Transdisciplinary Project Research Articles

Dialogic data innovations for sustainability transformations and flood resilience: The case for waterproofing data

Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and have increasing impacts, which disproportionately affect marginalised and impoverished communities. This article proposes and assesses a new methodological approach for developing innovative solutions based on urban data analytics to address sustainability challenges in light of changing climate conditions. The approach draws inspiration from Paulo Freire's dialogic pedagogy and has been implemented in the international transdisciplinary project “Waterproofing Data”, with multiple study sites in Brazil. The project has introduced three methodological interventions: making data practices visible, engaging citizens and communities with data, and sharing data stories. Our study demonstrates that these methods have expanded the types of data used in flood risk management and have engaged a wider range of social groups in the generation, circulation, and utilization of data. We present a framework that provides guidance about the ways in which data innovations can contribute to transformative change, aiming to ensure that future development trajectories are just, inclusive, and equitable. The findings provide evidence that our approach not only helps fill existing data gaps and promote more equitable flood risk governance but also democratises decision-making in climate adaptation. Citizens were empowered to take proactive measures to improve resilience to disaster risks, thereby saving lives and safeguarding livelihoods.

Bridging the old and the new in sustainability transitions: The role of transition intermediaries in facilitating urban experimentation

As experimentation with niche innovations confronts the old with the new, intermediaries are important to bridge innovative niches and established regimes. While there is a broad literature on experimentation to foster urban sustainability transitions, there is limited understanding of intermediaries acting as facilitators and translators. Previous studies of transition intermediaries in urban experimentation adopt a scaling-centric focus, which rests on the assumption that novelty emerges within niches and impacts regimes through processes of scaling-up. By contrast, this study shifts towards a reconfiguration perspective to move beyond the niche-regime dichotomy and provide a more fine-grained conception of how novelty emerges in-between niches and regimes, as well as through within-regime dynamics. This is to build a dialogue between the literature on urban experimentation and the literature on intermediaries in sustainability transitions. It is to shed light on the ambigious and heterogeneous nature of regime actors: they do not only reproduce path dependencies, but can also facilitate path creation. It implies a shift from a meso- towards a micro-level of analysis, which reveals the variety of intermediaries and their interactions. The study provides an empirical exploration of niche and regime intermediaries in local experimentation by analysing the transdisciplinary research project “Dresden – City of the Future: Empowering Citizens, Transforming Cities!”. The qualitative case study follows an explorative approach, which provides empirical insights on intermediaries’ activities that could not be anticipated during the initial research design. The interaction between niche and regime intermediaries shows the importance of recognising the dialectic nature of change from below and change from above. While niche intermediaries acted more as visionaries, knowledge brokers and advocates of change, regime intermediaries acted more as guides and facilitators, creating a shared institutional infrastructure and coordinating local-level activities. It reveals the (dis)empowering dynamics that underlie niche-regime interaction but also power struggles regime intermediaries are confronted with. These findings provide insights for governance strategies to strengthen the position of transition intermediaries. They suggest that the work of intermediaries should no longer be hidden and informal but recognised as an essential part of transition governance. A variety of both niche and regime intermediaries should be fostered to build interfaces between niches and regimes, and bring about reconfiguration.

Transmediating race and senses through subtitling in translanguaging classroom

This article reflects on a transdisciplinary curricular project in a Japanese language course that employs audio–visual subtitling to promote students’ critical literacies in languages, cultures, and media. Drawing on Nornes’s (2015) notion of “sensuous subtitling,” which embraces the incorporation of the “materiality of language” into translation, we present how students’ experimental subtitlings potentially make a transformative intervention into how the characters are sensed and felt through film viewing. As Japanese-speaking women teaching Japanese language and culture at an English-speaking university in Canada, we use our bodies as racialized and racializing sites to explore the affective potentials of interlingual subtitles and their pedagogical implications. We reflect on students’ subtitling of Korean Japanese film Where Is the Moon (1993, dir. Yoichi Sai) that embodies race and senses through various cinematic techniques. Students’ subtitlings reshaped the “intercorporeal” space in which the cinematic bodies of the characters touch our bodies (Sekimoto and Brown, 2020).

