"Them" - Adventures with Civil Society

• In Event: Transdisciplinary Research: Transforming Sensibilities and/or Making Usable Knowledge?

Abstract

To cope with “great societal challenges” (Wissenschaftsrat 2015), science, industry and society alike are asked to contribute to a “transformation” to maintain the livelihood of mankind (National Advisory Council on Global Change 2011). According to several public research funding programs, transdisciplinary projects are pivotal for the exploration and implementation of transformative innovations. Nevertheless, such funding often comes without ‘user manual’, thus, there is no blueprint for the successful conceptualization of cross-disciplinary cooperation.
In my contribution, I want to reflect on how transdisciplinarity is conceptualized in an environment where basic and applied research come together for the first time and where the cooperation with civil society – imposed by the funding program – apart from industrial partners has been uncharted territory before. Therefore, I analyze a graduate school engaged with the research on hybrid lightweight materials where junior scientists from different academic fields such as mechanical engineering, physics, chemistry and sociology are explicitly asked to produce not only usable knowledge, but also industry-ready products.
I want to point out the difficult and time-consuming ways of making transdisciplinary research work by portraying how civil society is imagined and approached by doctoral candidates. Different academic cultures as well as factual constraints lead to differing ideas and concepts of how working together with stakeholders from society has to be done and how these cooperations affect the outcome of the respective research projects. My analysis is based on (auto)ethnographic fieldwork, focus groups and (informal) interviews, and draws on concepts taken from (Feminist) STS and literature on the logics of transdisciplinary research (e.g. Balsiger 2005).

Author

• Anna-Lena Berscheid, University of Paderborn