Interactive Timeline Activity: Designing and Implementing ‘Phase 0’ in Transdisciplinary Research

Description

Transformative, transdisciplinary research aims to integrate scientific inquiry and societal impact by working across disciplines and with non-academic partners. The transdisciplinary research (TDR) process is often divided into three phases: a) problem identification and framing; b) co-creation of (solution-oriented and transferable) knowledge; and c) implementation and integration (Lang et al. 2012; Lawrence et al. 2022). Horcea-Milcu, Leventon and Lang (2022) add an additional phase, phase 0, at the beginning of the project, focused on building collaboration and understanding the (case study) context.

Phase 0 can be seen as building the preconditions to start a TDR project, for which the framework developed three principles: 1) selecting the case study based on content and process criteria; 2) understanding the case study context from a TDR perspective, including reflective discussions to understand the perceptions, expectations and priorities of partners; and 2) fostering premises for coming together by managing expectations, breaking boundaries and negotiating goals (Horcea-Milcu, Leventon, and Lang 2022). In practice however, transdisciplinary projects are often messy and non-linear, making designing and implementing this first stage of the process challenging.

In this workshop we will explore this first phase of the TDR process. We will start the workshop with an introduction to the guiding principles for phase 0 of TDR enriched with some examples from practice from two TDR projects from different national contexts. This will be followed by an interactive timeline activity based on a workshop that we conducted in the WildlifeNL project to better understand the choices that were made in the early stages and how those shaped the implementation and collaboration later in the project. In line with the joint effort of undertaking TDR, we will aim to include one of the non-academic partners in the WildlifeNL consortium to join the session to share experiences from their perspective.

The goals of the workshop are:
- Exchange experiences and learn from each other; inspire participants to devote attention to phase 0 and provide handles on how this can be done in running and how it can be included in design of future projects.
- Jointly reflect on experiences – challenges and strategies - with phase 0 to identify recurring patterns that help us distill generalizable lessons for the design and implementation of early stages of TDR.
- Explore possibilities to collaborate as organizers and participants in reporting those lessons, for example in a joint publication or special issue.

Period	7 Nov 2024
Event title	International Transdisciplinarity Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Utrecht, NetherlandsShow on map