INTERSECTIONS

Investigating Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity: Intersections of Practices, Culture(s) and Policy in Collaborative Knowledge Production (INTERSECTIONS)

Overview

Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research (IDR and TDR) – collaborative research spanning methods, approaches, disciplines, and societal spheres – is trapped in a paradox. On the one hand, IDR and TDR promise to catalyse societal transformation and tackle societal challenges. This approach is therefore heavily promoted by universities, funders, and policy members. On the other hand, IDR and TDR face a range of barriers on an institutional, societal, and individual level.

One way through this impasse is to understand the multiple intersections that exist between cultures (knowledge), practices (researchers), and policy (institutions) in interdisciplinarity (ID) and transdisciplinarity (TD) to improve their capacity to address scientific and societal challenges.  

Approach and Methods

This project is situated in the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Cultural Studies of Science. This is represented by the methods employed, the questions studied as well as by the scientific community we target.

To investigate the sketched field, we will employ a combination of qualitative methods. In a first step, we conduct an extensive review of the literature on ID and TD. This will allow us to consolidate the theoretical approaches on ID and TD and lay the theoretical foundation for the empirical investigation. The complex search strings used to query Web of Science and Scopus, as well as the consolidated database of relevant literature resulting from this search and the subsequent selection process have been published as dataset/data in the ETH Research Collection in September 2023.

We will then conduct interviews and focus groups with members of both academia and policy. This will inform us about the currently circulating understandings of ID and TD in Switzerland and Europe.

Subsequently, we will conduct ethnographic fieldwork in three research centres in Switzerland that have agreed to collaborate with our research group. These explorations will provide insight into collaborative research practices and relevant influencing factors. Overall, we follow an approach of problematisation, aiming to challenge and defamiliarise existing preconceptions of ID and TD.

Enlarged view: Photo of whiteboard
An insight into the collaborative brainstorming process about keywords related to our research questions. These keywords are the basis for our search queries with which we will mine relevant literature databases to identify the publications for the literature review. Picture by Lisa Brombach, 17.02.2022.

Outcome

By understanding the multiple intersections that exist between cultures, practices, and policy in ID/TD we envision creating the following outcomes:

  • Enable the consolidation of a research program for investigating ID/TD by refining and expanding the theories and methods used for investigating interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge cultures.
  • Enhance our understanding of the rapidly changing conditions for collaborative academic work.
  • Contribute to policies for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and education that are grounded in aggregated evidence from different fields.
  • Contribute to current policy debates around the impacts of and funding of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research in Switzerland and beyond.

Outputs from the first phase of the project can be consulted external page here.  

Doctoral and Masters Theses

Below are the current and past doctoral and masters theses on the INTERSECTIONS project. 

Funding

Enlarged view: SNSF logo

"Investigating interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity: intersections of practices, culture(s) and policy in collaborative knowledge production" (Intersections) is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), external page Programme PRIMA, Grant No. 201582, period 2022–2026.

We thank the three research centers in Switzerland who serve as our case studies and research sites.