Conference Agenda

Drawing upon the transdisciplinary approach as notably outlined by Darbellay (2015), this presentation integrates interested parties’ viewpoints, understandings, and knowledge throughout the research process, highlighting the work of Moody (in press) that emphasises children’s roles as agentic co-researchers. It underscores the ethical imperative of recognising children’s agency and rights in research, in line with the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, particularly articles 12 and 13, which assert children’s rights to be heard and express their opinions freely. James (2007) discusses the importance of authentic, diverse children’s perspectives in research, beyond merely affirming established views. The model of “children’s research advisory group” (‘CRAG’) by Lundy et al. (2011) illustrates how children’s involvement in research processes enhances findings’ validity and applicability, a viewpoint supported by Gillett-Swan (2018) for its quality impact on results.

Proposing an extension of CRAGs within a transdisciplinary framework, this presentation focuses on their design and implementation. Transdisciplinarity offers a broad and cohesive strategy treating participatory methods as a subset of its inclusive philosophy which fosters integration of children’s voices into research and policymaking, ensuring their perspectives are not merely included but are instrumental in shaping outcomes. Building upon this foundation, the research underpinning this discussion is drawn from a doctoral study that employs a case-based and comparative approach across three alternative schools in French-speaking Switzerland. Utilising multi-informant and multi-method strategies to capture the dynamic nature of school climate, as suggested by Wang & Degol (2016), the study includes observations, interviews with teachers, headmasters, and parents, and drawings with children (4 to 12). Emphasis is placed on the children’s perspectives on school climate, as elaborated by Cohen et al. (2009), examining how relationships, safety, pedagogical approaches, and the institutional environment contribute to the overall experience of learning and socialisation in these schools.

An insightful component of this study is the active participation of children aged around 10-11 as co-researchers. They participated in four sessions of approximately one hour each, spread throughout the 2023-2024 school year, across each of the three schools involved. These sessions were dedicated to discussing concepts, methodologies employed, and data analysis. This highlighted the need to consider practical, organisational, and temporal aspects for children as co-researchers. Balancing the power dynamic and ethically navigating the willingness of children and parents to participate were interesting challenges in these classroom and school settings. Reflections from the study underscore the importance of designing activities that accommodate the logistical and temporal realities of children’s lives. Building trust with participants, being prepared to adapt to the unexpected, and continuously reflecting on and adjusting methods to suit the needs and preferences of child participants were important. One of the main advantages was the authentic engagement with students, fostering a reciprocal learning environment and enriching data through their creative contributions. This involvement not only provided valuable data about school climate but also empowered the children as active participants in the research process.

Interdisciplinary research is increasingly recognized as a key method to tackle complex societal challenges and stimulate creativity to find innovative solutions. However, interdisciplinary research in practice can be uneasy and will not always be successful.

In this presentation we will take you through our journey of becoming an interdisciplinary team, doing research on chronic pain. Our key goal when starting our collaboration, funded by the Center for Unusual Collaborations, was to come to innovative ways of treating chronic pain. An ambitious goal that requires out-of-the-box and high-risk-high-gain research. One of the most important lessons is that researchers from different disciplines may think they speak a universal ‘language of science’, but a thorough understanding of each other’s ways of working, research paradigms, methods, and concepts is necessary before they can start working together on solving scientific questions. And, in our case, if researchers cannot understand each other’s language, they cannot expect patients to understand scientific language either. For scientists to engage with a non-scientific audience and vice-versa, we need to find and create places to meet and find ways to interact effectively. Language is the medium through which all these interactions take place. It is therefore essential that language takes a central place in the process of multidisciplinary collaboration, interdisciplinary research, patient participation and public engagement.

In this case story we share our experiences in creating a common language, summarized in five steps: 1: creating the team; 2: metaphor-forced introduction to disciplines; 3: creating common ground; 4: outreach; 5: integration. Metaphors play an important role in this process. We will demonstrate how we reflectively progressed through these steps while enhancing interdisciplinary collaboration, (scientific) innovation and public engagement. This five-step journey can be used as a process-tool for any other high-risk-high-gain multidisciplinary research team seeking to innovate through interdisciplinarity – with the risk of becoming a brilliant failure.

Participatory and interactive modes of scientific knowledge production have become promising concepts to tackle the multiple risks of a changing climate. Especially in climate services co-creation approaches are increasingly applied. Climate services are a broad and interdisciplinary field, related to the translation of climate research results for application. The aim is to tailor data and knowledge into customized information and products to support society in their attempts to deal with a changing climate. Co-creative research processes are important to know the needs of practitioners and enhance the applicability of products. Therefore, productive relationships, knowledge integration as well as mutual learning between experts of practice, scientists of all relevant fields and users of climate services have to be advanced.

