Transdisciplinary Mode Research Articles

Expansive learning of climate scientists towards transdisciplinarity

Expansive learning theory was deployed in this study to explore how climate scientists can learn from working in a transdisciplinary mode, particularly to co-produce knowledge and navigate complex climate risks with other actors. A qualitative case study methodology was used to investigate expansive learning for climate scientists involved in the Future Resilience of African CiTies and Lands (FRACTAL) project. Findings from the study show how several major tensions of the cultural and historical work environment of scientists limit their potential to effectively produce scientific climate change information to inform decision making in complex African cities. Novel learning aspects were introduced during transdisciplinarity, which helped the scientists grapple with these tensions. They spent much time in cities with different groups of actors learning about the complex and dynamic drivers of risks in African cities and how these might change into the future. They also learned about the diverse subjectivities, priorities and values that influence African urban decision making. The group of scientists took learning actions to change their approach for co-producing knowledge with other actors in contexts of such complexity. These learning actions demonstrate transformative agency of climate scientists to expand their activities to collaboratively navigate complex African urban climate change risks.

Disciplinarity and Work: Work-Based Learning as an Emergent Transdisciplinary Mode of Study

Work-based learning (WBL) is a pedagogy focused on learning through work, and has been described as an emergent “transdisciplinary” mode of study. Professional Studies is a name given to practice-based research degrees which operationalize WBL. Thus, Professional Studies can be considered transdisciplinary. But what does transdisciplinarity mean in practice and how does it relate to academic disciplines when applied in a WBL context? This paper explores the characteristics of “disciplinarity” and its relation to WBL in Australia. The paper provides evidence of transdisciplinarity through case examples of research projects, with an emphasis on addressing work-based problems and futures studies.

Beyond solutionist science for the Anthropocene: To navigate the contentious atmosphere of solar geoengineering

The emerging narrative of the Anthropocene has created a new space for changes in global environmental change (GEC) science. On the one hand, there is a mounting call for changing scientific practices towards a solution-oriented transdisciplinary mode that can help achieve global sustainability. On the other hand, the scientists’ desire to avoid exceeding planetary boundaries has broken a taboo on researching solar geoengineering, a dangerous idea of deliberately cooling the Earth’s climate. Whilst to date the two features have been discussed separately, there is a possible confluence in the future. This paper explores this close yet precarious relationship between transdisciplinary GEC science and solar geoengineering in the context of Future Earth, a new international platform of Earth system science. Our aim is to understand how a transdisciplinary mode of science can navigate the contention over solar geoengineering and its course of research without breeding polarization. By seeking the immediacy of ‘problem-solving’, Future Earth is drawn into the solutionist thinking that orders the mode of engagement in pursuing consensus. However, because conflict is inescapable on the solar geoengineering debate, transdisciplinary engagement might as well aim at mapping out plural viewpoints and allowing people to disagree. In transdisciplinary engagement, as co-design signifies the engagement of stakeholders with decision-making in science, a fair and transparent procedure of making decisions is also needed. From our own experience of co-designing research priorities, we suggest that, if carefully designed, voting can be a useful tool to mediate the contentious process of transdisciplinary decision-making with three different benefits for collective decision-making, namely, efficiency, inclusivity and learning. For the future directions of transdisciplinary GEC science, since the Anthropocene challenges are truly uncertain and contentious, it is argued that the science for the Anthropocene should move away from a solutionist paradigm towards an experimentalist turn.

Environmental humanities and climate change: understanding humans geologically and other life forms ethically

