Creating Inspiring Workshops and Courses in Transdisciplinarity: A Guide - Manual / Resource - Page 89
Embracing differences, tensions, and con昀氀icts
Practices in transdisciplinary research
Embracing differences, tensions, and con昀氀icts
Diversity of societal actors
In TDR, working with diverse actors and their specific ways
of knowing, doing, and being is a key element for gaining a
comprehensive understanding of complex problems, discussing
desirable futures, and creating effective pathways toward
solutions. Disciplinary knowledge and the knowledge and
experience of societal actors are well-recognized sources of
diversity in transdisciplinary research. It is now well-understood
that each discipline and actor brings only partial knowledge about
any problem. Equally important, each discipline and societal actor
favors different questions when developing new research, and is
able to work toward and implement solutions depending on their
role in the system, their know-how, and their respective power.
A wide range of societal-actor groups and disciplines may be
considered for collaboration in TDR, e.g., local communities,
government agencies, NGOs, industry, researchers from social
and natural sciences, humanities and arts, and Indigenous
knowledge holders. There is also diversity that cuts across
disciplines and societal actors– different scientific disciplines
use different language, concepts, theories, methods, and
standards of evidence. It is therefore key to acknowledge how
those involved in research understand the world and what
they consider valid ways of knowledge production. Similarly,
government entities and NGOs have different missions,
responsibilities, authorities, capacities, resources, etc. In addition
to these differences, other well-recognized sources of crosscutting diversity include gender identity, age, class, race, and
ability.
Practices Diversity of societal actors
For each TDR project, a thorough actor and context analysis sets
the basis to find out with whom to collaborate. This depends
on the specific overarching aim and the context of the project:
Who has an interest, who has power to make decisions, who is
affected – economic power, social capital, knowledge, etc.? What
are the needs, wishes, and fears of the different actors, and how
are their relations structured? Where are power differences,
where do we have conflict lines?
New researchers work with the owners of the agricultural plot to learn about the soil from the inhabitants
of Xochimilco.
Photo Credit: Cocina Colaboratorio transdisciplinary project
p. 84