Stakeholder Inclusion as the Research Council of Norway’s Silver Bullet

Focusing on stakeholder inclusion, this article investigates the consequences of implementing the responsible research and innovation framework in a public funding regime. I use a Norwegian transdisciplinary project as a case study, demonstrating how the Research Council of Norway relies heavily on the assumption that stakeholders will pay for further development of the project as long as they are appropriately engaged. In analysing my case, I show how a real risk exists for a project that can potentially deliver value to society and address the grand challenges of our time ends up as waste. I refer to this as 4E Waste which I break into four types: Economic Waste – when money put into the initial project becomes “worthless” because the research is not followed up, Eidetic Waste – where knowledge is lost when the community of practice that is building the novel understanding dissipates, Ecological Waste – when polluting practices associated with current production methods prevail, and Ethical Waste – when the potential enterprise becomes a missed chance to do something good. Keywords: RRI; stakeholder inclusion; funding policy; Mode 2 research

Reframing places, communities and identities: social learning in urban experimentation

A central promise of urban experiments (UEs) is to create sites for social learning. However, research on such learning in sustainability transitions still lacks conceptual clarity and empirical evidence. This article helps to close this gap by analyzing how social learning emerges from urban experimentation. It adopts a transactional understanding of learning induced by disruptions of everyday habits and distinguishes cognitive, normative, and relational learning processes. Further, the additional dimension of socio-material learning is derived to account for changes in understanding or interpreting material realities. These concepts serve an analytical framework for a case study of two transition experiments carried out as part of the transdisciplinary research project “Dresden – City of the Future.” The two UEs strive to initiate local sustainability transitions pertaining to participatory governance of urban districts and co-creation of a livable schoolyard. The empirical results illustrate how interventions by the two UEs induced learning in the sense of changes of cognitive understandings, norms, relations among people, as well as between people and their socio-material environments. The experiments encouraged individual and collective learning and in particular the formation of collective identities and interpretations of specific places. By comparing two UEs, we further show differences in learning regarding the actor groups, namely that the majority of learning processes in the first experiment dealt with bridging the gap between prevalent routines of the school community and novel habits introduced by the initiators of the experiment. Participants of the second experiment were socio-ecologically minded from the outset and therefore fewer learning processes took place in this regard.

Drivers and barriers to knowledge exchange through an envisioned online platform for transdisciplinary research projects

Transdisciplinary research requires improved knowledge exchange between science and practice. Such improvements include diversifying and scaling up knowledge accessing and sharing through online platforms. We conducted twenty interviews informed by behavioral science methods to clarify the aim, components, and participants' perspectives on the usefulness of the proposed components for an envisioned platform. Participants were members of a Dutch community of practice for river studies and a research programme into integrated and collaborative management. The proposed concept included storylines, data repositories, user profiles, interactive visualisations, and collaborative sessions. Interview results include drivers and barriers from prospective users that we translated into requirements to increase the potential adoption and effective use of online platforms with similar components. From the experiences with implementing these requirements, we provide recommendations for enabling primary drivers: (i) Combining online and offline interactions to provide various options for knowledge exchange between disciplines and organisations. (ii) Sharing the content and application of the research with a non-scientific audience. (iii) Reusing existing online platforms as much as possible without restricting any to improve the reuse of research methods and results. We further provide recommendations to overcome the main barriers: (i) Partnering with various communities to extend knowledge exchange. (ii) Following a participatory approach to improve the design and content while considering the time and resources that such a process entails. (iii) Providing flexible options to contribute and tailor overviews of available knowledge in different ways according to prospective users' roles in practice. (iv) Purposefully facilitating online interactions according to the transdisciplinary process-intended attributes.

Combining Intergroup Dialogue and Sociotechnical Infrastructure Design: Addressing Social and Technical Determinants of Health Information Disparities with the Latinx Community

This transdisciplinary research project employed a multi-method approach to address health information inequities in Kentucky’s Fayette County during the COVID-19 pandemic. We drew from the study of Sociotechnical Infrastructures, Health Inequities, and Community-Based and Intergroup Dialogue (IGD) to co-create an Alternative Sociotechnical Infrastructure to facilitate information sharing among three stakeholder groups: (1) Latinx community members, (2) civil society organizations, and (3) government officials. Our research design included a combination of methodologies that addressed the technical and, more importantly, the underlying social causes of information access disparities. Focus groups helped identify Information Communication Technology (ICT) use, preferences, barriers, and information-sharing strategies. Community dialogues highlighted information barriers, existing resources, and proposed community-based solutions. The findings informed development of a web-based platform prototype that will facilitate information sharing during a crisis among all stakeholders. The methodology used also allowed the emergence of community champions among Latinx people who need to be invited to the table for these initiatives. We found that combining participatory action research (PAR) principles with critical dialogic methods fosters an environment of trust that enhances collaboration among stakeholders and consequently makes the design of information infrastructures more equitable and sustainable. As Information Communication Technologies embody social relations, we recommend emphasizing dialogic competencies and knowledge around racism/difference while valuing differences, collaboration, equality, and inclusions.

