By Manuela Lenzen
(German version below.)
The world’s problems rarely respect the boundaries of academic disciplines. They require solutions that look beyond disciplinary boundaries: interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary approaches.
In interdisciplinary projects, researchers from different disciplines work together to find solutions to research problems. In transdisciplinary projects, non-scientific stakeholders, particularly from civil society, politics, culture and business, are also involved in the research process.
This insight is not new. For the longest time, however, such projects had a rather difficult time at universities. They did not fit into the usual funding schemes and they were a risk for the careers of the researchers. After all, if you can’t really be categorised in any discipline, you don’t fit in well with chairs that are still advertised on a disciplinary basis. Interdisciplinary projects were and are therefore often something that young researchers were only able to pursue in addition to their academic qualifications.
The increasingly urgent problems of the present make it clear that things cannot stay this way. And slowly but surely, a broader basis for interdisciplinary research is developing. This development is also due to the insight that cooperation beyond the boundaries of one’s own discipline is not an easy endeavour that succeeds automatically if there is sufficient interest and goodwill on the part of all those involved. Rather, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research are extremely complex projects. Successful co-operation does not come naturally, it has to be learnt, just like other research practices. Of course, there are at least two obstacles to this learning: the time that those involved often cannot find in everyday university life, and the lack of teachers: Who has enough experience to be able to teach interdisciplinarity?
As a kind of interim solution, various toolkits are currently being developed from which researchers, organisers and funding institutions can draw as required. The most recent example is the EU project SHAPE-ID, Shaping interdisciplinary practices in Europe, which aimed to improve interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration between the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies and the natural, technical and engineering sciences and mathematics.
This project not only produced an annotated literature review, but also a well-equipped toolbox, the SHAPE-ID Toolkit. You select your role in the research process – for example ‘Research Individual’ – and can then call up instructions on how to set up an interdisciplinary team, how to search for collaborators and how to allocate tasks. There are also experience reports, tips on troubleshooting and planning interdisciplinary research careers.
SHAPE-ID is not the only project of its kind. The Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity (ITD Alliance), which has set itself the task of strengthening and promoting ‘collaborative forms of cross-border research and practice’, has started a collection of such toolkits for inter- and transdisciplinary research on the ITD Toolkits Inventory page. In addition to the results of SHAPDE-ID, four other toolkits are listed there.
How do you identify the exact topic of you research project? Who should be involved? What types of knowledge are needed? How do you get them together? How do you form a research team from people with very different backgrounds? What are the sources of conflict and possible solutions? How do you communicate the results to colleagues, funders and the public? And what experiences have others had? You can find answers to all these questions in the toolboxes. It is no longer necessary to reinvent the wheel of interdisciplinary collaboration for every interdisciplinary group.