Find out more about “transdisciplinary collaboration”
The Atlantic community is unique in its diversity. Fellows are medical professionals, artists, activists, or government officials, to mention but a few of the myriad sectors you are drawn from. One of our goals is to support you to connect and collaborate across those diverse perspectives for greater impact. Often collaboration across differences is described as “interdisciplinary” or “multidisciplinary”. But the type of very diverse collaboration we strive for could be better described as “transdisciplinary collaboration”. In transdisciplinary collaboration, stakeholders transcend their personal/professional knowledge boundaries, to co-construct innovative or (k)new solutions to complex entrenched problems in local and global systems.
The Institute is launching a “rapid realist review”, led by Dr. Justin Jagosh a specialist in this area, to explore what it takes to help to facilitate or hold back transdisciplinary collaboration. Realist reviews are a form of evidence synthesis that involve non-researcher contributors, they can be participatory.
We’d like to invite you to participate!
Please share with us any material that you would like us to include in this review! What you share does not need to be in the form of published or academic papers alone. We will include articles including research papers, literature reviews, editorials, but also commentaries, blogs, and other media. Once we have a shortlist of the final items for review, we will make these available to everyone who has expressed an interest in being part of the realist review. At this stage, we will invite you to join us in journaling, which will involve reading items and writing reflective passages/paragraphs about what the article is conveying about transdisciplinary collaboration and what it leads you to think about the topic. We may also schedule discussions to complement the journaling. A final paper summarizing the findings should be available in early February. The journal and analysis of these papers and final outputs will be disseminated for learning and discussion.
This learning process will help the WHOLE community to work together even better to advance equity. In trying to collaborate, partners can face obstacles such as a lack of knowledge or experience around how to identify topics or equity issues on which to focus, how to scope out roles, communicate across cultures, and/or plan the timing and pacing to motivate, build trust, and stimulate collective creativity. Let’s tackle the challenges and work out some solutions together!
To find out more about this and to get involved, or for any queries, please contact Abi Diamond