Integration

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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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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Three ways to design interdisciplinary collaborations

By Benjamin Hofmann and Milena Wiget.

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1. Benjamin Hofmann (biography)
2. Milena Wiget (biography)

What options do researchers have in designing interdisciplinary collaborations? How can researchers understand the connections between their own discipline-based research and less familiar research in other disciplines?

Types of interdisciplinary research collaborations

Solving complex sustainability and other problems often requires the integration of different disciplinary perspectives, which is challenging. To address this challenge, we developed a simple typology that features three types of interdisciplinary research collaborations, which can be implemented at any stage of the research process, as described, and shown in the figure, below.

Common base (type I): Research from different disciplines is integrated at one stage of the research process and then separated into disciplinary research at the next stage.

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Transdisciplinary research with and for artificial intelligence

By Florian Keil, Melina Stein and Flurina Schneider.

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1. Florian Keil’s biography
2. Melina Stein (biography)
3. Flurina Schneider (biography)

Is artificial intelligence, a technology aggressively advertised as the ultimate cure-all, fundamentally incompatible with transdisciplinarity and its decades-old insight that the “wicked” problems of the real world do not lend themselves to one-dimensional solutions? Should transdisciplinary research outright reject a technology that is already undermining efforts to achieve social and environmental justice? Or can artificial intelligence actually support transdisciplinary research when used responsibly?

Using artificial intelligence in transdisciplinary research requires a critical mindset

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Three social mechanisms leading to fake interdisciplinary collaborations / 形成伪跨学科合作的三种社会形成机制

By Lianghao Dai.

A Chinese version of this post is available

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Lianghao Dai (biography)

What are fake interdisciplinary collaborations and how do they arise?

Fake interdisciplinary collaborations are a form of performative scientific behaviour that claims to be interdisciplinary but lacks knowledge integration across disciplines. There are three social mechanisms that can result in such fake collaborations.

1. Irresponsible project management

Irresponsible project management has two manifestations:

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A framework for creating effective team integration in interdisciplinary research

By Colleen Cuddy.

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Colleen Cuddy (biography)

What kinds of integration are required in interdisciplinary teams to truly synthesize diverse knowledge and perspectives, creating meaningful outcomes? What are the key facilitators of successful integration?

Integration is a core team process in which “ideas, data and information, methods, tools, concepts, and/or theories … are synthesized, connected, or blended” (Repko, 2012: 4), combining diverse inputs that differ from and are more than the sum of parts (National Research Council, 2015). Integration is multifaceted, and interdisciplinary teams employ several types of integration, as shown in the table below. Social, knowledge, cognitive, and conceptual integration can be seen as a spectrum, with teams utilizing multiple types of integration, often concurrently, to reach team goals, and with innovative teams moving through the spectrum towards conceptual integration.

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Harnessing the collision of four ways of knowing

By Adrian Wolfberg.

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Adrian Wolfberg (biography)

How can solving today’s most complex challenges reckon with four fundamentally different ways of knowing? How can the collision of their distinct epistemic strengths and blind spots be harnessed for innovation in threat assessment and decision-making on complex problems?

Let me unpack these four ways of knowing and how they shape, support, and sometimes undermine each other. Here, I use the example of climate security intelligence, but the insights and lessons are likely to apply to a wider range of complex societal and environmental issues. The four ways of knowing are:

  1. Scientific knowledge from the physical sciences
  2. Scientific knowledge from the social sciences
  3. Judgment under uncertainty by knowledge-producing professionals
  4. Practical decision-making by practitioners who are senior executives.

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What roles do you play in inter- and transdisciplinary projects?

By Hanna Salomon, Benjamin Hofmann and Sabine Hoffmann.

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1. Hanna Salomon (biography)
2. Benjamin Hofmann (biography)
3. Sabine Hoffmann (biography)

What roles do researchers typically play in inter- and transdisciplinary projects? How can they be made transparent in order to reflect on them?

