What is ‘transdisciplinary’?
Words like multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary are often used interchangeably. But what do they mean?
For years now, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of synthesis of knowledge from various disciplines, academic and non-academic. Looking at things holistically and considering the interdependence between them seems like an obvious way forward to solve the hard and complex problems of our society. We need to both specialise and have the holistic picture. Lucky for us, research is essentially a collaborative process, and the nature and intimacy of collaborations yield different disciplinary frameworks: intra/mono, multi, cross, inter, and trans.
This representation by Jenseniu (2012) summarises the progression to transdisciplinary in a snapshot.
So let’s break this down in terms of a research project combining ideas from Tress et al. (2005a), Choi and Pak (2006), and Jenseniu (2012).
Latin intra (prep.) “within, inside, on the inside” — working within the frame of a single, recognised discipline. The collaboration depends on how wide the discipline is and the specificity of the research problem. For example, an astronomy research project focussing on stellar evolution will mostly include astronomers from the same…
