Transdisciplinarity (general relevance)

Transdisciplinarity in Africa: Key issues in achieving higher education’s third mission

By Basirat Oyalowo.

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Basirat Oyalowo (biography)

How can transdisciplinarity in Africa help achieve higher education’s third mission, namely making a contribution to society? What are the best pathways for achieving this? What are the key obstructions and potential ways around them?

Higher education’s third mission involves adding to the first two missions of teaching and research towards providing service to society. However, general pathways to achieving this are still unclear. A few studies have explored how and why the local impacts of universities need to be measured, but these are generally from outside Africa and concentrate more on quantitative methods to measure specific impact, such as economic impact.

Transdisciplinarity provides opportunities to consider the diversity of societal needs and values, to benefit from local knowledge, to involve scientific disciplines, stakeholders and target groups.

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Planning transdisciplinary stakeholder workshops: Four practical lessons

By Maxine Fromm.

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Maxine Fromm (biography)

How can transdisciplinary researchers best organise workshops that create a collaborative space for different stakeholders? What practical planning is required? How can organisers meet the challenges of translating a project idea into concrete workshops?

This i2Insights contribution offers four practical lessons gathered throughout a dialogue series on a just industry transition between Dutch representatives from industry, non-governmental organisations, academia and ministries, which was organised by the Sustainable Industry Lab.

Lesson 1: Planning should start from your stakeholders’ needs

As Lisa Andrews and colleagues noted in their i2Insights contribution, Three lessons for mainstreaming transdisciplinarity, you need to ‘reach stakeholders where they are’ and take into account their knowledge levels, interests and agendas.

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What roles do you play in inter- and transdisciplinary projects?

By Hanna Salomon, Benjamin Hofmann and Sabine Hoffmann.

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1. Hanna Salomon (biography)
2. Benjamin Hofmann (biography)
3. Sabine Hoffmann (biography)

What roles do researchers typically play in inter- and transdisciplinary projects? How can they be made transparent in order to reflect on them?

Inter- and transdisciplinary projects typically require different roles and the researchers involved may play one or more of them. There is a plethora of literature describing various ideal-typical roles and we used the literature on researchers’ roles in sustainability science to develop a reflection tool on researcher roles in inter- and transdisciplinary projects.

A Role Reflection Tool

The reflection tool consists of a role survey for individual researchers, a spider web graph for immediate role visualization on the individual and project team level, and a set of questions for individual and project team reflections.

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Using cross-cultural dialogue to break down inappropriate knowledge hierarchies

By Roxana Roos.

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Roxana Roos (biography)

How can indigenous, local, artisanal, craft, tacit, counter, gendered and experiential knowledge better inform solutions to complex problems, such as climate change? How—when faced with conditions of complexity, uncertainty and competing tenable knowledge claims—can the actionable knowledge base be pluralized and diversified to include the widest possible range of high-quality, potentially actionable knowledges and sources of relevant wisdom? What are the pitfalls and challenges ahead?

I start with some cautions for the usual practice of transdisciplinary research and then highlight key aspects of cross-cultural dialogue, alongside pitfalls and challenges.

Integration can reproduce undue asymmetries

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Using field experiences to generate transdisciplinary research questions

By Kimberly Bourne and Alison Deviney.

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1. Kimberly Bourne (biography)
2. Alison Deviney (biography)

What are the benefits of field experiences for large convergence research centers? How can they be used to generate new research questions that cross disciplines and benefit local communities?

We draw on a two-day retreat centered around a geographically specific issue to provide lessons that may be useful for others. The retreat combined field excursions and a brainstorming workshop to generate new research questions. An additional benefit was that it positively changed the power dynamics in the group.

In our case, the large convergence research center focuses on innovations for sustainable phosphorus management. A central field site is in South Florida, USA, where phosphorus pollution from agricultural and urban areas threatens a wetlands national park (the Everglades).

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Fostering transdisciplinary research in the Global South: Lessons for funders

By Flurina Schneider, Zarina Patel, Katsia Paulavets, Tobias Buser, Jacqueline Kado and Stefanie Burkhart.

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1. Flurina Schneider; 2. Zarina Patel; 3. Katsia Paulavets; 4. Tobias Buser; 5. Jacqueline Kado; 6. Stefanie Burkhart (biographies)

How can research funding programmes address existing inequalities in global science systems? How can they foster science-society-policy interactions and transdisciplinary research in the Global South?

Inequalities in science disadvantage the Global South in terms of classical science metrics such as the number of researchers and publications, but also in terms of access to research, funding and infrastructure. Early career researchers are particularly affected.

To address these inequalities, financial investment in research capacity is needed from both national governments and international donors. However, dependence on international funding reinforces the influence of the Global North in setting research agendas in the Global South. We argue that international research funders can mitigate this challenge by supporting transdisciplinary research, because transdisciplinary research integrates different perspectives to resonate with local realities and problems.

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Epistemic justice and its relevance to transdisciplinary research

By Sarah Cummings, Charles Dhewa, Gladys Kemboi, Stacey Young and Mike Powell.

