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 interdisciplinary synthesis matters, it is often not enough. Academics alone are not well-equipped to address socio-ecological crises but need to work with a large range of actors outside of academia such as community elders, engineers, farmers, fishers, medical practitioners, NGOs, policy makers, science communicators, social activists, teachers, or union workers.
In the Brazilian fishing communities of Siribinha and Poças, who are two of the protagonists of our new book Transformative Transdisciplinarity, fishers often have fine-grained expertise about local ecosystem dynamics that is central to conservation efforts. Local school teachers and employees of the municipality are central to interventions that aim for sustainable impact. Getting things done requires stepping outside of the comfort zone of academic debates and therefore demands a broadened agenda from interdisciplinarity to transdisciplinarity.
Transdisciplinarity comes with intertwined epistemic and political promises. The epistemic promise of transdisciplinarity is to generate more robust research by bringing the expertise of diverse actors together. Expertise about social-environmental crises is widely distributed, and scientific research can greatly benefit from the inclusion of non-academic experts. In our book, we explore the expertise of fishers regarding a wide range of issues, including ecosystem dynamics and local varieties of fish.
This epistemic promise is intertwined with a political promise of generating not only more robust science but also more just interventions. Transdisciplinary research benefits epistemically from diverse forms of expertise but simultaneously promises to include actors who commonly remain excluded from academic discourse. This political promise of transdisciplinarity is especially salient in places like Siribinha and Poças with long histories of colonial exploitation and racial oppression that continue to structure their disenfranchised position in Brazilian society.
For philosophers of science, the growing importance of transdisciplinary research is a fascinating issue, as it aligns with a wider shift in academia that is not exclusively framed through “transdisciplinarity” but also adjacent buzzwords such as “citizen science,” “civic science,” “co-creation,” “community-based research,” “multistakeholder platforms,” “participatory research,” “open science,” or “upstream engagement.” While all of these concepts have different historical legacies and connotations, they converge in highlighting the inclusion of diverse actors in a broader transdisciplinary trend of rethinking knowledge production in the context of socio-ecological crises.
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| Community of Practice (including the authors) at an event on transformative transdisciplinarity in Salvador, Brazil, March 2023.
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These transformations in academia suggest a philosophy of transdisciplinarity that reflects on the many methodological and institutional challenges of more inclusive forms of scientific research. Our program of transdisciplinary philosophy, however, aims to go a step further: rather than only reflecting about transdisciplinary trends from the distance of the philosophical armchair, our book showcases that philosophers can become valuable collaborators in transdisciplinary research collaborations.
Transdisciplinary practice requires navigating between very different practices of creating and validating knowledge, different ways of thinking about and being in the world, and different values and political positions of power. As philosophers who have collaborated in transdisciplinary projects in Brazil and Ghana for many years, our book explores the role of philosophers as mediators in these complex processes that require careful and caring navigation between diverse epistemologies, ontologies, and values.
At the core, our book articulates an optimistic vision of the role of philosophy in a world of intersecting crises that give rise to deeply contested policy responses. At the same time, philosophers often lack practical skills to become transdisciplinary philosophers. As philosophers, we’re usually trained to talk about people, not to talk with people. And we’re even less trained to work with people in making a difference together. Our book intends to provide guidance for philosophers who aim to change that.
