International Transdisciplinarity Conference 2021: Reflections and Takeaways
By Hayley Ho and Kateryna Pereverza
In this story we reflect on our experience of participation in the virtual International Transdisciplinarity Conference, ITD in September 2021. Our pre-crafted contribution for the conference was a video about the design principles we formulated when redesigning our course "Transdisciplinary Approaches for System Innovations" to be run digitally in spring 2021. The conference provided a great environment for sharing and discussing a variety of topics on knowledge co-production and integration in participatory and transdisclipinary processes. While Kate participated in the interactive sessions of the conference, Hayley was unable to attend. This led us to try a new format in this story — a transcribed and edited interview. At the end of the story we share a list of links and materials from the conference curated by Kate.
The International Transdisciplinarity Conference, ITD 2021, was the third online conference we participated in this year. We shared our insights and impressions on the previous two conferences — SoTL2021 and Transformations 2021 in this and this story respectively. All three conferences provided us with opportunities to share and learn from different research communities. We found the topics of learning, collaboration and co-creation, and their link to system transformations for sustainability, being cross-cutting and of great importance for all the three communities we met.
Preparation for the ITD2021 gave us the chance to further reflect on the process of redesigning our course to be run remotely and digitally. As a result, we formulated a set of design principles that can be considered when designing courses aimed at facilitation of collaborative learning and reflexivity, both in digital and physical spaces.
When preparing our pre-crafted contribution for the conference, we followed an approach we became accustomed to since the first trial for SoTL in March 2021: a combination of sketching "slides" on Miro and recording a voiceover during a Zoom call. We share the resulting video below:
Abstract of our talk at ITD2021
Interview: How was it to attend ITD2021?
HH: It is a shame that I was unable to join the interactive conference. I am really curious to hear how it went and your reflections. Tell me about the set up of the conference, what was the format of the discussions? How did the sessions work?
KP: The conference was really interesting with many different types of sessions on an online platform called iStage. It was really good compared to the other online conference platforms I tried. As a participant, you can create your profile with basic information and picture, use hashtags to indicate your research interests, and so on. You can look through participant profiles, have a chat or video call directly from the platform. You can create a personal agenda by adding sessions you want to attend. This was helpful for session organisers to see in advance how many participants are interested in their session.
There were many different session formats. One was plenary talks or keynotes. They were organised as webinars where you can listen and ask questions through the Q&A function. Moderators choose the most up-voted questions to ask keynote speakers. There were a couple of really good keynotes. The ones that particularly stood out for me were by Flurina Schneider and Dhanush Dinesh focusing on the topic "Collaboration towards impact", and by Guido Caniglia and Collen Vogel with a focus on "Td as a collective".
Other sessions were organised quite differently, and the majority were highly interactive. This is quite different from many other research conferences where you have paper sessions or presentations by a couple of speakers followed by a round of questions if time allows. At ITD it was clear for everyone that by joining a session you commit to actively participate and contribute, not only listen. You quickly become a part of a session community by being asked to introduce yourself and contribute to the conversation, making it socially unacceptable to leave at the middle. In previous online conferences it was common for people to jump between parallel sessions. I really liked the high level of engagement of ITD.
HH: We were asked to prepare a 6 minute video as our pre-crafted contribution. How did they present this and what was the format of our session?
KP: When it comes to pre-crafted contributions, many were presented, maybe 100 or even more. They were available during the conference and then after in a separate section of the platform. I was trying to see many of them by visiting "booths". There were many different formats, for example mini-documentaries about Td projects run in collaboration with indigenous communities in Latin America and Africa, posters, pre-recorded presentations, and animations.
The platform used a gamification approach by giving you points when you visit a booth. You can collect points through other activities too. I would be curious to learn how much motivation this was for other participants. I think it was fun!
Our session was organised around five pre-crafted contributions. Each was given a specific time-slot to be presented. I managed to see all the pre-crafted contributions from our session before it started, so for me it was a bit of repetition. We had a moderator who tried to organise a discussion following the presentations, but this was not very engaging. This may have been due to the lack of time as the session was quite short, about 45 minutes, and there ended up being only a few questions around certain presentations. I kept our presentation quite short and tried to highlight possible connections to other presentations. Others were more focused on their own work.
HH: Was there some over-arching theme or any red threads that linked our contribution to the others in our session?
