Creating Inspiring Workshops and Courses in Transdisciplinarity: A Guide - Manual / Resource - Page 79
Transdisciplinary schools of thought
What are the key differences among ‘TD’ schools
of thought?
Transdiscipline is a vast concept that includes different
frameworks, approaches, and goals. The term “transdiscipline”
was first coined by Piaget (1972), who explored the pedagogical
implications of going beyond disciplines to the interface between
them. This led to the Nicolescu school (1994) that explores
how different disciplines approach knowledge generation,
as well as the opportunities for new ways of doing so at the
transdisciplinary frontier. Inquiries on how to best address
societal problems seeded the Zurich school (2001) that entails
navigating from theory to practice and back, as well as weaving
scientific and non-scientific knowledges.
While most of the above developments were centered in Europe,
political processes in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America
aimed at addressing the profound inequalities derived from
colonial and postcolonial processes led to several bottom-up
approaches to transdiscipline. For instance, participatory action
research (proposed by Fals Borda in 1992) in Latin America
emphasizes the need for ethical-political commitments to
deconstruct the structural foundations of injustice, as well
as reciprocal interactions that honor different ways of being,
feeling, and thinking. In Africa, transdisciplinary design research
(coined by Breda in 2019) identified through action-guiding that
includes focusing on triggering social change, innovating for new
problems, and iterative learning.
lack of regional integration across these disciplinary origins into
a unifying school of thought. Transdisciplinarity in these regions
emerged out of a reaction to “pure” science that is relatively
disconnected from society. In more recent decades, a movement
has emerged whose emphasis is on making science relevant to
society and on solving complex problems, rather than developing
methodological or theoretical cohesion.
Further reading:
•
Breda, J., and M. Swilling. 2019. Guiding Logics Principles
Designing Emergent Transdisciplinary Research Processes:
Learning Experiences Reflections from Transdisciplinary Urban
Case Study Enkanini Informal Settlement. South Africa.
•
Gibbs, Paul, and Alison Beavis. 2020. Contemporary
Thinking Transdisciplinary Knowledge. Springer International
Publishing.
•
Streck, Danilo R. 2021. Transdisciplinarity as a
Decolonizing Research Practice. Diálogos Latinoamericanos
29 (March): 88–100.
Transdisciplinary approaches are practiced in North America and
Australia under a variety of labels, including collaborative or team
science, engaged research, sustainability science, translational
science, or co-production (in a broad sense). This diversity roots
in their emergence in diverse applied fields, but also points to the
Concepts Schools of thought
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