Abstract
The establishment of interdisciplinary Master’s and PhD programs in sustainability science is opening up an exciting arena filled with opportunities for early-career scholars to address pressing sustainability challenges. However, embarking upon an interdisciplinary endeavor as an early-career scholar poses a unique set of challenges: to develop an individual scientific identity and a strong and specific methodological skill-set, while at the same time gaining the ability to understand and communicate between different epistemologies. Here, we explore the challenges and opportunities that emerge from a new kind of interdisciplinary journey, which we describe as ‘undisciplinary.’ Undisciplinary describes (1) the space or condition of early-career researchers with early interdisciplinary backgrounds, (2) the process of the journey, and (3) the orientation which aids scholars to address the complex nature of today’s sustainability challenges. The undisciplinary journey is an iterative and reflexive process of balancing methodological groundedness and epistemological agility to engage in rigorous sustainability science. The paper draws upon insights from a collective journey of broad discussion, reflection, and learning, including a survey on educational backgrounds of different generations of sustainability scholars, participatory forum theater, and a panel discussion at the Resilience 2014 conference (Montpellier, France). Based on the results from this diversity of methods, we suggest that there is now a new and distinct generation of sustainability scholars that start their careers with interdisciplinary training, as opposed to only engaging in interdisciplinary research once strong disciplinary foundations have been built. We further identify methodological groundedness and epistemological agility as guiding competencies to become capable sustainability scientists and discuss the implications of an undisciplinary journey in the current institutional context of universities and research centers. In this paper, we propose a simple framework to help early-career sustainability scholars and well-established scientists successfully navigate what can sometimes be an uncomfortable space in education and research, with the ultimate aim of producing and engaging in rigorous and impactful sustainability science.
Highlights
IntroductionThe future well-being of people and our shared Earth depend on understanding the interconnectedness of nature and society, and guiding these relationships along more sustainable pathways (Kates et al 2001; Komiyama and Takeuchi 2006; Leach et al 2010; Folke et al 2016).Sustain Sci (2018) 13:191–204inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to problem-driven and solutions-oriented research have gained considerable traction over the past few decades, clearly reflected in the development of the field of sustainability science (Kates et al 2001; Carpenter et al 2009; Lang et al 2012; Brandt et al 2013; Pereira et al 2015; Ruppert-Winkel et al 2015).Sustainability science is described as a field of research that brings together scholarship, policy and practice, global and local perspectives from the North and South, as well as disciplines across the natural and social sciences, humanities, engineering, and medicine (Clark and Dickson 2003). Miller et al (2014) demonstrate that sustainability science has made progress in the past decade toward deepening our understanding of sustainability-related problems and challenges, even though large gaps remain in impact on actual sustainability transitions
PhD students like us are no longer ecologists, economists, or sociologists working together in an interdisciplinary team, but rather that we are interdisciplinary individuals engaging with disciplines, or even that from our interdisciplinary training we engage with others with a similar interdisciplinary background, collaborating in an effort to create inter- and transdisciplinary science, and essentially practicing what we refer to here as ‘undisciplinary science’ (Robinson 2008)
Our results from the survey, forum theater, and panel discussion indicate that a growing proportion of the sustainability science research community can be described as ‘undisciplinary’ scholars, based on their interdisciplinary training, and who face new opportunities and challenges as earlycareer sustainability researchers
Summary
The future well-being of people and our shared Earth depend on understanding the interconnectedness of nature and society, and guiding these relationships along more sustainable pathways (Kates et al 2001; Komiyama and Takeuchi 2006; Leach et al 2010; Folke et al 2016).Sustain Sci (2018) 13:191–204inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to problem-driven and solutions-oriented research have gained considerable traction over the past few decades, clearly reflected in the development of the field of sustainability science (Kates et al 2001; Carpenter et al 2009; Lang et al 2012; Brandt et al 2013; Pereira et al 2015; Ruppert-Winkel et al 2015).Sustainability science is described as a field of research that brings together scholarship, policy and practice, global and local perspectives from the North and South, as well as disciplines across the natural and social sciences, humanities, engineering, and medicine (Clark and Dickson 2003). Miller et al (2014) demonstrate that sustainability science has made progress in the past decade toward deepening our understanding of sustainability-related problems and challenges, even though large gaps remain in impact on actual sustainability transitions. Miller et al (2014) demonstrate that sustainability science has made progress in the past decade toward deepening our understanding of sustainability-related problems and challenges, even though large gaps remain in impact on actual sustainability transitions. While it remains unclear whether sustainability science is (yet) an established scientific discipline, it is broadly recognized that a science of sustainability requires collaboration between disciplines and across theory, practice, and policy (Bettencourt and Kaur 2011). While it remains unclear whether sustainability science is (yet) an established scientific discipline, it is broadly recognized that a science of sustainability requires collaboration between disciplines and across theory, practice, and policy (Bettencourt and Kaur 2011). Bettencourt and Kaur (2011, p. 19540) state that ‘there is arguably no example in the history of science of a field that from its beginnings could span such distinct dimensions and achieve at once ambitious and urgent goals of transdisciplinary scientific rigor and tangible socioeconomic impact.’ To be trained as a sustainability scientist requires new ways of engaging with each other, with the world around us, and of reflection within our own scientific processes
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