Situative Interdisciplinarity: Empirical Reflections on Ten Years of Cross-Disciplinary Research

Reckinger, Rachel; Wille, Christian

doi:10.2478/ajis-2018-0055

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Taking a multisectoral approach, or deliberate collaboration between different sectors of society (e.g., government, civil society, private sector), to address IWT has many advantages, such as the ability to leverage resources and expertise, avoid duplicative actions, and improve effectiveness (Salunke and Lal, 2017;Mahlangu et al, 2019). Embedded in this approach is crossdisciplinarity, which we use here as an umbrella term to describe a continuum of collaboration, ranging from multidisciplinarity to interdiscipinarity to transdisciplinarity in which disciplinary concepts, theories, and methods are combined or integrated to different degrees (Choi and Pak, 2006;Reckinger and Wille, 2018;Ding et al, 2020).…”

Section: Toward New Approaches To Combating Wildlife Traffickingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Toward New Approaches To Combating Wildlife Traffickingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Multidisciplinarity occurs when people from multiple disciplines work on different aspects of a complex problem and share information but maintain disciplinary boundaries without convergence or integration (Choi and Pak, 2006;Reckinger and Wille, 2018). Interdisciplinarity moves toward convergence and collaboration, with synthesis and integration of knowledge, but still maintains disciplinary perspectives (Reckinger and Wille, 2018). In contrast, transdisciplinarity tends to be multisectoral with collaboration between researchers from different disciplines and members of public and private sectors, including civil society (Choi and Pak, 2006;Reckinger and Wille, 2018;Pohl et al, 2021), potentially facilitating inclusion of stakeholder groups that have typically been excluded in the past.…”

Section: Toward New Approaches To Combating Wildlife Traffickingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Interdisciplinarity moves toward convergence and collaboration, with synthesis and integration of knowledge, but still maintains disciplinary perspectives (Reckinger and Wille, 2018). In contrast, transdisciplinarity tends to be multisectoral with collaboration between researchers from different disciplines and members of public and private sectors, including civil society (Choi and Pak, 2006;Reckinger and Wille, 2018;Pohl et al, 2021), potentially facilitating inclusion of stakeholder groups that have typically been excluded in the past. It is typically more integrative, applied, and likely to produce novel solutions (Mitchell et al, 2017).…”

Section: Toward New Approaches To Combating Wildlife Traffickingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Systems Approaches to Combating Wildlife Trafficking: Expanding Existing Frameworks to Facilitate Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration

Browne¹,

Ronis²,

Miller³

et al. 2021

Front. Conserv. Sci.

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Wildlife trafficking is a complex conservation issue that threatens thousands of species around the world and, in turn, negatively affects biodiversity and human well-being. It occurs in varied social-ecological contexts; includes numerous and diverse actors along the source-transit-destination trade chain, who are involved in illicit and often covert human behaviors driven by interacting social, economic, cultural, and political factors; and involves numerous stakeholders comprising multiple sectors and disciplines. Such wicked problems can be difficult to define and usually lack simple, clear solutions. Systems thinking is a way to understand and address complex issues such as wildlife trafficking and requires multisectoral, cross-disciplinary collaboration to comprehensively understand today's increasingly complex problems and develop holistic and novel solutions. We review methods utilized to date to combat wildlife trafficking and discuss their strengths and limitations. Next, we describe the continuum of cross-disciplinarity and present two frameworks for understanding complex environmental issues, including the illegal trade in wildlife, that can facilitate collaboration across sectors and disciplines. The Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation provides guidance and tools for defining complex social-ecological systems and identifying strategic points of intervention. One Health focuses on the nexus of human, wildlife, and environmental health, and can provide a framework to address concerns around human-wildlife interactions, including those associated with the illegal wildlife trade. Finally, we provide recommendations for expanding these and similar frameworks to better support communication, learning, and collaboration in cross-disciplinary efforts aimed at addressing international wildlife trafficking and its intersections with other complex, global conservation issues.

