Crossing borders, building new ones, or shifting boundaries? Shared narratives and individual paths towards inter/transdisciplinarity in research centres for urban sustainability

Abstract

Inter/transdisciplinarity (ITD) is a pillar of sustainability studies, often presented as the way to conduct research and practice especially in conflictual and politicised real-world stakeholder constellations. Several studies emphasise the need to consider the communicative processes through which it is put into practice. However, there is still a dearth of research that explores the meanings key actors associate with ITD and how they account for the material, practical and communicative facets of their everyday experience. This work seeks to collect the voice of leaders of inter/transdisciplinary research centres, identify shared repertoires used to interpret their experience in the field, and reflect on how shared narratives could inspire or impede researchers engaged in ITD. A discursive analysis was applied to 23 semi-structured interviews conducted with leaders of research centres on urban sustainability. Results identified diverse interpretative repertoires used to define ITD and to interpret the barriers that, in the eyes of these key actors, have to be crossed to become ITD researchers. These elements are combined into three main narratives used by participants to position themselves and the researchers involved in ITD. Despite being functional to self-representation, these shared narratives contribute towards depicting ITD as an individual escape, and interdisciplinary research centres as sanctuaries of a sort, thus paradoxically preserving the status quo. A third narrative advocates structural shifts and is coherent with the need for deeper changes and persistent recognition of ITD in sustainability studies.