The task of reconceptualizing planetary change for the human imagination calls on a wide range of disciplinary wisdom. Environmental studies were guided by the natural sciences in the 1960s, and in the 1970s broadened to include policy and the social sciences. By the 1990s, with global environmental changes well‐documented, various humanist initiatives emerged, expanding the idea of ethics, responsibility and justice within the transdisciplinary mode of environmental studies. Shared problems, places, and scales form the basis for collaborative work in the environmental humanities, sometimes in partnerships with natural sciences and the creative arts. Experiential learning and trust in judgments based on different methods typically guide humanities interventions. Shifting the frameworks of environmental research to be more consciously inclusive and diverse is enabling concepts of the physical world that better include humans and taking ethics beyond humans to consider more‐than‐human Others. This review considers historically how the environment and the humanities became conceptualized together. It then explores three emerging fields in transdisciplinary environmental scholarship where environmental humanities are playing major leadership roles: (1) climate and biodiversity justice, both for humans and for other forms of life; (2) the Anthropocene as a metaphor for living with planetary changes and (3) life after ‘the end of nature,’ including rewilding and restoration. While environmental humanities also work in many other fields, these cases exemplify the crucial tasks of situating the human in geological and ecological terms and other life forms (the ‘more‐than‐human’) in ethical terms. WIREs Clim Change 2018, 9:e499. doi: 10.1002/wcc.499This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > Disciplinary Perspectives

Towards a trickster science/fiction: complexifying boundaries with Neal Stephenson and Michel Serres

ABSTRACTThis article highlights an intersection between the science fiction of Neal Stephenson and the science philosophy of Michel Serres. As two of the most prolific contemporary advocates of the communication between literature and science, Serres and Stephenson employ permutations of the trickster figure as a potent lens on the epistemological transformations that occur when boundaries are crossed and static systems perturbed. Allegorizing the birth of science and rational consciousness as the intervention of a trickster, Stephenson finds in hackers and couriers the same generative force that Serres associates with the Greek god Hermes and the figure of the parasite. With particular attention to Stephenson’s postcyberpunk novel Snow Crash (Stephenson, Neal. 1992. Snow Crash. London: Penguin Books) and Serres’ Hermes series (1969–1980), the concept of the trickster will be explored as both a personification of the kinship between creation mythologies, information theory, anthropology, and modern physics, and as the template for a productive transdisciplinary mode of cultural inquiry.

Challenges for Social-Ecological Transformations: Contributions from Social and Political Ecology

Transformation has become a major topic of sustainability research. This opens up new perspectives, but at the same time, runs the danger to convert into a new critical orthodoxy which narrows down analytical perspectives. Most research is committed towards a political-strategic approach towards transformation. This focus, however, clashes with ongoing transformation processes towards un-sustainability. The paper presents cornerstones of an integrative approach to social-ecological transformations (SET), which builds upon empirical work and conceptual considerations from Social Ecology and Political Ecology. We argue that a critical understanding of the challenges for societal transformations can be advanced by focusing on the interdependencies between societies and the natural environment. This starting point provides a more realistic understanding of the societal and biophysical constraints of sustainability transformations by emphasising the crisis-driven and contested character of the appropriation of nature and the power relations involved. Moreover, it pursues a transdisciplinary mode of research, decisive for adequately understanding any strategy for transformations towards sustainability. Such a conceptual approach of SET is supposed to better integrate the analytical, normative and political-strategic dimension of transformation research. We use the examples of global land use patterns, neo-extractivism in Latin America and the global water crisis to clarify our approach.

The four knowledges of transport planning: Enacting a more communicative, trans-disciplinary policy and decision-making

There is widespread criticism of much transport planning practice for relying on particular, ‘technical’, knowledge forms characterized by instrumental, means-end rationality. At the same time politicians are criticized for taking ‘political’ decisions with not enough regard for the outcomes of such technical work. Increasingly attempts to capture the embodied knowledge and values of citizens are also brought into this contested terrain. But which knowledge forms should be significant in making policy and taking decisions; and how might they be brought together in political decision-making which is itself subject to its own rationality? This paper argues that the variety of knowledge forms in everyday transport planning processes should be more transparently articulated. Subsequent reflexion can help enhance the quality of transport planning processes, while such transparency bolsters the democratic legitimacy of the outputs of such processes. Such a more explicitly communicative, trans-disciplinary mode of governance would help to challenge the power of political rationality. This conclusion has implications for how transport planning as a discipline is enacted.