Explaining Challenges That Beset Transdisciplinary Projects in the Global South: The Shift from Methodological Perspectives to a Political-Economic Dynamic Analysis

In this paper, I argue that rigorous attempts to grasp the challenges unique to transdisciplinary projects in the Global South (TPGSs) require an understanding of the target state’s political-economic dynamics, which can undermine TPGSs. In this regard, I harness social-conflict theory to examine how and why Cambodia’s political-economic dynamics affected my own transdisciplinary project, which addressed dam-induced problems in the northeast of the country from 2018 to 2021. The present paper’s findings clarify the relationships among various nonacademic TPGS stakeholders—a topic that has attracted little attention from transdisciplinarians but that can significantly shape TPGS outcomes.

Encouraging household energy conservation through transdisciplinary approaches in Ghana and South Africa: assumptions, challenges and guidelines

ABSTRACTTransdisciplinary research has gained traction globally for mapping pathways for sustainable urbanisation. The involvement of local communities is believed to central to knowledge co-production needed to address sustainability challenges. But working with local communities can be challenging. This paper is structured around the authors’ personal reflections on undertaking transdisciplinary household energy conservation projects in Ghana and South Africa. The paper reflects on the assumptions and challenges of doing transdisciplinary research in urban Africa and suggests some guidelines for consideration when doing transdisciplinary projects. An inductive analysis of our reflections showed five key challenges: lack of integration, divergent problem identification, tensions in knowledge co-production, asymmetrical power relations, and distrust and managing expectations. We draw on our collective experiences to develop guidelines for conducting transdisciplinary research in urban Africa. These guidelines are not prescriptive but can be useful for a growing and broader audience interested in undertaking transdisciplinary research.

Understanding the Rights of Nature: Working Together Across and Beyond Disciplines

Recognising the rights of nature is seen by many as the paradigm shift needed to truly embed ecology and the environment into nature-based policy and management solutions to address biodiversity loss, climate change, and sustainable development. However, despite its potential, research across and beyond disciplinary boundaries remains very limited, with most located in the humanities and social sciences and often lacking connection with environmental sciences. Based on a multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary project, we identify some critical common themes among the humanities, social sciences, and environmental sciences to support future research on the potential of the rights of nature to address contemporary social-environmental challenges. We argue that future research needs to be not only interdisciplinary but also transdisciplinary since the movement of rights of nature is often driven by and based on knowledge emerging outside of academic disciplines.

The Challenges of Symmetrical Dialogue: Reflections on Collaborative Research in Northeast Brazil

This article explores ways to promote symmetrical dialogue among knowledge-practices of artisanal fishing communities, primary education teachers, and academic researchers in the state of Bahia, Brazil. We describe multiple engagements in an inter- and transdisciplinary project that integrates research, educational, and conservation activities in two communities living in an estuarine ecosystem. Most community members dedicate their efforts to fishing activities, harboring wide knowledge about local biocultural diversity. The project promotes collaborative inclusion of local expertise and knowledge in school activities, while also striving for the inhabitants’ inclusion in the planning of protected areas. The collaboration aims at symmetrical dialogues between researchers and communities that support self-determination in local school education and biodiversity conservation. Challenges to such symmetrization, including disagreements and tensions among diverse actors, not only appear in encounters of local and academic knowledge, but also within the interdisciplinary project involving natural sciences, social sciences, and philosophy.

Corrigendum: Urban commoning under adverse conditions: lessons from a failed transdisciplinary project

Corrigendum: Urban commoning under adverse conditions: lessons from a failed transdisciplinary project

Systemic knowledge integration in transdisciplinary and sustainability transformation research

While knowledge integration has been well framed conceptually, the structural aspects that support co- learning and knowledge integration in transdisciplinary research remain only modestly addressed. Addressing this gap, we enlighten how a conceptual framework – building on former work by Ostrom, Giddens and Whaley – could help to structure and analyse systemic knowledge integration processes. The conceptual model is based on a transdisciplinary research project, ‘Region Römerland Carnuntum 2040’, aiming to investigate and trigger regional sustainability transformations via the experimentation with a new governance format “Future council”. The present article is based on the Future Council’s patching of rules for knowledge integration as well as a well thought-through accompanying research, which consist of a series of surveys and interviews to reveal subliminal values, capabilities, knowledge and emotions of the regional stakeholders involved in the FC. The conceptual model helped to provide a more equal playing field for systemic knowledge integration in a heterogenous group as well as just representation of marginalized groups (e.g. youth). On the other hand, our findings reveal that structural adaptability comes with the danger of reproducing power structures (e.g. of mayors). For the future we identify a need for more research on social boundaries, values and emotions and their important structuring role for transdisciplinary knowledge integration.

Case study of a pilot mentoring program in transdisciplinary sciences

ABSTRACT We conducted a case study on the implementation of an adult mentoring program designed to connect land-grant university graduate students who participated in a transdisciplinary and multi-institutional research project withindustry professionals for the purpose of exposing students to industry practices. Seven mentees and six mentors participated in the study. We employed the theory of planned behavior to inform findings regarding participants’ behavioral, normative, and control beliefs surrounding professional performance and goal attainment. Program outcomes were positive for student career development, for example expanding graduate students’ professional networks and sharing research findings with industry professionals. However, the COVID-19 pandemic hindered the mentoring program’s success by adding stress and travel restrictions that prevented full engagement in the program by all parties. Recommendations for improving the program’s success include providing participants with better support mechanisms for initiatingmentoring relationships and encouraging mentees to develop coping mechanisms when faced with cognitive overload and communication apprehension.

Lovewear: Haptic Clothing that Allows Intimate Exploration for Movement-Impaired People

AbstractPeople with disabilities often face physical, political, and societal barriers in expressing their sexuality. The lack of inclusivity in the sex toy market does not support an autonomous experience for impaired individuals who cannot operate toys without external assistance. Lovewear is a collaborative art-science project that combines user-centered design principles with soft robotics integrated into textiles. The aim is to offer an autonomous experience through haptic feedback, allowing self-exploration of intimate sensations and sexual pleasure to females with motor impairments. A pillow interface activates an underwear garment: While caressing and touching the pillow, the wearer triggers the underwear’s inflatable i actuators. This transdisciplinary project used a mixed-methods research design; the objective is to promote the embedment of technology into everyday garments, to improve the wearer’s quality of life.

Overcoming barriers to social inclusion in agricultural intensification: reflections on a transdisciplinary community development project from India and Bangladesh

Abstract We describe a research-for-development (R4D) strategy developed to address how investments and interventions in agricultural intensification as a means to achieve community development can be designed to be more socially inclusive and equitable. We draw on results from a 5-year project – Promoting socially inclusive and sustainable agricultural intensification in West Bengal (India) and southern Bangladesh (SIAGI). We reflect on a major pivot in the project’s strategy, from being primarily research-driven to placing community concerns and priorities at the centre with a shift towards Ethical Community Engagement (ECE). This became the foundational framework which guided the definition and undertaking of all subsequent activities – including a rethink of methods and concepts to develop tools and frameworks fit for purpose and local context, and inculcating a culture of reflexivity and mutual learning in the project. We show that creating the conditions for true participation, where project beneficiaries and non-government organizations are equal partners alongside researchers and government actors, and for co-learning using the ECE framework, sets the foundations for increased and potentially enduring social inclusion in agricultural intensification.

Realigning practices of care and environmental governance: findings and reflections from a transdisciplinary research project in Wales (UK)