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1. Sarah Cummings; 2. Charles Dhewa; 3. Gladys Kemboi; 4. Stacey Young; 5. Mike Powell (biographies)

Can you imagine that you are in a situation where no-one listens to you or believes what you have to say? And the reason they are not listening or believing is because of your race or your gender or where you come from or your accent, or an intersectional combination of all four?

Or imagine that the knowledge of your community is seen as worthless and ignored, even when the community will suffer most when efforts to change it go awry?

This phenomenon is called epistemic injustice. Originally elaborated by social philosopher Miranda Fricker (2007), epistemic (or knowledge-related) injustice comprises unfair treatment in which the voices, experiences and solutions of marginalized individuals, communities and societies are ignored. We consider that it poses an existential threat to individuals and communities.

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Evaluation criteria for transdisciplinary research

This i2Insights contribution has been retracted.

For an excellent framework on evaluation criteria for transdisciplinary research, see:

Belcher, B. M., Rasmussen, K. E., Kemshaw, M. R. and Zornes, D. A. (2016). Defining and Assessing Research Quality in a Transdisciplinary Context. Research Evaluation, 25, 1–17. (Online – open access) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvv025

with an updated and refined version available at: Transdisciplinary-Research-Quality-Assessment-Framework-2.0.pdf. 

 

Breaking boundaries: Transforming research with co-production and bridging knowledge systems

By Truphena E. Mukuna and Alemu Tesfaye Shekunte.

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1. Truphena E. Mukuna (biography)
2. Alemu Tesfaye Shekunte (biography)

What role do communities play in shaping research that affects their lives? How can academia break free from the constraints of traditional disciplinary boundaries to foster more inclusive knowledge production? We explore these questions based on our experience in researching forced displacement.

The challenge of traditional research methodologies

Historically, much research in the Global South has been dominated by Western perspectives and methodologies. These often lack cultural relevance and fail to engage meaningfully with the communities they study. Consequently, the resulting body of knowledge can be disconnected from the lived realities of those studied. In addition, disciplinary biases often overshadow the philosophical underpinnings of research methods. Researchers may adopt a ‘positivist’ or ‘constructivist’ stance or prefer ‘quantitative’ over ‘qualitative’ methods.

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A framework for transdisciplinary boundary work

By Lisa Andrews, Stefania Munaretto, Heleen Mees and Peter Driessen.

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1. Lisa Andrews (biography)
2. Stefania Munaretto (biography)
3. Heleen Mees (biography)
4. Peter Driessen (biography)

What are the challenges in engaging different actors and integrating knowledge across disciplines? What does it mean to do this work ‘well’? What brings about successful engagement, boundary crossing and knowledge integration to enable impact? More specifically, how can transdisciplinary research project actors collaborate to produce outputs and foster societal impact?

The following framework identifies 12 boundary work activities to support transdisciplinary research project actors to collaborate, co-create and integrate knowledge that leads to societal impact across project phases. Here, impact is defined as the desired long-term societal, economic and/or environmental changes agreed upon by the involved transdisciplinary actors based on the problem and scientific knowledge gaps they aim to address, with impact resulting from a chain of events to which the transdisciplinary project has entirely or in part contributed.

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Considerations for creating and funding new toolkits for inter- and transdisciplinary research

By Bethany Laursen, Bianca Vienni-Baptista, Gabriele Bammer, Antonietta Di Giulio, Theres Paulsen, Melissa Robson-Williams and Sibylle Studer.

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1. Bethany Laursen; 2. Bianca Vienni-Baptista; 3. Gabriele Bammer; 4. Antonietta Di Giulio; 5. Theres Paulsen; 6. Melissa Robson-Williams; 7. Sibylle Studer (biographies)

Are you thinking about creating a new toolkit for inter- and transdisciplinary research? What questions can help you consider whether to embark on such an effort? If you are a funder, how can you decide whether to support existing toolkits or fund new ones? And how can toolkits help your reviewers in considering funding applications?

We are the core members of the Toolkits and Methods Working Group hosted within the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity (ITD Alliance). Since 2020, we have jointly mapped and visualized the previously uncharted landscape of inter- or transdisciplinary toolkits.

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Three lessons for mainstreaming transdisciplinarity

By Lisa Andrews, Bárbara Willaarts, Andreas Panagopoulos, Radhika Kanade, Nelson Odume, Bodil Ankjær Nielsen and Ingrīda Brēmere.

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1. Lisa Andrews; 2. Bárbara Willaarts; 3. Andreas Panagopoulos; 4. Radhika Kanade; 5. Nelson Odume; 6. Bodil Ankjær Nielsen; 7. Ingrīda Brēmere (biographies)

Are there similar challenges, responsibilities, and methods in transdisciplinarity across countries, scales, contexts and actor types?

In exploring five transdisciplinary case studies from projects on the topics of the water-energy-food-environment nexus and climate change adaptation, we identified three main lessons learned. These were common across the cases from South Africa, India, Greece, Latvia and Denmark, despite their different contexts, types of actors and project structures. These lessons were shared in a workshop at the 2024 Sustainability, Research and Innovation (SRI) Congress in Finland.

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