Frameworks

A communication framework for public engagement and impact

By Judith Friedlander and Tania Leimbach.

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1. Judith Friedlander (biography)
2. Tania Leimbach (biography)

How can researchers cut through ‘the infoglut’ to share their findings with communities? What communication strategies help raise the agenda of critical issues to drive impactful advocacy and action?

As researchers and practitioners, we want to better understand how to effectively frame critical issues in a hybrid media system, facilitate media uptake and engage the public in scalable change-making. To this end, we developed the MAVEN communication framework, which consists of:

  • Meta-frames (developing overarching concepts);
  • Actions and Applications (supporting local pilots and scalability);
  • Values (identifying shared community values and news values);
  • Evidence and Ethos (messaging from reputable stakeholders), and
  • News media (disseminating information within a hybrid media system).

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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.

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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

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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.

Before you act: Reflect on the context

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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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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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Understanding and responding to a chaotic world

By Jamais Cascio.

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Jamais Cascio (biography)

Is it helpful to conceive the world as Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible or BANI? What do these terms mean and what mental models can help us survive in a BANI world?

I created BANI as an acronym in 2018 to better describe an increasingly chaotic world. BANI is a sense-making framework that recognises recurring themes in disruptions that make it increasingly difficult to understand the big picture and to make decisions. BANI is not saying something about the world, but rather about how we perceive it. It comes from a human inability to fully understand what to do when pattern-seeking and familiar explanations no longer work. It involves seeing the world as it is and letting go of illusions of system strength, control, predictability and certainty. BANI sets out to illuminate systems, but operates at a human level in a visceral and experiential way.

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Six key steps for stakeholder engagement

By Khara Grieger, Kimberly Bourne, Alison Deviney and Nourou Barry.

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1. Khara Grieger (biography)
2. Kimberly Bourne (biography)
3. Alison Deviney (biography)
4. Nourou Barry (biography)

How can you systematically plan stakeholder engagement? What are the key issues that need to be considered? What guiding questions can help? 

STEP 1: Identify and clarify engagement goals

Spend time at the beginning of the engagement process to clearly identify why you are engaging with stakeholders. Common goals include sharing knowledge or information; collecting insights, perspectives, or information from stakeholders; and co-creating or co-designing solutions. Other potential goals may include building trust and improving transparency, enhancing collaborations and partnerships, and improving the implementation of decisions.

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Navigating power: A partial pragmatic map

By Katie Moon.

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Katie Moon (biography)

In research, how can we start to appreciate unexamined assumptions about what power is, where it resides, how it works, and who holds it, especially how these assumptions influence not only the problems we recognize, but the solutions we pursue? And importantly, who decides? How can we get a better idea of how power informs how we act: what interventions we attempt, whose knowledge we value, whose interests we centre, and what consequences we anticipate?

In this i2Insights contribution I provide an intentionally simplified orienting map that disaggregates power into six dimensions that mirror the ways researchers tend to separate and locate power into distinct domains to rationalise and evaluate interventions. I match these dimensions to three onto-epistemological frames—objective, constructionist, and relational—which were described in a previous i2Insights contribution A guide to ontology, epistemology, and philosophical perspectives for interdisciplinary researchers.

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A self-assessment checklist to improve interdisciplinarity in research projects / Un questionnaire d’auto-évaluation pour améliorer les projets de recherche interdisciplinaire

By Flore Nonchez.

A French version of this post is available

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Flore Nonchez (biography)

How can researchers improve the quality of their interdisciplinary proposals? What would help in clarifying project formulation, enriching description, maximizing relevance, facilitating workplan implementation (by anticipating possible difficulties) and enhancing impact?

The self-assessment checklist provided below aims to help project leaders and their research teams systematically consider the specific interdisciplinary aspects of an interdisciplinary research project, whatever their original discipline or experience of interdisciplinarity.

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Data variety and why it matters

By Richard Berry.

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Richard Berry (biography)

What are the differing characteristics of data? Why are they important for systems to function effectively? What is requisite variety of data?

There are nine characteristics of data variety which agitate systems. These are volume, velocity, variety, veracity, validity, vulnerability, viscosity, vectors and virtualisation. Together, the ‘9Vs’ constitute a data requisite variety framework and are described below. 

1. Volume

Description: The amounts of available data.

Example: Volume can vary widely from the results of small-scale research to the tsunami of digital material accessible through the internet. The latter can overwhelm both people and organisations.

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