TY - JOUR

T1 - Building capacities for transdisciplinary research

T2 - Challenges and recommendations for early-career researchers

AU - Jaeger-Erben, Melanie

AU - Kramm, Johanna

AU - Sonnberger, Marco

AU - Völker, Carolin

AU - Albert, Christian

AU - Graf, Antonia

AU - Hermans, Kathleen

AU - Lange, Steffen

AU - Santarius, Tilman

AU - Schröter, Barbara

AU - Sievers-Glotzbach, Stefanie

AU - Winzer, Janis

N1 - Funding information: Our research design includes a literature review, group discussions and co-operative supervision in research group leader trainings, and finally group discussions in a workshop with a wider transdisciplinary audience. The authors are currently serving as leaders of seven junior research groups funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Given our backgrounds in various fields, we represent an interdisciplinary constellation (see table 1 for an overview of the groups). Our paper takes a self-reflective perspective in line with our understanding of transdisciplinarity outlined above. The workshop we organized was entitled Doing Transdisciplinary Research – Addressing Challenges Faced by Early-Career Researchers and took place during the International Transdisciplinary Conference 2017 on September 11, 2017, in Lüneburg (Germany). In a world café setting (see Brown and Isaacs 2005), participants identified and discussed the main challenges of early-career transdisciplinary research and formulated recommendations on how to handle them based on their own experience. To structure the workshop, we had identified, based on literature research and our discussion during the training, three overall challenges as being particularly relevant to early-career researchers: 1.interdisciplinarity and the integration of disciplinary knowledge (figure 1, p.383), 2. collabo ration between academia and society, 3. the science-policy interface2 and science communication. In the following, we will discuss these challeng es and make some recommendations based on our experience, the literature, and the results of the workshop. We will refer to the experiences in the different research groups by citing their respective group leaders.

PY - 2018/1/1

Y1 - 2018/1/1

N2 - While transdisciplinarity offers a way to tackle complex social-ecological challenges, transdisciplinary research is a challenging task in itself. The integration of research methods across academic disciplines, the collaboration between researchers and practitioners, and the need to balance societal and disciplinary academic impacts pose many difficulties even to experienced applied scientists and even more so to early-career researchers. Young scholars face particular problems, given their lack of longer-term experience and their still fragile position within academia. Drawing on existing literature, an early-career researcher workshop, and our own experience as junior research group leaders, we discuss specific challenges and respective solution strategies of transdisciplinary research within the context of sustainability.

AB - While transdisciplinarity offers a way to tackle complex social-ecological challenges, transdisciplinary research is a challenging task in itself. The integration of research methods across academic disciplines, the collaboration between researchers and practitioners, and the need to balance societal and disciplinary academic impacts pose many difficulties even to experienced applied scientists and even more so to early-career researchers. Young scholars face particular problems, given their lack of longer-term experience and their still fragile position within academia. Drawing on existing literature, an early-career researcher workshop, and our own experience as junior research group leaders, we discuss specific challenges and respective solution strategies of transdisciplinary research within the context of sustainability.

KW - Capacity building

KW - Early career

KW - Social-ecological research

KW - Transdisciplinary research

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85062964123&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.14512/gaia.27.4.10

DO - 10.14512/gaia.27.4.10

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85062964123

VL - 27

SP - 379

EP - 386

JO - GAIA: Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society

JF - GAIA: Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society

SN - 0940-5550

IS - 4

ER -