Session 5.1
Precrafted Poster- Methodological aspects of social power relations in Td interactions
Maria De Eguia Huerta, Esther Meyer
Lighthouse gGmbH, Germany
This is a pre-crafted contribution connected to an online workshop also named “Methodological aspects of social power relations in Td interactions”. Behind both contributions is the Lighthouse gGmbH team, working in transformative Td research projects in Europe North and South.
This is a pre-crafted poster with the goal to share our Td experience form being on-the-ground starting from a very concrete Td experience (which will be presented with a video in the workshop format, that is following the same goal). In this poster we will show some selected pictures which show concrete aspects of the mentioned experience, an international Antidiscrimination Lab.
By sharing concrete methodological aspects of our experience, we would like to contribute to the broad debate about Td methodology and the mechanisms through which social power relations, privileges, discrimination, and exclusion may find their way to the heart of a Td interaction.
Our main goal with this contribution is to invite those participants “visiting” our poster to reflect about the complex mechanisms behind social power relations during Td interactions in which participants experience privilege and discrimination in unequal ways. A further goal is to share some of our challenges and learned lessons in our work on-the-ground about aspects to consider when designing a social power relations conscious Td interaction.
Our poster will consist of representative images, an explicative text and a link for those wishing to contribute to a collective reflecting about this issue. The link will be made to a digital whiteboard, in which contributions can be written. A reaction to a contribution of a previous participant will also be possible.
The aspects we will highlight in the poster which consider were despite all challenges key to the success of this Td experience are:
a) Living together in basic conditions. The common humanity takes place and arises when participants are sharing sleeping room, washing clothes per hand outside together or sharing a kitchen work slot.
b) The surroundings, Pyrenees. For example, hiking in the mountains was intertwined with an activity of deeper reflection on violence, in which individual and group work reached high intensity because of the issues that arose. This could be balanced through the parallel hiking activity.
c) A transformative, qualitative, creative, transdisciplinary research methodology constantly and consequently connecting three axes: an analytical one, the lab; a body-connected one, the corporeal; and a crafts one, the creative.
d) We asked ourselves uncomfortable questions beyond political correctness.
We would like to reach practitioners and academics interested in advancing knowledges and collective reflecting as well as sharing concrete aspects when facing the challenge of taking social power relationships into account when designing Td interactions.
Challenge accepted! – Coping strategies for developing Theories of Change in ITD contexts
Lisa Deutsch 1 & 2, Brian Belcher 3 & 4, Rachel Claus 3, Sabine Hoffmann 1 & 5
1 Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Switzerland; 2 ETH Zurich, Institute for Environmental Decisions, Switzerland; 3 Sustainability Research Effectiveness Program, College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Royal Roads University, Canada; 4 Center for International Forestry Research, Indonesia; 5 TdLab, Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
‘Theory of Change’ (ToC) has been promoted as useful tool in inter- and transdisciplinary sustainability research for visioning, planning, communication, monitoring, evaluation and learning. This pre-crafted contribution aims to create an infographic based on a recently published peer-reviewed article on lessons learned from developing ToCs in a large inter- and transdisciplinary research program. The paper analyses the experience of leading such a ToC process with researchers from multiple disciplinary backgrounds on sustainable urban water management and presents coping strategies to deal with the challenges that were encountered. The intention of this contribution is to (1) synthesize insights on challenges and coping strategies when developing ToCs in large programs, (2) present these insights in a novel and digestible format (in contrast to a classical research article) in order to support other program leaders in such ToC processes, (3) apply principles of science and visual communication to assure understanding across scientific communities, and (4) make these insights more easily shareable. To make sure that the infographic is indeed useful, we will solicit feedback from the envisioned target audience, inter- and transdisciplinary program leaders, ahead to the conference. This iterative process will end with feedback received during the virtual discussion slot at the conference and its subsequent refinement. We will post this iteratively developed infographic on our various social media channels (e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn) and its respective subgroups and thereby envision that it will be further shared across those channels to reach our target audience.
Overall, by preparing the article’s insights in a more condensed and practical way, we want to make the findings overall more accessible and facilitate the uptake beyond its presentation at the ITD conference in September 2021. We further want to create awareness about challenges among researchers leading projects and programs, interested in developing ToCs for increasing the societal impact of their activities, but also to equip them with strategies to address these challenges effectively. Challenges include (1) managing time constraints (2) balancing between concrete and abstract discussions, (3) ensuring diversity in group composition while balancing comfort and discomfort, (4) fluctuating between reservations and appreciation, and (5) fulfilling both service and science roles. Coping strategies are among others alternating formal and informal interaction formats, ensuring heterogeneous group formation, involving early-career scientists, being responsive to emergent needs and making the added value of ToCs explicit and tangible for all participants. We believe these lessons are critical for program leaders to design effective programs in order to make substantial contributions to societal change.
This contribution relates to the stream ‘TD on-the-ground: making TD tangible’, particularly to the question ‘What tangible transdisciplinary processes and practices are taking place on-the-ground?’ as the contribution refers to the application of the ToC approach and provides empirical insights on an interdisciplinary integration process. It further aligns with the question ‘How can we use these examples to improve existing transdisciplinary practices and to facilitate inclusive and equitable research?’ as it derives tangible lessons learned for future ITD practices (Deutsch et al., 2021).
