Results from your search will be shown on this page below the search form – you may need to scroll down to the results if the page does not automatically take you there after you submit your search.
Instructions:
- All blog posts are searched (pages from the menu are not searched)
- Search outputs are weighted by relevance.
- If searching with two or more words, the system uses an AND operator.
- Selecting a tag, author tag and/or category binds the search to only those posts which have those taxonomy term/s.
- A search output can be obtained by filling out any one field (ie., the search box; or, categories; or, tags; or, authors). If all fields are left blank, then the search returns the blog scroll.
- Exact word combinations can be searched for by using quotation marks (eg., “transdisciplinary learning”).
- Keyword matching is on partial words.
- The reset button (beneath the ‘Submit search’ button) will clear all entries in the search form, as will clicking on the ‘Search…’ link in the top of the right sidebar; or, reloading the page.
- Stopwords are used and for more information on stopwords and how search generally works on this page, see the ‘in-detail’ instructions below.
The search function checks all blog posts but not pages (ie., it does not check the ‘About’, ‘Index’ and other pages listed in the main menu).
For posts, search checks within titles, body text, category and tag text (and not comments).
Searches are weighted by relevance, with affects the order in which posts appear, with titles and content getting the most weighting, tags and categories lesser weighting.
Increasing the number of search terms and selections generally focuses the search output (ie., decreases the number of outputs).
Keyword matching is based on whole words.
If you enter two or more words into the search box, the relationship between the words is based on an AND operator (meaning the more words you add, the tighter (less content is returned in) the search output).
- For example, entering transdisciplinary learning into the search box would provide an output that lists all posts with both the word transdisciplinary and the word learning anywhere in the text. Posts with only transdisciplinary in the text or posts with only learning in the text would not be included in the output.
To find a specific word combination (eg., critical systems), wrap in quotation marks (ie., “critical systems“).
The search system uses ‘stopwords’; which are words that are overly common and so are excluded from being searched for if they are put into the search field (in order to avoid flooding the user with results). For example, words such as ‘has’, ‘sometimes’, ’whether’ are stopwords and can’t be searched on individually (that is, no search result will be returned). Such stopwords can be entered as part of a string of words, but as they are not in the search index they do not count towards the search output. There are also words that are very common across our blog posts and which we allow (to be searched on). These words relate to the way we build the content of our posts (eg., ‘biography’; ‘online’) or are related to the blog’s subject matter (eg., ‘research’, ‘university’). Just be aware that if you search on such words (either alone or in a string), you will get a very large number of results. At the time of writing, the following words are examples to avoid using: biography; change; development; experience; knowledge; science; PhD; policy; practice; process; research; social; time; university; work. A good rule of thumb if using a single search term and if there are a lot of results returned (in 2026, there were over 500 blog posts on this site), is to use one or more of the other fields (eg., tag), or add extra search terms to the search field, or try a different term that speaks to what you are searching for.
When you open a post that was found by your search, you can find where your specific word or word combination appears by using your computer’s search function (eg., on a computer running Microsoft Windows, Control ‘F’ will allow you to search the post (as well as anything else in the active screen)).
Restrict searches to particular tags, categories and/or author tags by using the dropdown selectors.
- Eg., if you choose the tag Advocacy, the search will only be conducted within posts that have that tag assigned to them.
- If you added the category Cases to that search, then only posts that had both the tag Advocacy and the category Cases assigned to them would be searched.
An alternative to selecting categories, tags or authors from their respective long drop-down list is to type the term or author name you are looking for in the relevant selector field. Typing one letter will jump to the lead word in the alphabetical listing (ie, typing ‘s’ takes you to the first tag or category in the list of those starting with ‘s’). Further addition of letters will home in on a tag, category or author until it is found or until the choice of letters exhausts the possible set of tags, categories or authors (in which case that tag, category or author is not in our list). NOTE: all authors are also available in reverse name order under ‘Authors‘ in the menu bar.
In the category, tag and author dropdown list, the number in brackets after each entry indicates the number of posts with that category, tag or author assigned to them.
Tags or authors with a zero in brackets “(0)”, placed after the tag or author text, are not currently linked to any blog posts. In the case of tags, most of these tags identify alternative tags, which, if searched, will yield a result. For example, “Assumptions – see ‘Mental models’ tag (0)” signifies that blog posts about ‘assumptions’ are tagged with ‘mental models’ and not ‘assumptions.’ Occasionally there will be a tag (or author tag) with “(0)” which refers to a new tag (or author tag) on a blog post which has not yet been made public. This tag (or author tag) will be searchable once the blog post is public (usually within a week).
