2MB PDF available from linked page).

Supporting academics’ learning to design, teach and research transdisciplinary programs in higher education: What’s the state of play?

August 14, 2023January 20, 2016

By Tanja Golja and Dena Fam

In their 2013 report on the significance of transdisciplinary approaches to advance scientific discovery and address formidable societal challenges (PDF 700KB), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) put out a call to “expand education paradigms to model transdisciplinary approaches” (p. xiii). Ought we be considering whether transdisciplinary approaches might reconfigure education paradigms, and if so, why?

As a case in point, most Australian universities offer professional learning opportunities for academics involved in coursework teaching and research supervision (e.g. a Graduate Certificate in higher education learning and teaching). Typically, such formal scholarly programs introduce teaching academics to current educational principles, practices and research in higher education.

However, these and similar academic programs have been slow to respond to the increasing interest in transdisciplinary education and research.

The promise of using similar methods across disciplines

August 14, 2023January 13, 2016

By Allison Metz

Interdisciplinarity has the potential to broaden and deepen our understanding and application of methods and tools to address complex challenges. When we embrace interdisciplinarity we broaden what we know about the potential methods for assessing and tackling problems, and we deepen our understanding of specific methods by applying these methods across different contexts. In my pursuit to understand co-creative processes by interconnected stakeholders – i.e., the deep and authentic engagement of stakeholders across governance, science, and community boundaries to identify and optimize the use of evidence for positive outcomes – I have been influenced by methods used outside of my discipline of implementation science and current context of child welfare services. For example, I recently read an article that studied the co-production of knowledge in soils governance (Prager & McKee, 2015) in the United Kingdom and was struck by the usefulness of these ideas for child welfare services in the United States.

The authors use a methodology referred to as “action arenas” to describe and discern the co-production processes that take place between specific stakeholder groups in soils governance.

Where to publish? Journals for research integration and implementation concepts, methods and processes

April 4, 2023January 6, 2016

By Gabriele Bammer

If you have developed a new dialogue method for bringing together insights from different disciplinary experts and stakeholders, or a refined modelling technique for taking uncertainty into account, or an innovative process for knowledge co-creation with government policy makers, where can you publish these to get maximum exposure and uptake?

Over the past several years, Peter Deane and I have been reviewing journals that publish concepts, methods and processes for:
•   Synthesis of disciplinary and stakeholder knowledge
•   Understanding and managing diverse unknowns
•   Providing integrated research support (combining what we know and don’t know) for policy and practice change.
These are the components of what is referred to in this post as research integration and implementation. We have compiled information about more than 50 journals and regularly make additions (these are publicized bi-monthly in I2S News). We provide a brief synopsis of the journal aims, the most recent Thomson Reuters impact factor, the link to the journal website, and information about relevant special issues.
[Author note December 2022: The compilation of 90+ journals has been relocated to the ITD-Alliance website: https://itd-alliance.org/journals/ and they are no longer publicized in i2S News.]

Reinventing science? From open source to open science

August 14, 2023December 16, 2015

By Alexey Voinov

Science is getting increasingly bureaucratized, more and more driven by metrics and indices, which have very little to do with the actual scientific content and recognition among peers. This is actively supported by the still dominant for-profit publication mechanism, which harvests products of scientific research for free, processes, reviews and edits them using voluntary work of scientists themselves and then sells the resulting papers back to the scientific community at obscene costs. The original ideals of scientific pursuit of truth for the sake of the betterment of humanity are diluted and forfeited in the exhausting race for grants, tenure, patents, citations and nominations. Something has to change, especially in the era of post-normal science when so much is at stake, and so little is actually done to address the mounting problems of the environment and society.

In computer programming open source emerged in the 1980s largely in opposition to attempts at licensing code and the growing dominance of Windows with the annoyingly secretive policies of Microsoft. It came as the idealistic philosophy of software development that stems from the so-called “gift culture” and “gift economy” based on this culture.

Co-creation, co-design, co-production, co-construction: Same or different?

August 14, 2023December 10, 2015

By Allison Metz

A key topic across disciplines is the authentic engagement and participation of key stakeholders in developing and guiding innovations to solve problems. Complex systems consist of dense webs of relationships where individual stakeholders self-organize through interactions. Research demonstrates that successful uptake of innovations requires genuine and meaningful interaction among researchers, service providers, policy makers, consumers, and other key stakeholders. Implementation efforts must address the various needs of these stakeholders. However, these efforts are described differently across disciplines and contexts – co-design, co-production, co-creation, and co-construction.

Developing consensus on terminology and meanings will facilitate future research and application of “co” concepts. For example, co-design is often used in health to describe processes that put users and communities at the heart of service design. Co-production is often discussed in socio-environmental science to allow users to participate in administration and delivery. Co-creation is often used in business to describe the involvement of customers in developing products and processes.

Modelling is the language of scientific discovery

August 14, 2023December 2, 2015

By Steven Gray

Modeling is the language of scientific discovery and has significant implications for how scientists communicate within and across disciplines. Whether modeling the social interactions of individuals within a community in anthropology, the trade-offs of foraging behaviors in ecology, or the influence of warming ocean temperatures on circulation patterns in oceanography, the ability to represent empirical or theoretical understanding through modeling provides scientists with a semi-standardized language to explain how we think the world works. In fact, modeling is such a basic part of human reasoning and communication that the formal practice of scientific modeling has been recently extended to include non-scientists, especially as a way to understand complex and poorly understood socio-environmental dynamics and to improve collaborative research. Although the field of participatory modeling has grown in recent years, there are still considerable questions about how different software tools common to participatory modeling can be used to facilitate communication and learning among diverse groups, which approaches are more or less suitable (given the nature of a community or environmental issue), and whether these approaches effectively lead to action-oriented outcomes.

Distinguishing between multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinarity – ‘theological’ hair-splitting or essential categorisation?

August 14, 2023November 25, 2015

By Gabriele Bammer

In a recent special issue of the journal Nature on interdisciplinarity (17 September 2015, p313-315), Rick Rylance criticised “arcane debates about whether research is inter-, multi-, trans-, cross- or post-disciplinary”, opining “I find this faintly theological hair-splitting unhelpful.” Does he have a point?

Rylance was discussing these distinctions in the context of research funding, especially relating to effective funding and evaluation of… well, what are we talking about and what are we going to call it? That’s the nub of the problem. For now, let’s stick with the term used by Rylance, namely “interdisciplinarity”.

Rylance also introduced a current project of the Global Research Council, which is comprised of the heads of science and engineering funding agencies from around the world. The Global Research Council has selected interdisciplinarity as one of its two annual themes for an in-depth report, debate and statement between now and mid-2016.