Publications (FIS)

Building capacities for transdisciplinary research

Challenges and recommendations for early-career researchers

authored by: Melanie Jaeger-Erben, Johanna Kramm, Marco Sonnberger, Carolin Völker, Christian Albert, Antonia Graf, Kathleen Hermans, Steffen Lange, Tilman Santarius, Barbara Schröter, Stefanie Sievers-Glotzbach, Janis Winzer
Abstract: While transdisciplinarity offers a way to tackle complex social-ecological challenges, transdisciplinary research is a challenging task in itself. The integration of research methods across academic disciplines, the collaboration between researchers and practitioners, and the need to balance societal and disciplinary academic impacts pose many difficulties even to experienced applied scientists and even more so to early-career researchers. Young scholars face particular problems, given their lack of longer-term experience and their still fragile position within academia. Drawing on existing literature, an early-career researcher workshop, and our own experience as junior research group leaders, we discuss specific challenges and respective solution strategies of transdisciplinary research within the context of sustainability.
Organisation(s): Institute of Environmental Planning
External Organisation(s): Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU)
University of Stuttgart
University of Münster
Helmholtz Zentrum München - German Research Center for Environmental Health
Technische Universität Berlin
Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF)
Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg
Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration (IZM)
Institute for Environmental Economics Research (IÖW)
Institute for Social-Ecological Research (ISOE)
Type: Article
Journal: GAIA: Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society
Volume: 27
Pages: 379-386
No. of pages: 8
ISSN: 0940-5550
Publication date: 01.01.2018
Publication status: Published
Peer reviewed: Yes
ASJC Scopus subject areas: Environmental Science (miscellaneous), Economics, Econometrics and Finance (miscellaneous)
Electronic version(s): https://doi.org/10.14512/gaia.27.4.10 (Access: Open)
https://doi.org/10.15488/4743 (Access: Open)

BibTeX

@article{1204ed848a524fa1b9c7a50f922e009d,
title = "Building capacities for transdisciplinary research: Challenges and recommendations for early-career researchers",
abstract = "While transdisciplinarity offers a way to tackle complex social-ecological challenges, transdisciplinary research is a challenging task in itself. The integration of research methods across academic disciplines, the collaboration between researchers and practitioners, and the need to balance societal and disciplinary academic impacts pose many difficulties even to experienced applied scientists and even more so to early-career researchers. Young scholars face particular problems, given their lack of longer-term experience and their still fragile position within academia. Drawing on existing literature, an early-career researcher workshop, and our own experience as junior research group leaders, we discuss specific challenges and respective solution strategies of transdisciplinary research within the context of sustainability.",
keywords = "Capacity building, Early career, Social-ecological research, Transdisciplinary research",
author = "Melanie Jaeger-Erben and Johanna Kramm and Marco Sonnberger and Carolin V{\"o}lker and Christian Albert and Antonia Graf and Kathleen Hermans and Steffen Lange and Tilman Santarius and Barbara Schr{\"o}ter and Stefanie Sievers-Glotzbach and Janis Winzer",
note = "Funding information: Our research design includes a literature review, group discussions and co-operative supervision in research group leader trainings, and finally group discussions in a workshop with a wider transdisciplinary audience. The authors are currently serving as leaders of seven junior research groups funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Given our backgrounds in various fields, we represent an interdisciplinary constellation (see table 1 for an overview of the groups). Our paper takes a self-reflective perspective in line with our understanding of transdisciplinarity outlined above. The workshop we organized was entitled Doing Transdisciplinary Research – Addressing Challenges Faced by Early-Career Researchers and took place during the International Transdisciplinary Conference 2017 on September 11, 2017, in L{\"u}neburg (Germany). In a world caf{\'e} setting (see Brown and Isaacs 2005), participants identified and discussed the main challenges of early-career transdisciplinary research and formulated recommendations on how to handle them based on their own experience. To structure the workshop, we had identified, based on literature research and our discussion during the training, three overall challenges as being particularly relevant to early-career researchers: 1.interdisciplinarity and the integration of disciplinary knowledge (figure 1, p.383), 2. collabo ration between academia and society, 3. the science-policy interface2 and science communication. In the following, we will discuss these challeng es and make some recommendations based on our experience, the literature, and the results of the workshop. We will refer to the experiences in the different research groups by citing their respective group leaders.",
year = "2018",
month = jan,
day = "1",
doi = "10.14512/gaia.27.4.10",
language = "English",
volume = "27",
pages = "379--386",
journal = "GAIA: Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society",
issn = "0940-5550",
publisher = "Oekom Verlag",
number = "4",
}