For the category selector, choosing one of the two parent categories (main topics or resource types) searches all blog posts, as all blog posts are assigned a main topic and a resource type.
Co-producing research: Why we need to say what we mean, mean what we say, and learn as we go
By Bev J. Holmes
The co-production or co-creation of research is not new – action based research traditions can lay claim to a long history, but are those of us involved in co-production doing enough to understand what it means?
In their work on public involvement, Antoine Boivin and colleagues (2014) note there is such widespread support for the rhetoric of co-production that we may dismiss (I would add not even acknowledge) the tensions that arise when professionals and lay people work together. Co-production in health research is similar. We need to work harder to say what we mean, mean what we say, and learn as we go.
Three schools of transformation thinking
By Uwe Schneidewind and Karoline Augenstein
2. Karoline Augenstein (biography)
‘Transformation’ has become a buzzword in debates about sustainable development. But while the term has become very popular, it is often unclear what is meant exactly by ‘transformation’.
The fuzziness of the concept can be seen as a strength, giving it metaphoric power and facilitating inter- and transdisciplinary cooperation. However, this fuzziness means there is also a danger of the transformation debate being co-opted by powerful actors and used strategically to impede societal change towards more sustainable pathways.
Creating community around the Science of Team Science
By Stephen M. Fiore
How can we create new academic communities? I provide lessons from building the Science of Team Science (SciTS), a rapidly growing cross-disciplinary field of study. SciTS works to build an evidence-base and to develop translational applications to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of team-based research.
I particularly draw lessons from the recent 8th annual conference attended by approximately 200 people [Moderator update – In April 2026, an embedded link to the 8th annual conference in this sentence was no longer available and so the link structure has been left in place but the active link deleted: scienceofteamscience.org/2017-scits-conference]. The conference aimed to:
- disseminate the current state of knowledge in the SciTS field along with applications for enhancing team science;
- provide opportunities to discuss future directions for advancing SciTS to improve the global scientific enterprise; and,
- provide opportunities for interaction amongst a diverse group of stakeholders, including thought leaders in the SciTS field, scientists engaged in team-based research, institutional leaders who promote collaborative research, policymakers, and federal agency representatives.
What can action research and transdisciplinarity learn from each other?
By Danilo R. Streck
A man raises his hand and brings up the following issue: “Our community is constantly affected by terrible floods that not only destroy our houses, but are the cause of sicknesses of our children.” This statement—in the midst of a participatory budget meeting in South Brazil—raised issues concerning the deforestation of riverbanks, the deficient sewage system, contested land ownership and occupation, among others.
Our research group is primarily interested in citizenship education and in supporting it through studying what makes learning possible (pedagogical mediation) within discussions about the allocation of resources for the public budget. Stories like this one remind us of the limits of a simplistic approach to understanding citizenship. In this case, citizenship and citizenship education was clearly related to health, to ecology, to urban planning, to farming, among other fields of acting and knowing.
Action research, broadly understood as collective (self) reflection in action within situations that one wants to change, is intrinsically an exercise of disciplinary transgressions.
Synthesis centers as critical research infrastructure
By Andrew Campbell
When we think of research infrastructure, it is easy to associate astronomers with telescopes, oceanographers with research vessels and physicists with particle accelerators.
But what sort of research infrastructure (if any) do we need in order to do more effective multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research on big, complex, ‘wicked’ challenges like climate change or food security?
Some eminent colleagues and I argue in a new paper (Baron et al., 2017) that the answers include:
Managing deep uncertainty: Exploratory modeling, adaptive plans and joint sense making
By Jan Kwakkel
How can decision making on complex systems come to grips with irreducible, or deep, uncertainty? Such uncertainty has three sources:
- Intrinsic limits to predictability in complex systems.
- A variety of stakeholders with different perspectives on what the system is and what problem needs to be solved.
- Complex systems are generally subject to dynamic change, and can never be completely understood.
Deep uncertainty means that the various parties to a decision do not know or cannot agree on how the system works, how likely various possible future states of the world are, and how important the various outcomes of interest are.