Inter- and Transdisciplinarity Beyond Buzzwords
The theme of the ITD24 conference is ‘Inter- and Transdisciplinarity Beyond Buzzwords: Educational Pathways for Sustainable Research Collaborations’. Educators, researchers, practitioners, and students from around the world are offered the opportunity to share their knowledge, insights, and expertise on the critical issues in inter- and transdisciplinarity needed to build capacity in and through research, education, policy-making, activism, and artistic engagement.
Sharing tools and knowledge to enrich and sharpen critical thinking
Between 2017-2023, SLU Urban Futures hosted the “Criticality in Research/Criticality as Praxis” PhD course series, which explores the potential of criticality to enrich and help evolve epistemological norms and normative research methods toward new forms of knowledge production. The series has three aims: provide young researchers with a framework for understanding criticality in ID and TD research and practice; a space to rehearse interactive and synthetic peer-to-peer critical thinking processes; and a shared toolkit to enrich and sharpen critical thinking, listening, reading, and writing skills.
At the ITD24, the initiators and teachers of the PhD course series, Andrea Kahn and Lisa Diedrich, will join eight young researchers of assorted disciplinary and professional backgrounds who enrolled in the course during 2017-2023. Four of the researchers come from SLU Landscape’s Phd cohort, and the others currently work on projects in Norway, South Africa and Belgium. Together with ITD24 conference participants, the group will explore how criticality broadens and strengthens ID/TD education, and how to design and use critical conversation tools to foster ID/TD mindsets.
The ITD workshop will be structured around three live conversational ‘rounds’, ‘real-time notetaking’, and in situ ‘epistemic drawing’ on a paper-covered table: Course leaders will share what they did and what and learned from teaching; young researchers will share their experiences of the course, and its influence on their work; and an open conversation with ITD24 participants explore how a pedagogical approach based on modelling critical conversation tools can support integration experts and expertise, and engage with ID-TD research, more broadly.
Attracting & Anchoring – establishing value for inter- and transdisciplinary belonging
SLU’s four Future Platforms; SLU Future One Health, SLU Future Food, SLU Future Forests and SLU Urban Futures, are tasked to strengthen inter- and transdisciplinary competence at SLU. The platforms are taking on complex issues, supporting new knowledge generation needed to create sustainable systems and living environments for the future.
At the ITD24, the four platforms will collectively arrange a workshop and invite participants to co-shape and reflect on formats to anchor inter- and transdisciplinary belonging. Together they will share some of their applied formats that foster and build inter- and transdisciplinary capacities and ask all participants to collectively assess and further develop those formats using a set of critical questions to strengthen their impact. Those questions concern e.g. mandate, ownership, incentives and right encounters for inter- and transdisciplinarity.
Formats that will be shared at the workshop are, among others, the Research Residency, the Interdisciplinary Academy, the Climate Conversations series and Seed Funding Models.
