Session 3.1
Transdisciplinary research in natural resources management: towards an integrative and transformative use of co-concepts
Viola Hakkarainen 1, Katri Elina Mäkinen-Rostedt 2, Andra Horcea-Milcu 3, Dalia D'Amato 4, Johanna Jämsä 5, Katriina Soini 1
1 Natural Resources Institute Finland, Latokartanonkaari 9, 00790, Helsinki, Finland; 2 Politics Unit, Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland; 3 Hungarian Department of Biology and Ecology, Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, Romania; 4 Helsinki Institute for Sustainability Science (HELSUS), University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; 5 Department of Geography and Geology, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Turku, Finland
Transdisciplinary research often utilizes collaborative ways of knowledge production to enable intended transformations towards sustainability. Multiple collaborative concepts with varying definitions are applied leading to confusion in the aims and uses of these concepts. In our recent study, we reviewed five concepts relevant to the current debate on the new collaborative ways of knowledge production in transdisciplinary research. We focused on the concepts of co-creation, co-production, co-design, co-learning, and adaptive co-management. While not aiming to be exhaustive, the selected co-concepts have become particularly relevant in the context of the current challenge of co-creating a sustainable future for the Earth’s system which science needs to meet. We elaborated our analysis in the context of natural resources management (NRM) literature where these “co-concepts” have gained importance as a way to contribute to environmentally sound and legitimate decision-making. NRM is also a context in which transformations towards sustainability are crucial. In this setting, TD is used as a research mode to link society, sciences and practitioners and as a pathway to address complex social-ecological issues.
Our study coupled a literature review and a conceptual analysis and aimed to clarify definitions, use, and interlinkages of these concepts and shed light on their intertwined nature. The first analysis phase consisted of the authors developing a synthetic overview of the literature for every five concepts. After reviewing the concepts individually, we conducted coding of 40 articles on Atlas.ti focusing on co-production, co-creation, and co-design to explore and understand the interlinkages between the concepts presented in previous literature. The three concepts were chosen because they are often used interchangeably and therefore coding served as a way to systematically gain an in-depth understanding of their interlinkages.
Our review revealed the variety of meanings and practices related to the co-concepts in NRM, and also highlighted the inadequacy and plurality of perspectives to their transformative aims. Basing on the results, we propose an integrative understanding of these concepts to navigate between collaborative modes and to facilitate the transformative aims of research processes. We share our results in the form of an infographic. In the infographic we combine both temporal (i.e. timing), epistemic and conceptual (i.e. how the concepts are understood and used individually and in relation to each other) relationships, which we found to vary depending on the conceptual perspective they were looked at from. This stresses the multiple possibilities the concepts provide for TD research. No research before has assessed and clarified the conceptual plurality in collaborative modes, which a researcher faces when practicing engagement in TD projects. The infographic we have created can be used by researchers, practitioners, and experts, and helps to navigate engagement in TD projects through grounding the research in those relevant points that align different perspectives. The infographics also facilitates anchoring the transformative aims of the project by focusing simultaneously on process orientation, power issues, and reflexivity.
We argue that an integrated understanding of the five co-concepts — in addition to understanding the concepts individually — may help to overcome some of the typical methodological and epistemological tensions occurring while practicing transdisciplinarity. The epistemological and related conceptual pluralism has practical influence on choices on how to carry out research. We underline that collaborative research projects may benefit from considering the epistemic nuances, manifesting in different disciplinary backgrounds, of each co-concept and acknowledging their integrated nature to counteract these effects. This consciousness operates in the sphere between theory and practical considerations, which may help to build a stronger methodology for TD research.
mQoL: Methodology for Assessing and Modeling Human Aspects in Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Computing in Situ
Katarzyna Wac 1 & 2, Alexandre De Masi 1, Igor Mattias 1, Vlad Manea 1 & 2, Allan Berrocal 1 & 3
1 QoL Lab, University of Geneva, Switzerland; 2 QoL Lab, University of Copenhagen, Denmark; 3 University of Costa Rica, Costa Rica
Interactive, mobile, wearable and ubiquitous computing applications and services assist us on a growing scale in our daily life situations, fulfilling our needs for leisure, entertainment, communication, or information and influencing our life quality in the long term. On the one hand, user acceptance of an existing application depends on the variety of human aspects influencing the application perception. These human aspects may be diverse such as, for example, preferred interaction style (e.g., kinaesthetic, visual), mobile service experience level (e.g., poor due to service unresponsiveness), user’s specific health and care needs (e.g., dizziness, hand tremors, low radiation), or user-specific aspects like cognitive load, physical flexibility, momentary perception of safety, intimacy or love in a given context. On the other hand, there are many human aspects and needs, which could be supported by interactive, mobile, wearable, and ubiquitous computing and are unknown to date. In both cases, these human aspects shall be assessed ‘in the wild,’ also denoted as in situ - situated in naturalistic settings, non-controlled, daily life user environments, and different contexts, in ecologically valid, longitudinal study designs.
