I became TRANS, how about you. - On transdisciplinarity and opening windows.
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Luc ROMBOUT
Antwerp University - Faculty of Sociology Belgium
luc.rombout@uantwerpen.be
Author(s):
This contribution will focus on reflections from ongoing doctoral research by the presenter.
With a professional background of practitioner, advisor and researcher we continue to be confronted with limited evolution in and expansion of the knowledge base and ‘ways of doing’ for the practitioners and the still omnipresent traditional compartmentalised view by researchers embedded in the traditional taxonomic view on sciences as separate entities.
The complexity of crisis is not the major issue in this discussion. It is the multi-facetted characteristic of crises and of the whole decision making and managing process.
Humans as key decision makers have their characteristics and relative fitness for decision making. And they are studied in psychology. They behave however in a group, team or in multiple teams, and are influenced by, but also impact upon the group dynamics themselves, which is studied more explicitly in social-psychology, communication science and sociology. Research on the decision making techniques can be found in political science, economics and mathematics or some other compartmentalised segment of the scientific world.
The successful integration of these research findings is hindered by differences in terminology, inductive, deductive or abductive research techniques and the challenge of integrating findings, the difficulty of experimentation, target groups and many other elements of the epistemology.
Back in the 1970s the term ‘transdiscipllinarity’ [Mahan, 1970] [Piaget] [Bernstein, 2015] [Lawrence (ed.), 2015] was created to point out that societal challenges and complex problems – like manned space travel or climate change – cannot be tackled by isolated research.
The research should transcend the boundaries of the traditional taxonomy of sciences and move towards new integrative fields of research on the one hand, and research should develop better methods for passing research knowledge on to the domain of practical implementation.
This contribution will contain links to the presenter’s current doctoral research containing examples of theories and research where the still predominantly monolithic approach leads to structural incompatibilities between research domains.
On the Epistemology of Crises and Disasters