Processes

How could research ethics governance better support participatory, transdisciplinary, and transformation-oriented research?

By Ying-Syuan (Elaine) Huang and Julia Wittmayer.

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1. Ying-Syuan (Elaine) Huang (biography)
2. Julia Wittmayer (biography)

How can we design an ethics governance system that can better respond when ethical dilemmas emerge after institutional approval has been granted? 

This question is increasingly pressing for researchers engaged in participatory, transdisciplinary, and transformative work. Ethical concerns often arise in-situ where partnerships evolve, power dynamics shift, community expectations change, and research begins to have effects beyond the original project design.

These concerns do not fit neatly into conventional ethics review procedures at universities, which still tend to be organised around upfront review: researchers submit an application, a committee assesses it, and approval is granted before the research begins. This model matters for safeguarding participants, researchers, and institutions. But it is increasingly misaligned with the type of engaged research that emphasises social learning and democratically deliberative process for positive societal change.

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Leading with Lived Experience across the research life cycle

By Catherine Brasier, Dan Chamberlain and Sarah Wilson.

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1. Catherine Brasier (biography)
2. Dan Chamberlain (biography)
3. Sarah Wilson (biography)

How can researchers and people with Lived Experience expertise effectively and authentically work together in Lived-Experience-centred research?

Along with colleagues, we have developed a structured approach, namely the “Wellways Six Steps of the Research Life Cycle,” which is shown in the figure below and described, along with 16 key actions. The aim is to help researchers and people with Lived Experience expertise to “work it out together.”

People with Lived Experience expertise demonstrate deep understanding of the following elements to drive their input:

  1. their own personal experience of the issue at hand
  2. their understanding of other people’s Lived Experiences
  3. Lived Experience values and practices
  4. the history of the Lived Experience movement – including the impact of the systemic and social factors.

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Accountability in two different teamwork environments: The jigsaw puzzle and the collage

By Allison Dalton, Yvonne Pelling and Gaetano R. Lotrecchiano.

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1. Allison Dalton (biography)
2. Yvonne Pelling (biography)
3. Gaetano R. Lotrecchiano (biography)

How can teams demonstrate accountability in two different collaborative environments?

Accountability refers to the ways, both tangible and intangible, of showing up for ourselves and the rest of the team throughout a collaborative project. It gives rise to trust and forward momentum which impacts team functioning and ultimately the outcome of the work.

Here we look at accountability in two different collaborative environments, which we refer to using the metaphors of the jigsaw puzzle and the collage.

A team tasked with assembling a jigsaw puzzle deals with a finite set of clearly distinguished pieces, each to be fitted together in one correct way, and a reference image to demonstrate what the outcome will look like.

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Transdisciplinary research in the Global South: Challenges and recommendations

By Laila Sandroni and Marcel Bursztyn.

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1. Laila Sandroni (biography)
2. Marcel Bursztyn (biography)

What are the key challenges in conducting research that aims to bridge science, policy and grassroots demands? How can such challenges be addressed?

This i2Insights contribution is based on transdisciplinary research that we and colleagues undertook with local communities in Brazil (Sandroni et al., 2026) and we suggest that the challenges and recommendations have broader relevance. Some are relevant to all transdisciplinary research, while others have particular resonance in Global South contexts.

Challenges

Key challenges centre around timing; tensions in worldviews; urgency and impact of climate change; process-oriented research and academic outputs; and language, concepts, and translation.

Timing

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Implementation strategies: Functions and intentions

By Julia E. Moore and Sobia Khan.

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1. Julia E Moore (biography)
2. Sobia Khan (biography)

When planning for change, how can you usefully think about the intended function or purpose of your implementation strategy? And what are effective ways to usefully think about how the strategy will operate in practice, the mechanisms that shape how people experience it, and how change is activated? 

We have developed thirteen intended functions or purposes that an implementation strategy can serve. Functions clarify what a strategy is meant to accomplish. In addition, we have developed 35 intentions of implementation strategies, which describe how people engage with a strategy and how it leads to change.

Functions of implementation strategies

Individuals and teams who are planning, implementing, or supporting change may find it useful to review the 13 functions or purposes of strategies for change that are described in the table below in order to clearly communicate, and effectively plan for, what they are aiming to achieve.

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Three dimensions of context

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Gabriele Bammer (biography)

By Gabriele Bammer.

In research tackling complex societal and environmental problems, what is involved in taking context into account when aiming for more comprehensive understanding of a problem, as well as research support for policy and practice change so that the problem is better dealt with?

As outlined in my work developing Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S), considering context involves dealing with circumstances at three levels:

  • social or big picture, eg., the historical, political, economic, cultural, geographical and other circumstances
  • organizational, especially the structure and culture of the research and stakeholder organisations involved
  • individual, especially the positionality or identity of researchers and stakeholders.

Each of these dimensions of context has widespread ramifications, affecting:

  • how a problem manifests and is understood, including what is studied and how, as well as the unknowns considered to be pertinent
  • what actions are likely to be considered and to have a chance of being successful.