The challenge is that there are no rigorous and robust scientific methods and tools to understand and accurately model human aspects and implicit needs in the user’s natural daily environments, which not only impair the acceptability of the existing mobile services but, what is more important, it impairs potential for replicability of the studies in mobile interaction domain.
Towards this end, we propose a replicable mixed-methods research methodology denoted as mQoL. The mQoL unifies several quantitative and qualitative human attitude and behaviour assessment and analysis methods. The mQoL consists of different methods that triangulate the data collected concerning the human aspects of mobile interaction; it bridges disparate fields of knowledge within computer science regarding the value of different types of data. Therefore, it implies the use of methods that are qualitative (entry/exit and occasional surveys/interviews, a weekly Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), daily Experience Sampling Method (ESM)/Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA)) and quantitative (a minute-based, unobtrusive for participant phone, wearable and computer activity loggers). mQoL applies in experiments aiming to explore and quantify human aspects in interactive, mobile, wearable, and ubiquitous computing in situ. We have evaluated the applicability of this methodology in user-based research to study different phenomena and for a set of different research questions spanning from assessment of physical activity via stress, sleep, public transportation usage to the individual’s intimacy perception. With these studies, we reflect upon and provide guidance to researchers upon the replicability of the mQoL.
Mapping the discourse around transformative and transdisciplinary science for young scholars: sketching a participatory undertaking
Jan Freihardt 1 & 2, Marco Kellhammer 1 & 3
1 Wissenschaf(f)t Zukünfte e.V.; 2 ETH Zürich, Switzerland; 3 TU München, Germany
Transdisciplinary (Td) and transformative science are relatively new approaches, compared to prevailing modes of doing science. Whether or not they succeed in gaining ground in academia beyond the niches in which they are currently operating depends crucially on a mindshift among scientists. They are the ones who define and reproduce what it means to do science, and therefore they are the ones who will ultimately have to acknowledge and accept Td and transformative science as valid and beneficial. This mindshift is the less likely to occur, the longer a scientist has been operating within the prevailing system, due to socialization and incentivization effects. Students and early-career researchers (ECRs), therefore, are more likely to be open to change and adopt new mindsets since they have not yet been operating in the “old” paradigms as long (even though we should not forget that they often face the pressure of “publish or perish” to advance their careers which might be hard to align with working in a Td/transformative mindset).
We have found that there is a lack of easily accessible and understandable literature introducing students and ECRs into the most important concepts around Td and transformative science. Therefore, we – ECRs ourselves – have set off to write such an introduction ourselves. From the beginning, we framed this process as a learning journey, starting off with various questions that we had ourselves. Subsequently, we accessed various sources of information to approach answers to these questions. These information sources ranged from a classical literature review over more than 30 semi-structured interviews with experts from the field to a multi-stage peer review of our text drafts, involving students and young scholars from our peer group as well as senior experts. As a result, we published a book compiling the outcomes of our own learning and development processes in a concise, understandable, and conciously designed format: »Draußen ist es anders. Auf neuen Wegen zu einer Wissenschaft für den Wandel«.
Given the wide range of perspectives that are incorporated in this book, it can be seen as a mapping of the current status of the discourse around Td and transformative science, albeit limited to the German-speaking countries. As a next step, we would like to take the book as a starting point to create spaces for exchange and reflection for interested students and scientists (in the form of workshops or other formats). As such, the book can serve as a boundary object for scientists from various backgrounds and at various stages of their professional development.
In our contribution to the conference, we would like to present the process outlined above, our central learnings and experiences, and the main results and outcomes. To do so, we intend to produce a sketchnote/graphical summary that outlines the main stages of our learning journey.
