Collaboration

Towards fair transdisciplinary collaborations that honour epistemic justice

By Annisa Triyanti, Barbara van Paassen, Corinne Lamain, Jessica Duncan, Jillian Student, Jonas Collen Ladeia Torrens and Nina de Roo

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1. Annisa Triyanti; 2. Barbara van Paassen; 3. Corinne Lamain; 4. Jessica Duncan; 5. Jillian Student; 6. Jonas Collen Ladeia Torrens; 7. Nina de Roo  (biographies)

What principles need to be upheld to fund and support fair, inclusive, and equitable transdisciplinary collaborations? What competences and attitudes are required for transdisciplinary collaborations to foster epistemic justice? And what do mushrooms have to do with this?!

It is widely acknowledged that to address complex societal problems and harness plural ways of knowing, a wider range of actors, perspectives and types of knowledge are needed than is traditionally the case in other forms of knowledge creation. Transdisciplinary collaborations are different from traditional forms of science in:

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Improving how we do research with indigenous and local communities

By Roxana Roos

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Roxana Roos (biography)

How can we best include the perspectives of indigenous and local people in global change research? What are the major challenges in doing research with and within local and indigenous communities? How can we best deal with such challenges?

More and more, global challenges like climate change are being felt locally, and indigenous peoples are often the most vulnerable. The inclusion of the perspectives of indigenous and local people when developing ways to respond to societal challenges is increasingly the norm in the scientific world. For response strategies to be effective, communities need to be involved in their development. This is true for a whole range of topics, from social justice to climate adaptation. But getting local communities involved in research by ‘outsiders’ can be a challenge for a multitude of reasons.

I propose eight important barriers to the participation of local and indigenous communities, along with potential solutions, based on the experiences of practicing researchers who have worked with such communities in the Philippines, Mexico, Russia (Siberia), Greenland, Norway (Svalbard), Canada, Germany, Greece, Colombia, Vietnam, Mongolia, Bangladesh, France, and New Zealand.

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Not just in our heads: Embodied and creative practices for creating connection

By Corinne Lamain and Jillian Student

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1. Corinne Lamain (biography)
2. Jillian Student (biography)

How can embodied and creative practices, such as dance and poetry, be used to bridge different forms of knowledge?

Transdisciplinarity requires crossing many boundaries, including knowledge fields, perspectives, languages, personalities, and geographic areas. This is often somewhat uncomfortable. Arts-based and embodied approaches can support creative thinking, perspective-taking and communication. For some, these art-based methods feel more natural than for others, but we suggest that the willingness to leave our comfort zone (‘embracing the discomfort’) opens up space for shared vulnerability that is much needed for integrating perspectives. Moreover, doing these practices under time pressure helps remove the tendency to self-criticise and strive for perfection in artistic expression. To be fair, creative practices are not everyone’s style. It is important to note that the effort is not about co-creating beautiful artwork, but rather to facilitate alternative means of expression.

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Living labs are learning labs: Creating and mapping conditions for social learning in transdisciplinary research

By Marina Knickel and Guido Caniglia

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1. Marina Knickel (biography)
2. Guido Caniglia (biography)

What is required for social learning in living labs? How can social learning be mapped in living labs?

Living labs are conceived as spaces for social learning across difference in real-world situations through transdisciplinary research with diverse actors. We argue that the following conditions, often intertwined and building on each other, are required to set up living labs as learning spaces:

1. Epistemic: Learning to foster knowledge pluralism

We suggest supporting research and practice partners in developing a capacity for knowledge pluralism as the ability to appreciate and work with multiple kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing. Knowledge pluralism could be fostered by learning to recognise differences in knowledge, perspectives and socio-cultural identities as strengths and by strategically valorising them.

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Lessons for strengthening community-university partnerships

By David D. Hart, Bridie McGreavy, Anthony Sutton, Gabrielle V. Hillyer and Darren J. Ranco

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1. David D. Hart; 2. Bridie McGreavy; 3. Anthony Sutton; 4. Gabrielle V. Hillyer; 5. Darren J. Ranco (biographies)

In an increasingly polarized world, how can partnerships between communities and universities strengthen the kinds of deliberative and democratic practices that might help address many local and global challenges? How can such partnerships improve practices that involve listening and responding across differences (the deliberative part)? How can they help find ways to make shared decisions and take joint actions, knowing that complete agreement or mutual understanding may never be possible (the democratic part)?

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Wisely navigating knowledge co-production: Towards an ethics that builds capacities

By Guido Caniglia and Rebecca Freeth

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1. Guido Caniglia (biography)
2. Rebecca Freeth (biography)

How can I ensure that marginalized voices are heard in this project? Whom do I call on to offer the next perspective in this workshop and why? How can I intervene in this particular disagreement in a productive way? These are typical questions that researchers and practitioners involved in knowledge co-production processes ask themselves. They express deep ethical concerns, which also have epistemological and political implications, as they address the question: What should I do in this situation? What is right and wrong for me to do here?