KP: There were some. There was a course presented by BinBin Pearce from ETH (Zurich) where she combines design thinking and system thinking, we have a similar approach in our course. I also discussed our contribution with other people not only during our session but brought ideas from it during other sessions.
HH: So the discussions in the whole conference all featured similar topics?
KP: There were several cross-cutting themes that reappeared many times during the conference. For example, there was a lot of discussion about knowledge integration, collaborative processes and knowledge co-production. Integration of indigenous knowledge systems was one of the interesting topics that reappeared many times.
HH: We always ask participants of our seminars and workshops for reflections afterwards. What were your reflections from our session?
KP: Our session at the conference was not the most insightful for me. Maybe it was too short. Participants spent a lot of time repeating their pre-crafted contributions, we then had limited time for discussion. Maybe some other approach to moderation was needed.
HH: What do you think they were aiming for with the moderation?
KP: I think the aim was to have a conversation in connection to the presentations, and to find connection points together. There was not enough time to identify interconnections between all the presentations.
HH: It sounds like our session was not ideal to have discussions related to our work. How did you find the other sessions?
What was good about this conference was the possibility to discuss and share our work on many occasions beyond our session. I was sharing insights from our experience when it was relevant in other conversations. People asked many questions and some asked for more information to look at after the conference. I had an in-depth discussion in a group that shared interests in innovative pedagogy and worked with courses focused on collaboration with societal stakeholders. This where I learnt about a very interesting course “Creative Intelligence and Innovation” run in UTS, Australia.
When you put your work in context and relate it to what others are doing, it became much more interesting for them. On several occasions highlighting a very particular aspect triggered interest to the whole approach. The chat function was very active during the majority of the sessions, and we exchanged many links and materials there with other participants.
HH: On the topic of reflexivity, shall we end on your overall reflections on participating with our contribution in the conference?
KP: Overall, I think my takeaway would be that I participated with our contribution throughout the whole conference, not only during the time slot dedicated to the presentation of our pre-crafted contribution. The conference provided many opportunities for this by having very interactive sessions. I also used the chat function on the platform and even had a couple of calls to have discussions with other participants. I feel like I participated very actively, both by sharing our work but also engaging in the topics of others, trying to provide some potentially useful reflections and feedback on their work. This was something unique about this conference, the possibility to contribute and actively engage.
HH: Thank you for sharing, that was interesting! I think we can end it there.
KP: Okay, good. So then I will stop recording.
Links & materials from the ITD2021 conference
Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity:
https://itd-alliance.org/
Can be of interest for early-career researchers interested in transdisciplinarity:
- A research and community platform for transdisciplinarity
https://td-academy.org/home/ - Global Mentorship Initiative of the Finnish Interdisciplinary society https://finterdis.fi/finterdis-english/junior-scholars/
- Global Young Academy
https://globalyoungacademy.net/ - Swiss Young Academy
https://swissyoungacademy.ch/en - A toolkit for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research developed by SHAPE-ID project
https://www.shapeidtoolkit.eu/
Innovative courses with a focus on transdisciplinarity:
- "Creative Intelligence and Innovation" course by UTS, Australia https://www.uts.edu.au/study/transdisciplinary-innovation/undergraduate-courses/creative-intelligence-and-innovation
- Transformative innovation lab
https://www.transformative-innovation-lab.de/en/
"Integration and implementation insights" blog:
A journal that hosts a format of "design reports" that allows to publish configuration of a transdisciplinary project in terms of its research and communication design:
https://gaia.oekom.de/index.php/gaia
A paper that indicates six modes of knowledge co-production and explores possible trade-offs between them:
- Chambers, J.M., Wyborn, C., Ryan, M.E., Reid, R.S., Riechers, M., Serban, A., Bennett, N.J., Cvitanovic, C., Fernández-Giménez, M.E., Galvin, K.A. and Goldstein, B.E., 2021. Six modes of co-production for sustainability. Nature sustainability, pp.1–14.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00755-x
Books shared by Guido Caniglia during his plenary talk "On being oriented in disorienting times in and through Td research":
- Ahmed, Sara. Queer phenomenology. Duke University Press, 2006.
- Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising utopia. New York University Press, 2019.
- Liboiron, Max. Pollution is colonialism. Duke University Press, 2021.
Personalities:
- Paolo Freire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire
