TEACHING MANUAL: KNOTS Project | Third Section - Topics, Themes and Application

The teaching manual is the main outcome of the KNOTS project. It is a resource as well as a toolbox for university teachers, researchers, students and interested audiences  With the manual, we want not only to motivate colleagues all over the world to take up transdisciplinarity in teaching but also to give some ideas and guidelines on how to do it in practice based on our shared experiences and endeavors.

For more background information about the teaching manual, please visit the link here.

Third Section - Topics, Themes and Application

Transdisciplinarity and Migration Studies

This session elaborates on the possible ways to approach migration studies from a transdisciplinary perspective. Transdisciplinary migration research is underrepresented in transdisciplinary scholarship compared to other fields of scholarly inquiry such as urban planning, natural resources management, or public health. It is also less prone to collaborative research practice such as action research, or collaborating with social movements or social groups from civil society. At the same time, the migration question is also closely related to identification and othering processes, and hence also about identity politics. Because of this, its analysis is often messy and ambiguous. From a transdisciplinary point of view, discussing the political interests and the discriminatory and exclusionary social practices which make migration a problem should become more central to migration studies than they usually are. We thus argue that such a shifting of focus in migration studies, which could be achieved by pursuing a transdisciplinary approach, would help to understand more closely the intersection of societal, political and economic powers constituting the migration subject. 

Transdisciplinary research in environmental change: A political ecology approach 

The aim of this session is three-fold: 1) To problematize the relationship between environment and society to reveal their fundamental interdependence. Here, it is also emphasized how knowledge production shapes the co-produced relationship between environment and society and its governance. 2) To highlight the inherently political nature of environment-society relations, drawing on the field of political ecology and its key themes: scarcity, ecological modernization, the market and processes of commodification, and the commons. 3) To explore examples of transdisciplinary research in relation to real-world challenges of environmental change.

Environment and Social Movement in South East Asia

This section contains an example of a 4,5 hour teaching session on transdisciplinarity in the context of “Environment and Social Movement in South East Asia”. The session, developed by Ta-Wei Chu from Chiang Mai University, is divided in three parts: “Introduction to Transdisciplinarity”, “Knowledge Production and Integration”, and “Transdisciplinary Environmental Research”.

Student Working Papers

This section is not a part of the teaching manual, but concerns related students’ reflections on transdisciplinary work (with a particular focus on KNOTS). Two working papers were produced in this respect.

Go to First Section - What is Trandisciplinarity?

Go to Second Section - Methodologies and Research Design

Please click here to visit KNOTS’ CSDS Project Page

TEACHING MANUAL: KNOTS Project | Second Section - Methodologies and Research Designs

The teaching manual is the main outcome of the KNOTS project. It is a resource as well as a toolbox for university teachers, researchers, students and interested audiences  With the manual, we want not only to motivate colleagues all over the world to take up transdisciplinarity in teaching but also to give some ideas and guidelines on how to do it in practice based on our shared experiences and endeavors.

For more background information about the teaching manual, please visit the link here.

Second Section - Methodologies and Research Designs

Methodologies for Transdisciplinarity

Transdisciplinary research practice challenges in its core two intrinsic assumptions of academic knowledge production: first, that scientific knowledge is neutral and objective, and second, that science is on top of the hierarchy between different sorts of knowledges. This session introduces thoughts from postcolonial and feminist authors who address science as relations of power and domination, but which are conspicuously missing in transdisciplinary literature. This session therefore introduces the concepts of othering, epistemic violence and colonizing discourse,as well as situated knowledges and standpoint theory. It further proposes reflexive positionality as a strategy to navigate through research and the pitfalls of producing knowledge within multiple societal hierarchies.   

Participation and Local Knowledge

The general purpose of this lecture is to introduce participation and local knowledge in a combined way and explicitly link the two topics. The specific aim related to participation is to show that participation goes beyond mere communicative aspects and involves a political dimension. The specific aim related to local knowledge is to explain that general attributes of local knowledge make it a specific kind of knowledge found in all societies. 

Knowledge Co-Production and Integrative Design

This session begins by discussing different types of knowledge and their multiple rationalities. It then deliberates why a disconnect exists between ‘real-world’ problems and knowledge produced through academic research projects, and it introduces ‘knowledge co-production’ to link them together (van Kerkhoff and Lebel, 2006). A methodology for transdisciplinary research developed by the Institute for Socio-Ecological Research (ISOE) is presented to exemplify how transdisciplinary research may be undertaken in practice (Bergmann et al 2012). This session concludes with a role-play exercise that explores the first stage of transdisciplinary research, namely problem definition and research question preparation.

Transdisciplinarity and Intersectionality

In this session, there will be five parts: (1) a short discussion of the similarities between the concepts intersectionality and transdisciplinarity, followed by (2) an introduction into intersectionality, and then (3) what it means to apply this concept methodologically. Finally, (4) it will be highlighted how to apply intersectionality in a transdisciplinary project, before (5) the conclusion of the lecture. 

Ethical issues in the context of transdisciplinary research

This session will (1) introduce the historical roots of attending to the ethical aspects of human related research, (2) sum up the institutional context of research ethics as embodied in institutional ethical guidelines, (3) focus on the concepts of positionality and reflexivity and finally (4) discuss assessing ethics in the 3 stages of TDR projects.

Go to First Section - What is Trandisciplinarity?

Go to Third Section - Topics, Themes and Application

Please click here to visit KNOTS’ CSDS Project Page

TEACHING MANUAL: KNOTS Project | First Section - What is Trandisciplinarity?

The teaching manual is the main outcome of the KNOTS project. It is a resource as well as a toolbox for university teachers, researchers, students and interested audiences  With the manual, we want not only to motivate colleagues all over the world to take up transdisciplinarity in teaching but also to give some ideas and guidelines on how to do it in practice based on our shared experiences and endeavors.

For more background information about the teaching manual, please visit the link here.

First Section - What is Trandisciplinarity?

The History of Transdisciplinarity

This session a) provides a brief historical perspective on transdisciplinarity, b) discusses different forms of integrative knowledge production like interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, and c) introduces the two most common understandings of transdisciplinarity and common features. 

Why Transdisciplinarity?

This session gives a short overview over 1) the history of science, thereby introducing the differentiation of science in disciplines, the differentiation between scientific and practical knowledge and the fragmentation of different types of methods, forms and norms (i.e. paradigms); and 2) how these debates and discussions relate to the discussions on science communication and whether and how this can help us to understand the possibilities and relevance of transdisciplinarity as a new framework for knowledge production.

How to Do Transdisciplinary Research?

This session focusses on how to do transdisciplinary research. Thereby the second understanding of transdisciplinarity which sees it as an operational modus of research connecting knowledge production and societal problems (see session “The History of Transdisciplinarity”) is in the center of interest. This presentation will a) introduce the ‘ideal’ phases of a transdisciplinary research project, b) discuss the challenges and c) lay out strategies presented for to coping with challenges that might accompany the implementation of transdisciplinary projects. Therefore, it is important to keep in mind that the focus is on researchers and their perspectives. 

Go to Second Section - Methodologies and Research Design

Go to Third Section - Topics, Themes and Application

Please click here to visit KNOTS’ CSDS Project Page