TY - JOUR
T1 - Building capacities for transdisciplinary research
T2 - Challenges and recommendations for early-career researchers
AU - Jaeger-Erben, Melanie
AU - Kramm, Johanna
AU - Sonnberger, Marco
AU - Völker, Carolin
AU - Albert, Christian
AU - Graf, Antonia
AU - Hermans, Kathleen
AU - Lange, Steffen
AU - Santarius, Tilman
AU - Schröter, Barbara
AU - Sievers-Glotzbach, Stefanie
AU - Winzer, Janis
N1 - 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 Lüneburg (Germany). In a world café 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.
PY - 2018/1/1
Y1 - 2018/1/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Capacity building
KW - Early career
KW - Social-ecological research
KW - Transdisciplinary research
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85062964123
U2 - 10.14512/gaia.27.4.10
DO - 10.14512/gaia.27.4.10
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85062964123
SN - 0940-5550
VL - 27
SP - 379
EP - 386
JO - GAIA: Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society
JF - GAIA: Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society
IS - 4
ER -