Epistemology

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.The checklist aims to be a guide for thoughtful, ongoing reflection between supervisors and doctoral students. These questions cover five areas where misunderstandings commonly arise:

  • Epistemology: How each supervisor and student understands knowledge, methods, and validity.
  • Institutional support and expectations: The context shaping what is possible.
  • Complexity management: Working with uncertainty and external partners.
  • Career orientation and identity: Finding a place within (or beyond) academia.
  • Dissemination pathways: Deciding how and where inter- and transdisciplinary work has an impact.

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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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The Möbius strip of knowledge: Rethinking the boundaries of knowing / Le ruban de Möbius du savoir : repenser les frontières de la connaissance

By Frédéric Darbellay.

A French version of this post is available

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Frédéric Darbellay (biography)

How can we move beyond current definitions of disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, which reproduce a logic inherited from classificatory and cumulative thinking that rests on the principles of classical logic – identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded third? Instead how can we think about knowledge as mutually transforming, traversing, and reinventing itself in line with research processes that do not follow a linear progression but unfold through movements of torsion, resonance, and tension? How can we think about the dynamics of knowledge less as a trajectory than a living space in continuous transformation?

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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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Practising responsible research within an Indigenous paradigm

By Norma Romm

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Norma Romm (biography)

What might it mean to practise responsible research within a postcolonial Indigenous paradigm? What is distinctive in terms of the conception of responsible research practice? How does research informed by this paradigm include responsiveness to the voices/spirit of the more-than-human world?

A postcolonial Indigenous paradigm as defined by scholars from a variety of geographical regions is offered as a way of doing research that expressly draws out and tries to revitalise the relational knowing-and-being processes of Indigenous communities in Africa, the Indigenous peoples of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the USA (First Nations). These scholars (Indigenous, as well as non-Indigenous ones who can be regarded as allies) have tried to credentialise this research paradigm by expanding upon the underlying suggestion that processes of knowing are inextricably tied to ways of living (being in relation to others, human and more-than-human).

This implies a specific conception of responsibility to try to nurture (in all fields of our influence, including in research practices) relationships that can be considered reciprocal rather than exploitative (of other humans or of other species and of the land and its communities).

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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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Understanding diversity primer: 3. Perceptions of good research

By Gabriele Bammer

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How do different perceptions arise of what makes for ‘good’ research? How can researchers come to understand such differences and their impacts on how problems are framed, understood and responded to, as well as how they affect the ability of those contributing to the research to work together?

Differences arise because training in a discipline involves inculcating a specific way of investigating the world, including which types of questions are worth addressing; legitimate ways of gathering, analysing and interpreting data; standards for validation; and the role of values in the research process. Educating someone in a discipline aims to make the discipline’s specific approach to research ingrained and tacit.

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A framework for identifying diversity in epistemic communities, linguistic variety and culture

By Varvara Nikulina, Johan Larson Lindal, Henrikke Baumann, David Simon, and Henrik Ny

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1. Varvara Nikulina; 2. Johan Larson Lindal; 3. Henrikke Baumann; 4. David Simon; 5. Henrik Ny (biographies)

How can facilitators take into account diversity stemming from epistemic communities, linguistic variety and culture when leading workshops aimed at co-production in transdisciplinary research?

Although facilitators are skilled in mitigating conflicting interests and ideas among participants, they are often poorly prepared for dealing with these other types of diversity.

We have developed a framework that allows diversity in epistemic standpoint, linguistic diversity and culture to be mapped in a workshop setting. This is illustrated in the figure below and each box in the framework is described next.

Epistemic standpoint

Epistemic communities or thought collectives are groups with shared and agreed forms of knowledge, thought styles or rationalities, and world views. These often differ from or even conflict with those of other groups. For example, engineers, social scientists, public servants and entrepreneurs are four different epistemic communities.

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Five questions to understand epistemology and its influence on integrative research processes

By Katie Moon, Chris Cvitanovic, Deborah A. Blackman, Ivan R. Scales and Nicola K. Browne

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1. Katie Moon; 2. Chris Cvitanovic; 3. Deborah A. Blackman; 4. Ivan R. Scales; 5. Nicola K. Browne (biographies)

How can we reduce the barriers to successful integrative research processes? In particular, how can we understand the different epistemologies that underpin knowledge?

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that asks: how do we know what we know? It is concerned with how we can ensure that knowledge is both adequate and legitimate, by considering:

  1. what constitutes a knowledge claim, including the assumptions that are made
  2. how knowledge is produced or acquired
  3. how the extent of its applicability can be determined.

Accordingly, understanding and accounting for different epistemologies is important for developing solutions to contemporary challenges where a range of disciplines and practices converge, each with their own methods and assumptions regarding the adequacy and legitimacy of knowledge.

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Transdisciplinary integration: A multidimensional interactive process

By Dena Fam, Julie Thompson Klein, Sabine Hoffmann, Cynthia Mitchell and Christian Pohl

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1. Dena Fam; 2. Julie Thompson Klein (no photo); 3. Sabine Hoffmann; 4. Cynthia Mitchell; 5. Christian Pohl (biographies)

The concept of integration is widely regarded as the crux of transdisciplinary research, education, and practice. However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach or methodology. Projects and programs vary in purpose, scale and scope, problem focus, research question, mix of expertise, degree of coordination and communication, timing, and responsibility for integration. Based on findings in a study of integration we conducted (Pohl et al., 2021), we address four common questions to provide insights into transdisciplinary integration as a multidimensional interactive process.

1. Does integration require coming to consensus on a contested issue?

Not necessarily. Agreement on a final single understanding or solution is only one kind of integration.

Other kinds do not require agreement or consensus. Instead, they allow perspectives reflecting different ways of knowing related to different knowledge communities and knowers to coexist. Such other kinds of integration include:

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Navigating intercultural relations in transdisciplinary practice: The partial overlaps framework

By David Ludwig, Vitor Renck & Charbel N. El-Hani

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1. David Ludwig (biography)
2. Vitor Renck (biography)
3. Charbel N. El-Hani (biography)

How can local knowledge be effectively and fairly incorporated in transdisciplinary projects? How can such projects avoid “knowledge mining” and “knowledge appropriation” that recognize marginalized knowledge only where it is convenient for dominant actors and their goals? In addition, how can knowledge integration programs avoid being naive or even harmful by forcing Indigenous people into regimes of knowledge production that continue to be dominated by the perspectives of external researchers?

On the other hand, how can transdisciplinary projects avoid an exclusive focus on difference that risks creating an artificial divide between Indigenous/local and scientific knowledge and that contributes to further marginalization by denying the very possibility of meaningful dialogue?

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Responding to unacknowledged disciplinary differences with the Toolbox dialogue method

By Graham Hubbs, Michael O’Rourke, Steven Hecht Orzack

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1. Graham Hubbs (biography)
2. Michael O’Rourke (biography)
3. Steven Hecht Orzack (biography)

Have you collaborated with people on a complex project and wondered why it is so difficult? Perhaps you’ve asked yourself, “Do my collaborators even conceive of the project and its goals in the way I do?” Projects involving collaborators from different disciplines or professions seem almost ready made to generate this kind of bewilderment. Collaborators on cross-disciplinary projects like these often ask different kinds of questions and pursue different kinds of answers.

This confusion can bedevil cross-disciplinary research. The allure of such research is its promise of solving complex problems by bringing together a variety of perspectives that when combined lead to solutions that any one perspective would fail to find.

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