A Quality Assessment Framework for Transdisciplinary Research: Lessons from Evaluating Graduate Research Projects
Rachel Davel 1, Rachel Claus 1, Stephanie M. Jones 1, Brian M. Belcher 1 & 2, Daniela Pinto 1
1 Royal Roads University, Canada; 2 Centre for International Forestry Research, Indonesia
University-based research has a major role to play in addressing urgent social and environmental challenges. Graduate research remains underdiscussed in the literature and is an untapped means to influence social transformation. Students, whether they continue in academia or as practitioners, are part of the next generation of researchers, professionals, decision-makers, and members of society, and the learning, skills, and values brought to and gained through the research experience can translate to other areas of students’ personal, social, and working lives. As part of a broad effort to increase societal impact, research approaches are evolving to be more problem-oriented, engaged, and transdisciplinary. New approaches to research evaluation are therefore needed to learn whether and how research contributes to societal change. We used the principles and criteria presented in Belcher et al.’s (2016) Transdisciplinary Research Quality Assessment Framework (QAF) to assess the transdisciplinary research design elements of three completed Royal Roads University doctoral research projects. The cases were selected purposively based on their potential to contribute to real-world impact and to generate lessons about the change process. The student researchers were all mid-career development practitioners, each tackling a different development issue in Africa (e.g., post-conflict transitional justice in Uganda, private aid in Tanzania, and water, sanitation, and health in Nigeria). The four principles of the QAF are: relevance, which refers to the appropriateness of the problem positioning, objectives, and research approach for intended users; credibility, which pertains to rigour of the design and research process to produce dependable and defensible conclusions; legitimacy, which refers to the perceived fairness and representativeness of the research process; and effectiveness, with criteria that assess the degree to which research is positioned for use. Paired with an outcome assessment of each of the three doctoral projects, application of the QAF enabled us to analyze projects’ design and implementation to draw connections between transdisciplinary elements and contributions to realized outcomes (Belcher et al., in press). Results indicated that stronger transdisciplinary characteristics were associated with more pronounced outcomes and diverse contributions to change processes (i.e., research, organizational practice, governmental policy, professional development). QAF results also uncovered transdisciplinary qualities supported by training as well as those which were inherent in the student researchers. We draw lessons from our testing of the QAF on the doctoral case studies, learning about: (1) design and implementation of effective research projects; (2) how higher education institutions can provide training and support for impactful student research; and (3) how to improve the QAF tool. This presentation provides an overview of the key theoretical concepts of the QAF, presents examples from our application of the QAF to graduate research case studies, and concludes with lessons learned.
References:
Belcher, B. M., Rasmussen, K. E., Kemshaw, M. R., and Zornes, D. A. (2016). Defining and assessing research quality in a transdisciplinary context. Research Evaluation, 25(1): 1-17.
Belcher, B. M., Claus, R., Davel, R., & Jones, S. M. (in press). Evaluating and improving the contributions of university research to social innovation. Social Enterprise Journal.
QAF 2.0: A Refined Transdisciplinary Research Quality Assessment Framework
Brian M. Belcher 1 & 2, Rachel Claus 1, Rachel Davel 1, Stephanie M. Jones 1, Daniela Pinto 1
1 Royal Roads University, Canada; 2 Centre for International Forestry Research, Indonesia
Transdisciplinary research (TDR) aims to solve complex societal issues through systems transformation. TDR approaches continue to evolve at an ever-increasing pace. As the boundaries between disciplines are crossed and blurred, more and more diverse stakeholders are engaged in and co-generating research. Traditional research quality definitions and criteria are insufficient to assess the variety of new research approaches characteristic of TDR. New, more comprehensive, and multi-dimensional principles and criteria are needed to guide and evaluate TDR design and implementation. Belcher et al. (2016) conducted a systematic review of literature on defining and measuring research quality in an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary context, and used the findings to develop a prototype Transdisciplinary Research Quality Assessment Framework (QAF). The four QAF principles are: (1) relevance, which refers to the appropriateness of the problem positioning, objectives, and research approach for intended users; (2) credibility, which pertains to rigour of the design and research process to produce dependable and defensible conclusions; (3) legitimacy, which refers to the perceived fairness and representativeness of the research process; and (4) effectiveness, with criteria that assess the degree to which research is positioned for use to contribute to positive outcomes and impacts. The QAF was designed for a range of users and uses, including research funders and research managers assessing proposals; researchers designing, planning, and monitoring a research project; and research evaluators assessing projects ex post to learn about effective research practice. Our team has subsequently tested the QAF tool in evaluations of completed research projects in a range of TDR, graduate student research, and research-for-development contexts. On that basis, we have revised the principles, criteria, and definitions to improve clarity, reduce ambiguity and potential for double-counting, and add new criteria as needed. We have also developed guidance for the application of each criterion. This contribution presents the revised set of QAF criteria, definitions, and guidance, as well as scoring tools and templates, and discusses how to apply the QAF.
References:
Belcher, B. M., Rasmussen, K. E., Kemshaw, M. R., and Zornes, D. A. (2016). Defining and assessing research quality in a transdisciplinary context. Research Evaluation, 25(1): 1-17.
