Creating Inspiring Workshops and Courses in Transdisciplinarity: A Guide - Manual / Resource - Page 93
Embracing differences, tensions, and con昀氀icts
Balancing power and managing power dynamics
The why, what, and how of a TDR project can be disputed at
various times by diverse actors with varying degrees of power.
“Power” refers to the capacity of actors to mobilize or control
actions, resources, and discourses to achieve their goals. Power
influences the formation of discourses and societal structures
(institutions) associated with status-related privileges.
Power can be used instrumentally (to do, achieve or prevent
something); coercively (over someone to get them to be
submissive to the power-holder’s wishes and ideas); or in an
emancipatory way (in solidarity with or in support of someone).
All forms of power may be needed or used in a project, but how
that is done affects whether those involved in the project trust
and enjoy each other, or can work productively with each other.
Project leaders and participants tend to feel most secure in
project teams, when they experience power as something they
hold within as a measure of their sense of strength, rather than
when it is wielded upon others.
In any collaborative team, there are asymmetric power relations.
These power imbalances can be influenced by factors such as
gender, race, education, age, seniority, position, class, wealth,
and geographical origin, but also – more subtly – by factors
such as origination of ideas, acquisition of funding for the
project, disciplinary background, and ways of knowing. Such
power imbalances can affect project participants’ ways of
doing, knowing, and being – and importantly, how well they feel
respected within a team. To undertake inclusive and plural TDR
processes, it is necessary to create deliberate space – repeatedly
– for recognizing these power differences, their causes and
effects, and addressing them.
Practices Power dynamics
It is important to encourage and facilitate contestation of
interests, views, and knowledge-claims among all members
of the collective, using a range of tools and approaches, on
an ongoing basis. Scientists often contribute to reproducing
power imbalances by imposing their agendas, approaches, and
funding. Deconstructing dichotomies – such as leader-follower,
observed-observer, and knower-learner – can help reduce power
imbalances among researchers (e.g., from the Global North
vs. the Global South), as well as among diverse members of
transdisciplinary teams.
Further reading:
•
Bammer, Gabriele. 2022. Understanding diversity primer.
Integration and Implementation Insights.
•
Moser, Susanne C. 2013. Individual Community
Empowerment Human Security. In Changing Environment
Human Security: Transformative Approaches Research, Policy
Action, edited by L. Sygna, K. Obrien, and J. Wolf, 279–93.
London: Earthscan/Routledge.
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