Vol. 13 No. 2 (2020): Negotiating Transdisciplinarity

Humanity and nature around the globe are facing increasingly complex and interdependent challenges, which require not only rapid action and structural change, but presumably a more inclusive research framework and a pluralistic concept of knowledge. This issue critically engages with transdisciplinarity, and more precisely with a transdisciplinary capacity building project in Southeast Asia and Europe funded by the Erasmus+ Capacity Building in Higher Education program. The aim of the project was to develop and consolidate transdisciplinary capacities for teaching and research focussing on three global challenges: migration, natural resources, social inequality. The present issue offers a selection of reflections, theoretical and conceptual groundings, and empirical embeddings of the experiences and outcomes of the project. The authors, all centrally involved in the project, illuminate different aspects of the joint endeavor, and raise questions regarding collaboration and transformative action in very diverse settings marked by multiple inequalities. The papers address not only epistemological problems, but also administrative and managerial challenges of such a project, as well as the clashes between research and capacity-building aspects in scientific activity. They also elaborate on disciplinary and cultural obstacles and hurdles of intellectual belonging and difference. The issue, thus, forges a bridge between theoretical reflexions on transdisciplinarity and concepts of knowledge on the one hand, and its institutional, structural, and disciplinary encounters, on the other.

Managing editors: Rainer Einzenberger, Gunnar Stange, & Dayana Lengauer

Guest editors: Petra Dannecker & Alexandra Heis

Cover Photo: Michaela Hochmuth

Layout: Karl Valent