The Politics of Transdisciplinarity

This book discusses collaborative research as both a product of social and epistemic control, and as a process of dealing with it. It offers fresh multi-disciplinary perspectives on old questions that are gaining new urgency with the rise of participatory, transdisciplinary and transformative research.

Autorentext

Jeremias Herberg is a sociologist and practitioner at the interface of environmental politics and research. He heads the presidential department of the German Environment Agency and held a visiting professorship at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. He publishes broadly on social dimensions of sustainability. He co-founded the Journal of Political Sociology.

Ulli Vilsmaier is a geographer by training and specialized in inter- and transdisciplinary research and higher education. Her research focuses on designing, accompanying, implementing and evaluating boundary-crossing research and on methods for boundary work and integration. She has significant international experiences with research development and transformations of academic institutions.

Inhalt

Introduction: Social and Epistemic Control in Collaborative Research - Reconfiguring the Interplay of Politics and Methodology 1. The Limits of Epistemic Control, the Powers of Actualization, and the Moral Economies of a Fictional Collective 2. Untrol: Post-Truth and the New Normal of Post-Normal Science 3. Designing a Transformative Epistemology of the Problematic: A Perspective for Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science 4. Navigating between Complexity and Control in Transdisciplinary Problem Framing: Meaning Making as an Approach to Reflexive Integration 5. Knowledge Decolonization à la Grounded Theory: Control Juggling in Research Situations 6. Identity Politics: Participatory Research and its Challenges Related to Social and Epistemic Control 7. The Phase Zero: Why Collaborative Research is Not Co-Designed but Scripted