Inter- and transdisciplinary projects typically require different roles and the researchers involved may play one or more of them. There is a plethora of literature describing various ideal-typical roles and we used the literature on researchers’ roles in sustainability science to develop a reflection tool on researcher roles in inter- and transdisciplinary projects.

A Role Reflection Tool

The reflection tool consists of a role survey for individual researchers, a spider web graph for immediate role visualization on the individual and project team level, and a set of questions for individual and project team reflections.

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Using cross-cultural dialogue to break down inappropriate knowledge hierarchies

By Roxana Roos.

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Roxana Roos (biography)

How can indigenous, local, artisanal, craft, tacit, counter, gendered and experiential knowledge better inform solutions to complex problems, such as climate change? How—when faced with conditions of complexity, uncertainty and competing tenable knowledge claims—can the actionable knowledge base be pluralized and diversified to include the widest possible range of high-quality, potentially actionable knowledges and sources of relevant wisdom? What are the pitfalls and challenges ahead?

I start with some cautions for the usual practice of transdisciplinary research and then highlight key aspects of cross-cultural dialogue, alongside pitfalls and challenges.

Integration can reproduce undue asymmetries

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Boundary spanning: A leadership perspective

By Gemma Jiang, Jenny Grabmeier, Diane Boghrat and Susan Simkins.

authors_jiang,_grabmeier_boghrat_simkins
1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Jenny Grabmeier (biography)
3. Diane Boghrat (biography)
4. Susan Simkins (biography)

What does boundary spanning in cross-disciplinary science teams entail, and how does it relate to leadership?

At its core, boundary spanning is about bridging differences. These differences usually fall into two categories:

  1. Interdisciplinary differences, which involve varying perspectives across different disciplines, such as vocabulary, methods, epistemologies, and cultures.
  2. Transdisciplinary differences, which involve perspectives from science, society, policy, and practice that transcend institutional and sectoral boundaries.

The expertise required to bridge these differences is often referred to as “integration expertise” (Hoffman et al., 2024) or as one of us (Simkins) refers to it “interdisciplinary translation.” For simplicity, we’ll refer to all these forms of expertise as “boundary spanning,” and those who play these roles as “boundary spanners.”

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Setting up your team for knowledge integration

By Shalini Misra, Megan A. Rippy and Stanley B. Grant.

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1. Shalini Misra (biography)
2. Megan A. Rippy (biography)
3. Stanley B. Grant (biography)

What kinds of collaborative arrangements best foster knowledge integration? Should you keep your team together by forming one big group to work toward your shared goals? Or should you differentiate tasks by breaking work into smaller components and assign the pieces to sub-groups? How large should sub-groups be and how should they be composed? What types of engagement processes lead to successful knowledge integration?

If you have led a large cross-disciplinary research effort, you have grappled with these questions.

We addressed these questions by assessing the linkages between integration processes and research products in a self-evaluation of the first two years of our National Science Foundation Growing Convergence Research project on inland freshwater salinization (Misra, Rippy and Grant, 2024).

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Breaking boundaries: Transforming research with co-production and bridging knowledge systems

By Truphena E. Mukuna and Alemu Tesfaye Shekunte.

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1. Truphena E. Mukuna (biography)
2. Alemu Tesfaye Shekunte (biography)

What role do communities play in shaping research that affects their lives? How can academia break free from the constraints of traditional disciplinary boundaries to foster more inclusive knowledge production? We explore these questions based on our experience in researching forced displacement.

The challenge of traditional research methodologies

Historically, much research in the Global South has been dominated by Western perspectives and methodologies. These often lack cultural relevance and fail to engage meaningfully with the communities they study. Consequently, the resulting body of knowledge can be disconnected from the lived realities of those studied. In addition, disciplinary biases often overshadow the philosophical underpinnings of research methods. Researchers may adopt a ‘positivist’ or ‘constructivist’ stance or prefer ‘quantitative’ over ‘qualitative’ methods.

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