We suggest that a perspective based on the ancient virtue of practical wisdom may help researchers and practitioners alike working in knowledge co-production to navigate the complexities of these questions.

Practical wisdom: An ancient virtue for wise navigation

Our answers to the deep ethical questions that emerge in collaborative and participatory research will vary depending on the specifics of the situation we are in, who is involved, as well as our own positionality and role in research projects or academic institutions. There is no formula to follow. 

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Improving cross-disciplinary collaboration with strategy knotworking and ecocycle planning

By Nancy White

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Nancy White (biography)

How can cross-disciplinary teams improve their project results and cross-team learning, especially when they are part of a portfolio of funded projects?

I have worked with cross disciplinary teams in international agriculture development, ecosystems management and mental health. For the most part, these are externally funded initiatives and have requirements both for results (application of the work) and for cross-team learning. Often there is not useful clarity about how funder and grantee agendas work in sync. And there is rarely opportunity or support for shared optimization and exploration across different portfolios of funded work.

I have used the six knotworking questions plus ecocycle planning from Liberating Structures to make it possible for a group to look back critically, assess the current state, and prospectively generate options to move forward.

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Stakeholder engagement: Learning from Arnstein’s ladder and the IAP2 spectrum

By Gabriele Bammer

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Gabriele Bammer (biography)

What can researchers interested in stakeholder engagement learn from two classic frameworks on citizen involvement in government decision making – Arnstein’s ladder and the IAP2 (International Association for Public Participation) spectrum of public participation?

Arnstein’s ladder

Sherry Arnstein (1969) developed an eight-rung ladder, shown in the figure below, to illustrate that there are significant gradations of citizen participation in government decision making.

The two bottom rungs are manipulation and therapy. Manipulation refers to putting citizens on “rubberstamp advisory committees or advisory boards” (p. 218) to “educate” them or engineer their support. Therapy involves changing the citizen view of the problem.

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Advancing considerations of affect in interdisciplinary collaborations

By Mareike Smolka, Erik Fisher and Alexandra Hausstein

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1. Mareike Smolka (biography)
2. Erik Fisher (biography)
2. Alexandra Hausstein’s biography

Have you ever had a fleeting impression of seeing certainty disrupted, the impulse to laugh when your expectations were broken, or a startling sense of something being both familiar and foreign at the same time?

As social scientists engaged in collaborative studies with natural scientists and engineers, we have had these experiences repeatedly while doing research. Whenever we recognized that our social science paradigm was confronted with a different approach to knowing the world, unsettling experiences of difference emerged, which we later analyzed as moments of disconcertment.

In a comparative analysis of the affective substrates of interdisciplinary collaboration (Smolka et al., 2020), we found that attending to disconcertment facilitated collaborative knowledge production.

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Collaboration agreement template

By L. Michelle Bennett, Edgar Cardenas and Michael O’Rourke

1. L. Michelle Bennett (biography)
2. Edgar Cardenas (biography)
2. Michael O’Rourke (biography)

As scientific research continues to move towards collaborative knowledge production, scientists must become more adept at working in teams. How can teams improve their chances of collaboration success? What is a good way to facilitate dialogue about shared values, norms and processes of collaboration? Are there ways of anticipating, identifying, and addressing obstacles as they arise?

We have designed a collaboration agreement template to assist teams in:

  • Making explicit and therefore transparent important aspects of their approach to collaboration
  • Ensuring they have a shared vision for their work together
  • Recognizing that their working relationships are dynamic, individually and as a team, and will require flexibility and a willingness to adapt over time
  • Establishing expectations for working together, including what they do and say
  • Preparing for disagreements and even conflicts, especially in the early stages and along the way when there are changes in team composition.

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Clarifying incentives and expectations in research collaborations

By Alisa Zomer and Varja Lipovsek

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1. Alisa Zomer (biography)
2. Varja Lipovsek (biography)

In which areas do research collaborations between academics and practitioners often run into trouble? What difficult questions can we ask ourselves and our partners at the outset of a research collaboration that can set us up for a successful partnership? How can we learn from past successful and failed aspects of research partnerships?

In our experience four areas where collaborations can have problems are:

  • Incentives and expectations
  • Timelines
  • Collaborative decision making and team buy-in
  • Learning and dissemination.

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Managing risk and equity in collaborative research

By Alisa Zomer and Selmah Goldberg

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1. Alisa Zomer (biography)
2. Selmah Goldberg (biography)

How do the perceived costs, benefits and risks that researchers envision compare to reality when a project is implemented? How can we best support equitable exchange and decision-making for all actors involved in research study design and implementation? 

We have developed a risk and equity matrix to stimulate systematic consideration of potential impacts for stakeholders, researchers and others involved in a research process, to ensure that risks and benefits of research collaborations are distributed in a more equitable manner.

The risk and equity matrix is meant to:

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