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Section: Toward New Approaches To Combating Wildlife Traffickingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Toward New Approaches To Combating Wildlife Traffickingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Toward New Approaches To Combating Wildlife Traffickingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Toward New Approaches To Combating Wildlife Traffickingmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Systems Approaches to Combating Wildlife Trafficking: Expanding Existing Frameworks to Facilitate Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration

Browne¹,

Ronis²,

Miller³

et al. 2021

Front. Conserv. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The characteristics of diff erent forms of cross-disciplinarity are also summarised in Table 2.1. Although presented -here and in literature in general -as distinct categories, these diff erent approaches can be argued to fall on a spectrum, and few research projects will fall exclusively into one category without characteristics of any others (Klein, 2017;O'Rourke et al, 2019) and are likely to change in their forms, intensities, and means of collaboration over time (Reckinger & Wille, 2018). It should be noted that although we speak of a spectrum of integration and collaboration, it is not only the extent to which integration and collaboration take place that distinguished diff erent forms of cross-disciplinarity, but for instance also which actors and corresponding knowledge bases are involved and integrated (O'Rourke et al, 2019;Pohl et al, 2011).…”

Section: A Spectrum Of In Tegration and Collaborationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Navigating Difference in Inter- & Transdisciplinary Learning

Horn¹

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Complex sustainability issues – such as the energy transition and social inequalities – cannot be addressed from a single field. They are not confined to the disciplinary compartments into which academia is organised, and they are affected by and affect diverse societal actors. Therefore, such complex issues require inter- and transdisciplinary approaches in which scientists from diverse disciplines and societal actors collaborate and integrate their knowledge and perspective to generate novel insights. If we want to stimulate inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration for complex sustainability issues, this places a demand on our universities in how they train their students. And although the call for inter- and transdisciplinary approaches is commonly accepted, there are still many questions about how inter- and transdisciplinary learning comes about and can be supported. This motivated us to undertake this PhD project with the research question: How can we prepare university students for inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to address complex sustainability issues? We conducted an action research project in the context of a novel inter- and transdisciplinary master module that we designed and implemented as part of this research project: the Interdisciplinary Community Service Learning (iCSL) module. This module consists of two courses: iCSL1: Defining Challenges in a Multi-Stakeholder Context and iCSL2: Addressing Challenges through Transdisciplinary Research. Students from diverse fields collaborate with each other (interdisciplinarity) and with non-academic actors (transdisciplinarity). During the first two pilot years of the iCSL module (2019-2021), we collected research data for the six studies in this PhD project including observations, interviews, focus group discussions, and written reflections. From the data we learned that inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration requires that teams ‘navigate difference’ – in opinions, perspectives, and knowledge – to expose, recognize and confront differences and engage in knowledge integration. Only then the value of diverse knowledge and perspectives in cross-disciplinary teams can be used to generate novel, richer, more comprehensive insights and thereby realise the potential of inter- and transdisciplinarity. However, we found that the students in our courses often did the exact opposite; they tended to avoid, overlook, and ignore differences. Consequently, their collaboration ran the risk of remaining superficial and narrow, which prevented them from fulfilling the promises of inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration. The potential for inter- and transdisciplinary learning and training thus lies in supporting teams and individuals to navigate difference, counteracting personal and social tendencies. We saw that diverse representation – of disciplinary and societal perspectives - in the inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration were key to getting in contact with differences. Another condition turned out to be the collaboration towards a joint goal or product, that necessitated knowledge integration. Besides these conditions, we saw that interventions could support inter- and transdisciplinary learning. We found that it is important to engage the individual as a whole in inter- and transdisciplinary learning to stimulate the development of attitudes, behaviours and values, as opposed to an exclusively cognitive focus on knowledge and skills. Stimulating affective processes played an important role in doing so. Furthermore, we saw that students’ abilities to engage in inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration varied widely and that a combination of structure and freedom helped in catering to diverse competence levels and learning needs. Together, the findings from this PhD research project contribute to the understanding of inter- and transdisciplinarity and of inter- and transdisciplinary learning. Additionally, the research findings provides insight into processes that are relevant beyond the educational context when attempting to better understand and facilitate inter- and transdisciplinarity. In order to support the uptake of our lessons in other contexts, we also provide concrete recommendations and two directly usable, open access tools.

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Using a Creative Approach to Teach Russian as a Foreign Language to International Students Majoring in “Music Education”

Sheglova

Rubtsova

Krylova

2021

Technology, Innovation and Creativity in Digital Society

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Situative Interdisciplinarity: Empirical Reflections on Ten Years of Cross-Disciplinary Research

Cited by 4 publications

References 38 publications

Systems Approaches to Combating Wildlife Trafficking: Expanding Existing Frameworks to Facilitate Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration

Systems Approaches to Combating Wildlife Trafficking: Expanding Existing Frameworks to Facilitate Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration

Navigating Difference in Inter- & Transdisciplinary Learning

Using a Creative Approach to Teach Russian as a Foreign Language to International Students Majoring in “Music Education”

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