As evaluation research is increasingly stressing the relation between good co-creation processes and their success and impact (Maag 2018) the improvement of these processes becomes a key issue and was the focus of the project NorQuATrans (Normativity, Objectivity and Quality Assurance of Transdisciplinary Processes; https://www.hicss-hamburg.de/projects/NorQuATrans/index.php.en). The project aimed for concepts of quality assurance for co-creative research in all its facets.

Using the case study approach, we started in NorQuATrans with identifying the phases and steps of a co-creative product development process within the project ADAPTER (ADAPT tERrestrial systems; https://adapter-projekt.org/). After intensive dialogues with key agricultural practitioners ADAPTER delivered innovative simulation-based products to support adaptation to climate change.

The colleagues from the ADAPTER project contributed with their practical experience facilitating co-creation processes to identify the different process steps in different grades of detail. As a result, we identified a complex course of dialogues, research activities, reconcilement processes and many iteration loops to re-adjust the development of climate service products (Schuck-Zöller et al. 2022). From this empiric activity we gained a sequence of process steps and activities. These process steps and sub-processes, originating from ADAPTER, were compared to descriptions in literature (i.e. Maag et al. 2018, Jahn et al. 2015). In this way we added a theoretical background to the empiric results and generalized them.

The aims of the cooperation between NorQuATrans and ADAPTER were threefold:

a) Improving the co-creation processes in the development of climate service products,

b) creating a sequence that could be transferable to other thematic fields of transdisciplinary research, and

c) developing the basis for a kind of manual “How to organize co-creative product development processes successfully”.

In our contribution we want to present our methodology as well as the results. Challenges for researchers in adapting their routines in conducting research to expectations and needs of practitioners shall be discussed.

References

Jahn, Thomas, Keil, Florian (2015). An actor-specific guideline for quality assurance in transdisciplinary research. Futures 65, p. 195-208

Maag, Simon, Alexander, Timothy J., Kase, Robert, Hoffmann, Sabine (2018). Indicators for measuring the contributions of individual knowledge brokers. Environmental Science & Policy 89, p. 1-9

Schuck-Zöller, S.; Bathiany, S.; Dressel, M.; El Zohbi, J.; Keup-Thiel, E.; Rechid, D.; Suhari, M. (2022): Process indicators in transdisciplinary research and co-creation. A formative evaluation scheme for climate services. In: fteval Journal for Research and Technology Policy Evaluation, 53, p. 43-56. doi: 10.22163/fteval.2022.541

Suhari, M.; Dressel, M.; Schuck-Zöller, S. (2022): Challenges and best-practices of co-creation: A qualitative interview study in the field of climate services. In: Climate Services, 25. doi: org/10.1016/j.cliser.2021.100282

The paper explores the potential power of mapping in relation to transdisciplinary knowledge production by unpacking what “Co-Creative Mapping” is and how it can be used. Maps are fundamental yet underutilized in landscape architecture, planning and design where they are often seen as mere static and objective representations of data rather than as active agents in relation to the perception, representation and production of landscapes. Acknowledging the agency of mapping, as a knowledge production process in itself, is therefore suggested as a first step towards untangling the power of maps. To further elaborate on this, Co-Creative Mapping will be contextualized in relation to tackling complex societal – so called “wicked” – problems (e.g. “sustainability”), while drawing inspiration from existing concepts such as for example deep mapping, social cartography and community geography. Thus, the aim of the paper is to explore what role mapping can play as a catalyst for transdisciplinary knowledge exchange and/or production. The objective is to develop a conceptual framework, which will then be deployed in a real-world setting through a series of workshops involving relevant – to a given site: in this case a university campus, and its ongoing development process – stakeholders where the main focus is the boundary spanning, perspective shifting and mutual learning opportunities provided through Co-Creative Mapping. A stakeholder, in this context, should be understood as an actor that has or should have interest in being actively involved in a process where the transdisciplinary setup can allow for existing power structures and conflicts to be set aside, handled or at the least acknowledged and thereby made visible. By revisiting the potential of mapping, the paper suggests that approaching mapping creatively has the capacity to become a collaborative design process by which disciplinary boundaries can be bridged allowing for inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge exchange and/or production, which can then be further developed into a method for research. Specifically, using a transdisciplinary approach provides the intrinsic opportunity to, other than involving none academic actors, also rethink, renegotiate and/or redraw boundaries that might otherwise limit the scope of identifiable interests and/or questions among the disciplines and perspectives of the actors involved. From a research(ers) perspective, the knowledge and experiences gained are expected, although (always) site-specific, to be transferable back to, and made actionable within, the participants own disciplinary domicile – while also allowing to contribute to an expanded understanding of how a deeper/broader scientific and/or societal impact can be achieved. The paper concludes by summarizing the experiences gained from the workshops in relation to the framework and suggests future adaptations to both the theoretical contributions of Co-Creative Mapping and to knowledge about what kind of transformative outcomes it can be expected to produce when deployed.