Theory in a Transdisciplinary Mode: the Rhetoric of Inquiry and Digital Humanities

The sciences and humanities have long been regarded as discrete intellectual cultures, separated by a sharp epistemic divide. Recently, however, turns toward "transdisciplinarity" have intimated the growing importance of overcoming disciplinary boundaries. The Rhetoric of Inquiry and digital humanities are two transdisciplinary projects that have attempted, respectively, to bring humanistic inquiry to the sciences, and to bring scientific inquiry to the humanities. This paper attempts to trace the parallel genealogies of both projects in an attempt to theorize some common traits of theory in a transdisciplinary mode. I suggest that articulating these projects with one another enables us to suppose that building transdisciplinary theory will entail a heightened reflexivity concerned with questions about scope, methods, and epistemic values.

Urban landscape sustainability and resilience: the promise and challenges of integrating ecology with urban planning and design

The twenty-first century global population will be increasingly urban-focusing the sustainability challenge on cities and raising new challenges to address urban resilience capacity. Landscape ecologists are poised to contribute to this challenge in a transdisciplinary mode in which science and research are integrated with planning policies and design applications. Five strategies to build resilience capacity and transdisciplinary collaboration are proposed: biodiversity; urban ecological networks and connectivity; multifunctionality; redundancy and modularization, adaptive design. Key research questions for landscape ecologists, planners and designers are posed to advance the development of knowledge in an adaptive mode.

Transdisciplinarity and protected areas: A matter of research horizon

This article discusses the consequences and challenges for protected area research resulting from the changes and diversifications of the idea of area protection. The article provides an overview of the diverse types of protected area research and a critical analysis of the potentials and limits of newly emerging forms of research, such as involving stakeholders. The main question raised is to what extent protected area research can be conceptualized in a transdisciplinary way. A short introduction to the discourse on transdisciplinarity will be followed by an analysis of possibilities for conceptualizing protected area research in a transdisciplinary mode. It will be shown that the full potential of the newly emerging form of research can be tapped by orienting protected area research towards different target horizons and by strengthening the embeddedness of protected areas in society.

‘Learning by doing’: adaptive planning as a strategy to address uncertainty in planning

Adaptive management, an established method in natural resource and ecosystem management, has not been widely applied to landscape planning due to the lack of an operational method that addresses the role of uncertainty and standardized monitoring protocols and methods. A review of adaptive management literature and practices reveals several key concepts and principles for adaptive planning: (1) management actions are best understood and practiced as experiments; (2) several plans/experiments can be implemented simultaneously; (3) monitoring of management actions are key; and (4) adaptive management can be understood as ‘learning by doing’. The paper identifies various uncertainties in landscape planning as the major obstacles for the adoption of an adaptive approach. To address the uncertainty in landscape planning, an adaptive planning method is proposed where monitoring plays an integral role to reduce uncertainty. The proposed method is then applied to a conceptual test in water resource planning addressing abiotic-biotic-cultural resources. To operationalize adaptive planning, it is argued that professionals, stakeholders and researchers need to function in a genuinely transdisciplinary mode where all contribute to, and benefit from, decision making and the continuous generation of new knowledge.