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Four lessons for pursuing participatory action-oriented PhD research inside the university system

By Raymond Hyma and Javier García Martínez.

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1. Raymond Hyma (biography)
2. Javier García Martínez (biography)

What happens when participatory, relational, and action-oriented inquiry meets the institutional architecture of the PhD: tight timelines, individual authorship, and demands for methodological certainty? What does it mean to pursue participatory and action oriented research as a PhD project inside the university system?

We are PhD candidates in a university alliance connecting Australia and the UK, navigating participatory and action-oriented commitments across two institutional contexts. We noticed that much of the literature about participatory doctorates is written retrospectively, once the thesis is submitted and the mess has been tidied into a coherent story. Our contribution is different: we write from the middle, while decisions are still being negotiated, while constraints are still shaping the work, while we are still learning how to stay accountable to participatory values in real time.

So, what are we learning so far?

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Navigating polarities: Fostering both/and mindsets in team science

By Gemma Jiang and Joanna Kaniewska.

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1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Joanna Kaniewska (biography)

How can teams develop a mindset that makes differences productive, such as disciplinary differences in work processes, communication styles, underlying assumptions, behavioral norms, and more? In particular, how can teams move from an either/or mindset, which often leads to defensiveness driven by the need to prove that “I am right; you are wrong” to a both/and mindset, which fosters a learning culture in which differences become sources of generative tension that can propel creativity and collective insight?

One practical way to cultivate a both/and mindset is through working with polarities which are opposing yet interdependent tendencies. By integrating both tendencies, teams can move beyond either/or thinking and draw on a wider range of perspectives. We argue that developing the capacity to navigate polarities helps teams navigate differences more effectively overall.

In this i2Insights contribution, we describe three limiting beliefs drawn from our experience with team science coaching and show how they can be transformed through polarity thinking.

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Building trust in researching about and engaging with underserved communities

By Katrina Messiha.

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Katrina Messiha (biography)

How can we ensure that the many people whose lives are shaped by homelessness, migration, poverty, trauma, mental illness, caring responsibilities, social isolation and other contributors to marginalisation are adequately represented and well engaged with in relevant research?

This is important because if some lives are missing from the evidence base, they may also be missing from the services, policies and practices built upon it. But what happens when researchers try to engage people whose previous encounters with healthcare, welfare, housing, immigration or other public systems, including research, may have been difficult, exhausting or even harmful?

The usual language used to describe such people is “hard to reach,” “seldom heard” or “difficult to engage.” These phrases may be commonly used and well intended, but they can hide a pressing question: Where does trust already exist and how can research begin there?

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Cultivating epistemic humility in research teams

By Faye Miller.

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Faye Miller (biography)

What makes it so challenging for research teams to be truly receptive to being wrong? And what can teams do to make doubt expressible and useful?

Being aware that knowledge is always situational, incomplete, and prone to error, as well as the willingness to hold opinions tentatively, be receptive to change, and recognise the boundaries of understanding, are all components of epistemic humility. Humility about what one knows and can know is an intellectual quality in individual researchers. Yet epistemic humility also has a structural dimension: which doubts get expressed, whose knowledge is heard, and how teams handle what they don’t yet know, are challenges that go beyond the individual researcher to shape how research teams function.

This i2Insights contribution is an attempt to highlight two challenges that need to be addressed:

  • the confidence trap, built on the pressure to exude certainty, and
  • the silence trap, arising from the social dynamics that can suppress productive doubt.

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Tinkering workshops: Exploring children’s perceptions of problems and potential solutions

By Ina Opitz, Melanie Kryst, Pia von den Benken and Audrey Podann.

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1. Ina Opitz (biography)
2. Melanie Kryst (biography)
3. Pia von den Benken (biography)
4. Audrey Podann (biography)

How can children’s everyday experiences and perceptions of problems and solutions be made accessible for potential inclusion in transdisciplinary research? How can these processes also be used to familiarise children with the fundamentals of transdisciplinarity?

We have developed a three-hour “tinkering workshop,” based on design science principles, to encourage children to think about their environment and identify problems and solutions in a playful and creative way.

Our tinkering workshop is suitable for children aged between 9 and 12 years. We have tried it out in four workshops with a total of 56 children, focusing on the problem of plastic waste.

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Transdisciplinarity in education: Aligning conceptualisation, configuration and competencies

By Hussein Zeidan.

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Hussein Zeidan (biography)

How can we move from broad visions of transdisciplinarity to concrete educational practices that students can meaningfully engage with? What kinds of course designs genuinely support learning in complex, real‑world settings? And how do we ensure clarity, for both students and educators, about what these courses are meant to achieve?

These questions sit at the heart of many conversations among educators seeking to bring transdisciplinarity into their teaching practice. We want students to learn how to navigate complex problems, draw on multiple ways of knowing and develop the mindsets that allow them to work across boundaries with confidence. Yet the very flexibility that makes transdisciplinarity appealing can also make it difficult to design courses that are clear, supportive and aligned.

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