Transdisciplinarity (specific) – Integration and Implementation Insights

From slogan to practice: Restoring transdisciplinarity as a serious way of working

March 19, 2026March 10, 2026

By Hussein Zeidan.

Do you sense a growing gap between the promise of transdisciplinarity and the way it is often practised? Have you recognised instances where a paper praises integration, yet treats it as little more than a symbolic gesture, instead of a serious intellectual and ethical commitment?

How did we get here, and how can we reclaim transdiscipinarity from superficial habits that weaken its potential?

How did we get here?

The rise of transdisciplinarity has been remarkable. Funding agencies promote it. Universities showcase it. New centres and programmes are built around it. This visibility has helped many people experiment with new forms of collaboration.

Moving from epistemic paternalism to transformative transdisciplinarity

February 17, 2026

By David Ludwig and Charbel N. El-Hani.

authors_david-ludwig_charbel-el-hani — 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.

Recognize and value linguistic and conceptual pluralism!

February 24, 2026February 12, 2026

By Ulli Vilsmaier.

How can we best recognise and value linguistic and conceptual pluralism in naming what we do when we work in international environments? What are the limitations of descriptors such as transdisicplinarity, participatory action research and co-creation?

Terminology is really an issue when working across linguistic, disciplinary and professional boundaries. Working internationally we are now accustomed to using the hyper-centralized language, English; we tend to delegate translation more and more to machine-based algorithms; and we easily forget the consequences of working in a language that is not our mother tongue nor anchored in our cultural and social environment.

A hyper-centralized language has great benefits, but also major weaknesses.

Training specialists to solve wicked problems

February 10, 2026

By Vladimir Mokiy.

vladimir-mokiy_2026 — Vladimir Mokiy (biography)

How can a modern university train highly qualified specialists who are able to rethink and unambiguously solve wicked problems?

Here I build on my previous i2Insights contribution Systems transdisciplinarity as a metadiscipline, the methodology of which aims to unify and generalize complementary and non-complementary disciplinary knowledge and methodologies. This metadiscipline provides the basis of a proposed curriculum for a two-year training program at the masters level. The intention is that specialists would be trained in systems transdisciplinarity using a single curriculum to ensure a uniform level of professional capabilities and competencies.

The curriculum

The curriculum involves the organization of training in four sections.

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

January 20, 2026January 13, 2026

By Frédéric Darbellay.

A French version of this post is available

frederic-darbellay_2023 — 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?

Why interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are not enough for addressing complex problems

April 29, 2025April 29, 2025

By Gabriele Bammer.

gabriele-bammer_nov-2021 — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

As the importance of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research approaches becomes more widely recognised, how can we overcome the danger that they are seen to be all that is needed for tackling complex problems? What are the limitations of these approaches? What else might be required?

My starting point is that improved understanding of, and action on, a complex societal or environmental problem usually requires a number of research questions to be addressed. Different questions require different kinds of research approaches. Let’s illustrate this by considering the following complex problem:

As effort goes into making cities more sustainable, how can we incorporate illicit drug users into a more sustainable city X?

Transforming and weaving knowledge in a complex world: The butterfly and the spider

February 11, 2025

By Frédéric Darbellay.

Inter- and transdisciplinarity is today increasingly recognized as a field of study in its own right, with its own theoretical and conceptual foundations, its methodological approaches, its national and international scientific communities and networks.

The field aims to meet the demand for the collaborative, integrated and forward-looking responses that are needed to address the complexity of global issues. Inter- and transdisciplinarity is establishing itself not only as a pioneering and transformative field of research, but also as an essential approach to rethinking the organization of knowledge in academic structures and beyond.

However, inter- and transdisciplinarity remains a diverse and constantly evolving field, shaped by various schools of thought and enriched by a global and intercultural perspective. This diversity constitutes its richness and calls for an inclusive approach, capable of representing the plurality of scientific communities, approaches and practices.

Why is it so hard to agree on definitions of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity?

May 28, 2025June 11, 2024

By Gabriele Bammer

As more and more researchers, educators, universities and research organisations, funders, and policy makers become interested in interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, the demand for clear unequivocal definitions of these terms grows. Why is agreeing on such definitions so hard? And what’s the way forward?

The late Julie Thompson Klein’s work tracking typologies of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity over time (Klein, 2017) is revealing and provides the basis for this i2Insights contribution.

Klein pointed out that in the latter half of the twentieth century, the classification of the Western intellectual tradition “into specialized domains within a larger system of disciplinarity” was “supplemented and challenged” by an increasing number of activities that involved disciplinary interactions.

Co-producing knowledge: Phases, issues and the td-net toolbox

April 30, 2025October 10, 2023

By Sibylle Studer and Theres Paulsen

authors_sibylle-studer_theres-paulsen — 1. Sibylle Studer (biography)
2. Theres Paulsen (biography)

What are the steps involved in co-producing knowledge in transdisciplinary research? What tools are available to help knowledge co-production and for what purpose should they be used?

Based on our experiences with the td-net (Network for Transdisciplinary Research) toolbox, we discuss how knowledge co-production can be organized along an ideal type of a transdisciplinary research process.

Phases and key issues of co-production

In developing the td-net toolbox, we used the following four phases of knowledge co-production, which require an iterative, rather than linear, approach:

Integrating context, formats and effects in transdisciplinary research

December 4, 2024March 15, 2022

By tdAcademy 2021 GAIA paper authors

authors_td-academy-2021_gaia-paper — Author biographies

What are the key aspects of transdisciplinary research and how can they be integrated effectively?

Four key aspects of transdisciplinary research are:

context dependencies
innovative formats
societal effects
scientific effects.

These are illustrated in the figure below, along with a summary of an ‘ideal’ transdisciplinary research process.

1. Context dependencies

Context dependencies are the factors that influence both the research design and the interpretation of results and include: who is involved (the actors), the social, cultural, political and other conditions, and the research setting (for example is it outside the lead researchers’ home country).

Boosting the transformative power of transdisciplinarity with quantum theory

October 12, 2021October 12, 2021

By Cyrille Rigolot

How can transdisciplinarity improve its ability to foster very deep, very fast and very large transformations toward sustainability?

Quantum theory might be a major source of insights in that direction. Although quantum theory is not new to transdisciplinarity, lately it has become much more accessible, practical, and potentially transformative on the ground.

Quantum theory for transdisciplinarity research

In the debates last century about the emerging transdisciplinary research field, quantum theory inspired theorist Basarab Nicolescu to develop three basic ‘axioms’, which he argues should be recognized at the core of transdisciplinarity research, namely:

How can social network analysis benefit transdisciplinary research?

February 27, 2026September 9, 2021

By Leonhard Späth, Rea Pärli and the RUNRES project team

authors_leonhard_spath_rea-parli_RUNRES-project — 1. Leonhard Späth (biography)
2. Rea Pärli (biography)
3. RUNRES Project Team (participants)

Can we observe in a more analytical way how transdisciplinarity “happens”? How useful is social network analysis in transdisciplinary work, especially for uncovering the role of relationship structures? How can transdisciplinary concepts be used to map connections between those involved in transdisciplinary research?

A very brief introduction to social network analysis

Social network analysis is the study of connections between different people or any other social entity involved in the topic under investigation (referred to as actors), as well as the patterns of those connections and the distribution of the ties among actors.

There are many ways to conduct a social network analysis.