Editorial

**Editorial** Science Studies 1/2007 is the first issue by its new chief editors Dr. Tarja Knuuttila and Docent Sampsa Hyysalo. The decision to appoint two editors-in-chief was motivated by the steadily increasing amount of submissions, as well as by the need to retain a good grasp of the range of focal areas that comprise science and technology studies. Tarja Knuuttila is a philosopher of science currently studying scientific modelling and representation especially in the context of computational science. Sampsa Hyysalo’s primary field is science and technology studies. He has studied change in professional and everyday practices by focussing on the development and appropriation of health ICTs. The change in its editors does not mark a great transition in the focus of the journal. Science Studies continues to be both an international and interdisciplinary journal welcoming contributions to the study of science and technology from different points of view and different disciplinary backgrounds whether philosophical, historical, sociological, psychological, educational or politicoeconomic. At the moment the journal receives contributions from all over the world, the most contributions coming from the US and from Northern European countries. The acceptance rate is 20,5 for the moment, but it will fall, since we are receiving an increasing amount of contributions. This shows that the interest towards Science Studies is steadily growing. As to our website, Science Studies is also happy to announce that it has digitized and published all of its articles from 1988 to 1997. The ten volumes which have been published comprise over 100 articles on Science and Technology Studies and represent one of the largest fully accessible online collections available today. We are committed to distributing the content of Science Studies to as broad an audience as possible at no cost. Moreover, we have decreased our moving wall from one year to six months, allowing for increased visibility and access to our most recent content. The present volume contains four full articles concentrating mainly on science and science policy. In “From Core Set to Assemblage: On the Dynamics of Exclusion and Inclusion in the Failure to Derive Beta Cells from Embryonic Stem Cells” Mike Michael et al. concentrate on a traditional STS-theme, that of experimenter’s regress. They contrast Collins’s core set model to an analysis in terms of assemblages in an attempt to show that scientific controversies need not end in the exclusion of the discredited faction of scientists from the core set. Rather, due to several reasons such as the ‘chronic uncertainty’ of stem cell research, the epistemically defeated faction can be rehabilitated because of the ‘social understandability’ of their strategies. ”Effects of ‘Mode 2’-Related Policy on the Research Process: The Case of Publicly Funded German Nanotechnology” by Andreas Wald and “Disentangling Transdisciplinarity: An Analysis of Knowledge Integration in Problem-Oriented Research” by Wolfgang Zierhofer and Paul Burger provide somewhat critical perspectives on the supposed advantages of Mode 2 policies and the very idea that transdisciplinary research, which is also referred to as Mode 2 science, represents a genuinely new model of knowledge production. Wald argues that nanotechnology research does not fit into the picture portrayed by Mode 2 literature, yet Mode 2-related policies are applied to it in the German context. As a result of this, policies are often considered harmful by the scientists. Zierhofer and Burger in turn seek to analyze the diversity of the supposed transdisciplinary mode of knowledge production in terms of various types of research objectives and related research instruments. Finally, Matt Ratto’s paper “A Practice-Based Model of Access for Science: Linux Kernel Development and Shared Digital Resources” presents a close-quarter analysis of Linux kernel development in order to build a model of access that would be apt for examining the increasingly distributed and digitally-mediated scientific work. This last paper is also a teaser for the next issue of Science Studies, which is a special issue on Free/Libre Open source software (FLOSS). Guest edited by Dr. Yuwei Lin and Prof. Lars Risan, Science Studies 2/2007 provides a set of highly interesting and in-depth studies on organization, work and development in FLOSS projects.

Innovations for sustainable development: the need for transdisciplinary knowledge integration

In this article we argue that a transdisciplinary mode of knowledge integration, is key to the generation of sustainable agricultural innovations for small–scale, resource–poor farmers in developing countries. The concept and challenges of transdisciplinary research are described. We present a case study on the introduction of True Potato Seed in Bangladesh by a local non–governmental organization. The institutionalization process of a transdisciplinary approach to technology development within this organization is outlined. The case study is analyzed in relation to the identified main challenges for implementing transdisciplinary research. We conclude that application of a transdisciplinary approach throughout the innovation process requires changes in university curricula as well as organizational changes.

Ação comunicativa e de informação: modelo transdisciplinar para o aprender a aprender

Este artigo trata do Modelo de Ação Comunicativa e de Informação para Redes Sociais em Ambientes Digitais, uma articulação transdisciplinar de conhecimentos e saberes que orienta a construção coletiva e colaborativa de estratégias inclusivas de comunicação e de formação permanente de competências para promover o entendimento entre atores integrantes de uma rede social. A Ciência da Informação, a Comunicação e as Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC) organizam, em relação de transdisciplinaridade, esta articulação. Este modelo é base para o diagnóstico e o planejamento de ações: para a construção coletiva de relações de comunicação negociadas entre os participantes da rede; para a criação de ambientes digitais que propiciem espaços de aprendizagem para o enfrentamento da informação e da comunicação; para que especialistas em comunicação pública promovam a transparência da informação, como previsto na Constituição e na Lei de Acesso à Informação do Brasil. O modelo articula metodologias para análise do indivíduo e da rede (Estudo de Usuários, Análise de Redes Sociais, Multivocalidade) para obter diagnóstico e elaborar planejamento de ações de comunicação e de informação.