Fragmentation – Integration and Implementation Insights

Finding expertise in research integration and implementation to tackle complex problems

January 4, 2021May 19, 2020

By Gabriele Bammer

Author - Gabriele Bammer — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

When you are pulling together a team to tackle a complex societal or environmental problem, where can you find the expertise to deal with:

Research integration challenges such as: deciding which disciplines and stakeholders to include, setting limits around the problem, dealing with competing problem definitions, managing intractable unknowns, and synthesising different perspectives?
Research implementation challenges such as: identifying likely change agents, taking context into account, developing tools and processes for research to support more effective actions to ameliorate the problem?

Facilitating serendipity for interdisciplinary research

August 10, 2020January 21, 2020

By Catherine Lyall

author-catherine-lyall — Catherine Lyall (biography)

How can institutions facilitate the serendipitous encounters that so often appear to characterise interdisciplinary careers? Is there an inherent hypocrisy in university leaders, research funders and policymakers claiming that they want to facilitate interdisciplinarity and then not creating the conditions that experienced interdisciplinarians say they need in order to foster this style of working?

Here I examine the importance of informal interactions, physical locations, the ‘small stuff’ and ‘slow research.’

Three lessons from statistics for interdisciplinarians and fellow travellers

January 6, 2021December 12, 2017

By Gabriele Bammer

In last week’s blog post on recognising interdisciplinary expertise I argued that forming a new i2S discipline could help embed interdisciplinarity and related approaches (transdisciplinarity, systems thinking, action research, T-shaped research and others) in the academic mainstream. But how would such a discipline work? What are the challenges to establishing an i2S discipline and how could they be overcome?

The discipline of statistics provides three productive analogies. Key to success in both statistics and i2S are: collaboration, dedicated journals to publish advances in concepts and methods, and lobbying for effective application of the discipline.

Recognising interdisciplinary expertise

August 18, 2020December 5, 2017

By Gabriele Bammer

Could we overcome the challenges of embedding interdisciplinarity in the academic mainstream if relevant expertise were defined and recognized as a new discipline? What is this relevant expertise?

Here I consider team-based interdisciplinarity addressing complex societal and environmental problems and argue that it needs specific expertise over and above that contributed by disciplines. This set of knowledge and skills is currently poorly defined and recognized.

If contributing such know-how was an established role, it could provide a way of more adequately integrating interdisciplinary researchers into academic institutions. Furthermore, the time is ripe to codify that expertise by pulling together lessons from decades of experience.

Four simple questions for navigating the knowledge mobilisation swamp

September 7, 2020December 6, 2016

By Vicky Ward

How can knowledge mobilisers – people who move knowledge into action – make sense of diverse definitions, navigate through the fragmented literature and better describe their work? It all starts with a few simple questions…

Over the past 15-20 years, research and practical activity focusing on how knowledge can be better shared and used has grown at what sometimes seems like an alarming rate. For many, the diverse range of literature, terminology, models and tools can seem overwhelming and bewildering. In 2010, for example, McKibbon and colleagues identified 100 different terms used to describe the activities and processes involved in linking knowledge and practice (McKibbon et al., 2010). And in 2014 Huw Davies and colleagues found 71 substantial reviews of research literature on this topic across health, social care and education (Davies et al., 2015).

Four things everyone should know about ignorance

April 13, 2021November 1, 2016

By Michael Smithson

“Ignorance” is a topic that sprawls across a grand variety of disciplines, professions and problem domains. Many of these domains have their own perspective on the unknown, but these are generally fragmentary and often unconnected from one another. The topic lacks a home. Until fairly recently, it was a neglected topic in the humanities and human sciences.

I first started writing about it in the 1980’s (e.g., my book-length treatment, Ignorance and Uncertainty: Emerging Paradigms), but it wasn’t until 2015 that the properly compiled interdisciplinary Routledge International Handbook on Ignorance Studies (Gross and McGoey 2015) finally appeared.

Do we need to discipline interdisciplinarity?

June 15, 2020March 2, 2016

By Gabriele Bammer

Imagine a team of researchers tackling global health inequalities, with a focus on sanitation. The team comprises epidemiologists and biostatisticians interested both in measuring the extent of the problem and designing intervention trials, engineers investigating a range of sanitation options, anthropologists examining the cultural aspects of sanitation, economists and political scientists documenting the economic benefits and looking for policy levers to assist in making change happen.

The team is working at national policy levels and with a range of target communities seeking to engender small business interest in promoting new sanitation options, as well as individual and community behaviour change. There is collaboration with major international donors and non-government organisations. The team has a talented and charismatic leader.

What the team does not have is access to the full array of theory and methods for synthesising the input of the different disciplines, along with all the relevant stakeholder knowledge. Nor does it have the ability to bring to bear all the different ways of teasing out and taking into account the knowledge gaps – the unknowns. Finally the team cannot tap into the wealth of information about how to provide effective integrated research support for policy and practice change.

Read moreDo we need to discipline interdisciplinarity?

Where to publish? Journals for research integration and implementation concepts, methods and processes

May 14, 2020January 6, 2016

By Gabriele Bammer

If you have developed a new dialogue method for bringing together insights from different disciplinary experts and stakeholders, or a refined modelling technique for taking uncertainty into account, or an innovative process for knowledge co-creation with government policy makers, where can you publish these to get maximum exposure and uptake?