This article presents This article presents findings from a transdisciplinary research project on collaborative practices for the sustainable management of natural resources (SMNR) in Wales. Here, the legislation establishes that the national well-being agenda and the principle of SMNR in environmental governance must be achieved through collaborative and participatory practices, across sectors and organisations, including within the public sector. However, neoliberal and hyper-bureaucratic governance structures, characterized by a risk-adverse nature, do not allow public sector institutional actors to experiment and engage with such practices in their everyday work. This article discusses a collective experience of reflecting on, and challenging such oppressing neoliberal structures, through experimenting with alternative ways of doing and being together. The emerging community at the heart of this experience is composed of policymakers, practitioners, artists, and academics (including the authors), who together carved out a 'site of negotiation' to contest techno-managerialism and mere rational approaches to (natural resources) governance. In the course of this research, these actors began to collectively create and shape new and shared meanings of doing collaborative and cross-boundary work (as required by the Welsh legislation), based on relationships of trust, reflexivity, embodiment, and relationality. Reflecting also on our own experience (and interpretation) of working alongside them, we believe that such emergent processes of collective meaning-making have the potential to transform neoliberal (environmental) governance structures into 'lived' and 'owned' institutions. Inspired by relational, integrative and caring forms of democratic governance, we argue that professionals in public sector organisations can realign governance structures in ways that meet the challenge of enabling the rapid and wide sustainability transformations that are so desperately needed.

Refugees’ Arriving through the Lens of Fiction: Unveiling the Ambivalences of Hegemonic Expectations

In this article, we use fiction as a lens to study processes of refugees’ arriving in Austria. For that purpose, we draw on findings from our transdisciplinary and participatory project “The Art of Arriving—Reframing ‘Refugee Integration’” in which we have created a real-world laboratory and examined if and how the meaning-making processes involved in creating and interpreting art can foster reframing “refugee integration” concepts and provide alternative views on the arrival of refugees beyond an assimilationist lens. By inviting and accompanying artists from different cultural realms (literature, music, and photography) and with different refugee experiences during the process of jointly creating an artwork as well as by getting access to the recipients’ interpretations of these artworks, we gained insights into the various ways that artistic practices unveil and contest common hegemonic expectations that shape the processes of refugees’ (and other migrants’) arriving. Our analysis of the short story “Außen vor” (“Being [left] out”) written by Hamed Abboud, Anna Baar, and Mascha Dabić—of its creation and reception process—contributes to the ongoing debates on how refugees’ artistic practices can serve as means of cultural and social transformation.

Transdisciplinary Research along the Logic of Empowerment: Perspectives from Four Urban and Regional Transformation Projects

Transformative research requires transdisciplinary collaboration, forcing researchers out of their disciplinary comfort zones. In transdisciplinary research projects, the role of (social) scientists changes, and non-scientific actors become part of research projects. Transdisciplinary research is particularly suited to not only generate scientific knowledge, but also invent real-world solutions and to innovative. This, however, does not come without challenges. Implementing a transdisciplinary project is time-consuming and requires the alignment of both the research and impact ambitions of all project partners. In this paper we build upon experiences gained in four transdisciplinary research projects and ask: (1) What is the transdisciplinary approach followed by the project? (2) Which opportunities and challenges can be identified for successful transdisciplinary collaborations? (3) What is the rationale for engaging in transdisciplinary research from the perspective of social scientists? Building upon the logics of interdisciplinary, a fourth logic, called the logic of empowerment, is identified as a driver for transdisciplinary research. Transdisciplinary collaboration empowers researchers to not only ‘discover’ innovations, i.e., to invent, but also to implement, i.e., to innovate.

Challenges toward Evidence-Based Policymaking Using Agent-Based Modeling for Federal Sports Grants: A Self-Reflection from a Transdisciplinary Project

Despite their importance, federal grant systems often need more clarity regarding cost-effectiveness, lack of transparency, and slow feedback cycles. Sports funding systems aimed at improving child health and contributing to sustainable development goals are incredibly challenging due to their heterogeneity in stakeholders and regional aspects. Here, we analyze how we tackled these challenges in a transdisciplinary EU project in Austria, targeting the use of agent-based modeling for evidence-based policymaking in a co-creation process with policy stakeholders in the domain of federal sports grants to improve the health and well-being of children and youth. The initial and executed set of procedures is described, along with lessons learned during the project’s lifetime. These lessons derive a framework that provides an adapted set of processes, supporting methods, and critical decision points for an improved use of transdisciplinarity. In addition, the steps of the developed framework are combined with essential aspects of knowledge integration, following the main phases of the policy cycle and providing suggestions for required skills and competencies for capacity building concerning implementing the developed framework in the public sector. Our results show that the combination of transdisciplinarity, human-centered policymaking, and sports, supported by cutting-edge technologies such as agent-based modeling, can achieve significantly better results than a pure disciplinary approach and generate positive spill-over effects.