This post is by David Ludwig (Wageningen University, Netherlands) and Charbel N. El-Hani (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil) whose open access book Transformative Transdisciplinarity. An Introduction to Community-Based Philosophy has recently been published by Oxford University Press. Specialization is inevitable in academia. Becoming an academic often means becoming a specialist in a narrowly defined research area that is carefully sheltered from too much outside influence. While this division of epistemic labor is central to disciplinary progress, it clashes with the reality of complex socio-ecological crises. Issues such as biodiversity loss, climate change, economic exploitation, or public health are not technical problems that can be solved by a specialist with narrowly defined expertise but require collaboration across disciplines, synthesizing insights from distinct fields such as biological and Earth sciences as well as economics and policy studies. While interdiscipl...
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