International Transdisciplinarity Conference 2015 - Sustainability and Health: emerging topics and new challenges for inter- and transdisciplinary research

Background

Major advances in transdisciplinary (td) research have recently occurred in the fields of Global Health and Sustainable Development. Global Health raises questions beyond health improvements based on medical interventions: its dimensions need to be understood in a context of both local and global social-ecological changes, where outcomes are less certain. Likewise, Sustainable Development goes beyond environmental integrity: its dimensions include solidarity and justice between generations, and across cultures, and nations. As a result, a range of disciplines and fields is needed to understand socially relevant sustainability- and health-related problems in their socio-ecological and socio-historical contexts. Relevant areas include, for example, new technologies, hunger, energy, poverty, pollution, and migration.
Given these challenges, researchers and educators from natural science, social sciences, and humanities are invited not only to integrate knowledge of diverse disciplines and fields into their research but also to consider stakeholders’ expertise in view of practical problem solving and understanding of causes at their roots. Growing awareness of the need for solving complex problems through transdisciplinary approaches in the fields of Global Health and Sustainable Development leads to the purpose of this conference: to explore these contributions and to relate their implications to transdisciplinary experiences and new insights and approaches in other research domains.