STEMskiller: Skill Set Map for Mentors of Early Career Researchers
ENGAGEMENT, INVOLVEMENT, COLLABORATION, TRANSDISCIPLINARITY, AND INQUISITIVNESS: Converging science and technologies
Transdiciplinarity
Definition:
Unlike interdisciplinarity, “transdisciplinarity” (TD) represents academic effort with a clearer goal: to understand the world across disciplinary demarcations, and the:
…emergence of transdisciplinarity is dated conventionally to the first international seminar on interdisciplinarity (ID), co-sponsored in 1970 by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In the influential typology created for that meeting, TD was defined as ‘a common system of axioms for a set of disciplines’ that transcends the narrow scope of disciplinary worldviews through an overarching synthesis.[1]
Transdisciplinarity attempts to answer questions such as:
How to tackle the manifold aspects of reality? How to increase understanding on global and complex issues? How to stimulate synergies among disciplines? How to support co-operation and exchange among experts and sectors?[2]
Mentors should make mentees aware of such trends because grants at the international level (e.g., EU grants related to sustainability and climate change) can incorporate a basic level of collaboration across disciplines in an attempt to solve societal problems.
[1] Klein, J.T. (2014). Discourses of transdisciplinarity: Looking Back to the Future. Futures, 63, 69. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2014.08.008>
[2] Kim, Y. (1998). Forward to: Stimulating Synergies, Integrating Knowledge.International Symposium on Transdisciplinarity, Val-d'Oise, France, 1998, III. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000114694
Useful resources on Transdiciplinarity:
Alonso-Yanez, G., House-Peters, L., Garcia-Cartagena, M., Bonelli, S., Lorenzo-Arana, I., & Ohira, M. (2019). Mobilizing transdisciplinary collaborations: Collective reflections on decentering academia in knowledge production. Global Sustainability, 2, https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2019.2
Provides a description of a multi-national TD collaboration in the area of global sustainability, challenges encountered, and thoughts about how to improve future joint efforts.
Klein, J.T. (2014). Discourses of transdisciplinarity: Looking Back to the Future. Futures, 63, 69. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2014.08.008
Provides a brief overview of TD and current interpretations of related concepts, concluding that:
As an epistemological project, TD will be aligned more closely with the discourse of transcendence. As a method of knowledge production, it will be linked with utilitarian objectives, although they range from manufacturing new products to new protocols for health care and environmental sustainability. As a form of critique, it will continue to interrogate the structure and logic of the university and its role in society (p. 73).
Tags: All IPS; all PSR; all IAL; CompQ
Peer Review: None
Table of contents:
Author: Stephanie Krueger
Peer Reviewer(s): None