FIRST INIT Virtual Seminar: Inter- and Transdisciplinary Horizons. INIT Purposes and Approaches


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The challenge is clear.  Understanding and acting on pressing issues of cultural and environmental survival—from  explaining global migration, to pushing the boundaries of new media art and developing sustainable cities—demand rigorous, relevant and engaged forms of scholarship.  As a result, they also call for a profound re-examination of the nature of academic knowledge production and its role in advancing collective understanding and global wellbeing.  How does one discern the relative relevance of problems for study?  In what ways do disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to knowledge production leverage our understanding and capacity to act?  How have individuals and groups attempted to integrate distinct knowledge traditions and worldviews for the advancement of understanding?  What challenges—epistemological, conceptual, empirical, relational, material—do these forms of knowledge production present? How might knowledge production be organized in the future?  How are we to educate individuals to conduct relevant, rigorous and engaged knowledge work?

The Inter-transdiscipinary horizons seminar brings together experts in the humanities, the social sciences, the natural sciences, technology, and education to reflect about contemporary forms of academic knowledge production.  With a focus on disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholarship, the seminar will shed light on the purposes that these approaches might best serve, the processes and practices by which understanding is advanced and validated, the leveraging contributions and challenges that these approaches presents, and resulting implications for research evaluation and education.  It is our hope that a comparative analysis of disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to research and education will yield elements toward a comprehensive conceptualization of academic knowledge production—one that articulates, for example, the circumstances under which particular approaches are best fit, the distinct validation challenges they face, and the assumptions about the nature of knowledge and inquiry on which they are built.

The seminar is organized as a virtual platform of conversation and echange of ideas for the INIT network: International Network for Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplnarity

Papers open for discussion

Interdisciplinary Cases and Disciplinary Knowledge

Wolfgang Krohn

Date of publication: 20 February 2012

This chapter provides an epistemological analysis of interdisciplinary knowledge and research. It points at the peculiarities of interdisciplinarity and determines its place in the context of modern social epistemology. Interdisciplinary research can be subdivided into three kinds. At the center of the following analysis there is interdisciplinary problem solving, or better said, interdisciplinary case work. Of no less relevance, but of less epistemological concern, there is interdisciplinary communication as it is cultivated by many research centers. And finally there are a few cases of interdisciplinary fusion creating new disciplines. Among the suggested—but contested—examples are biochemistry, cognitive science, climate research, and public health.

Transdisciplinarity in the practice of research

Thomas Jahn, Matthias Bergmann

Date of publication: 09 April 2012

The experience of practices of research, especially in the socio-ecological context, has led us to the conception of transdisciplinarity that we present in the rest of this article, a conception that reflects the real state of transdisciplinary research as it is practiced currently, while, at the same time, opening up the possibility of a better understanding of transdisciplinarity,one that can lead to a wider agreement on its nature and purposes.