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

Wed, August 30, 11:00am to 12:30pm, Sheraton Boston, Floor: 3, Exeter

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

Over the last 40 years, the traditional model of science conducted by individual researchers has evolved into various models of ‘big science’, as illustrated by the increasing number of transdisciplinary research networks at local, regional and international scales in the global environmental change research community. Transdisciplinary research networks such as Future Earth are deemed necessary to address complex problems not amenable to individual research grants. Our session moves beyond the epistemological and methodological research on the nuts and bolts of how to improve the effectiveness of stakeholder-engaged research; we seek, rather, to gain a better understanding of how the performance of stakeholder-engaged research transforms the sensibilities of researchers and stakeholders and its impacts on the production of “useable science” in different geographical locations. Building upon recent scholarship on the logics of interdisciplinarity (Barry and Born, 2013), the remaking public participation in science (Chilvers and Kearnes, 2016), socio-technical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) and imaginaries of publics in public engagement in science (Welsh and Wynne, 2013; Felt et al., 2016), we are interested in gaining a geopolitical understanding of the relationship between imaginaries of stakeholders, individual and collective sensibilities, and transdisciplinary research practices across different geographical locations. In line with the theme of the conference, our session invites scholars to ask how do researchers and stakeholders make sense of each other in transdisciplinary research settings, and to consider in what ways does this “sensitizing” generate (or not) usable knowledge in different socio-political contexts?

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