Methodologies for transdisciplinary research: situatedness of knowledges and reflexivity as preconditions of collaborative study designs
Aim of this session
This session aims at providing students with a basic understanding of the aforementioned concepts of othering and epistemic violence, of standpoint theory and situated knowledge and finally of reflexive positionality, and relates these directly to transdisciplinary research designs. Throughout the field trips, the KNOTS project and the teaching experience, understanding and knowledge of these concepts proved meaningful pre-conditions for transdisciplinary collaborative endeavours, but they are largely lacking in
transdisciplinary literature.
As trained (positive) modern scientists, we have learned that it is our job to explain the world to non-academic actors, to disclose and make visible its underlying structures and
laws and we have learned that these structures and laws govern nature and society. A central part of transdisciplinarity is concerned with integrating, interpreting and negotiating different knowledges. Despite fundamentally challenging science and its power to define and classify societies and nature, postcolonial theory and its critical analytical concepts
are non-existent in transdisciplinary literature. The aim of introducing a postcolonial critique on the production of knowledge as embedded in geopolitical, imperial and colonizing strategies is therefore highly emphasized. This is particularly so if transdisciplinary knowledge production is directed toward collaborative endeavours in the Global South or collaborative endeavours with non-white, non-male actors, which is particularly the case in the realm of migration, social global inequalities and political ecology and sustainable development.
A transparent and accountable standpoint in research practice is at the heart of all transdisciplinarity, albeit mostly implicitly only. Once scientists accept that all knowledge, including their own, are socially located and situated, the main challenge is to negotiate, integrate and incorporate different knowledges, translation and brokerage of ideas and concepts, which always remain incomplete and partly untranslatable. This session provides the epistemological and methodological impetus to reflect on the reproduction of social hierarchies as inherent mechanics in science. In addition, these introductory concepts question the scientists’ habitual positionality as standing outside the society, as detached and unrelated to the
knowledge we produce. Students should not only be trained in professional expertise and specialized skills, but also in their ability to critically read the world, from their partial perspective, and to position their research to ensure compatibility and openness essential to collaborative research practices.
Links to transdisciplinary research and teaching
Teaching transdisciplinarity as a framework for research that fosters collaboration in knowledge production requires at least some reflection on the history of Western modern science, main conceptual advancements in the philosophy of science, as well as the manifestation of major societal emancipative developments in scientific practices. This engagement is rare in
transdisciplinary literature (exceptional is e.g. the book by Du Plessis et al. 2013). Instead, transdisciplinary literature is prominent in providing guidelines.
Teaching transdisciplinarity must engage transformative pedagogies (Nixon, 2017). The teaching manual echoes the experiences of three summer schools and field trips in which the urgent need for a transdisciplinarity mediated through transformative pedagogies became obvious. The hands-on experience in negotiating knowledge between different academic disciplines, schools of thought and paradigms, as well as beyond academia, was a valuable teaching and learning practice for those who did not have experience in interpretative
science. Most students were overwhelmed with the challenges of collaborating with non-academic actors, especially non-academic actors who did not receive academic training or who were not trained professionals, and therefore were navigating through different social realities.
The session stresses that transdisciplinarity ought to foster an understanding of objectivity and truth based on an active and explicit conjunction of different, sometimes contradicting, but often complementary perspectives. It is not the main objective of transdisciplinary research to produce a neutral and objective knowledge, superior to other knowledges. The choice of partners for collaboration is based on how we construct our academic identities, and how we see our place in the world, how we understand and interpret it. Navigating through research that is not oppressive, not marginalising, not patronizing and not essentializing is a challenge.
The session also speaks about reflexivity and positionality throughout the research process, which is one possible way of avoiding the pitfalls of an authoritative, oppressive and patronizing research project. Here an understanding of interconnectedness between our researcher-selves, the research interest and the object of research could be a helpful pathway. Methodologically, this would lead to a processual and dynamic conceptualisation of transdisciplinary research, where relations, becoming and negotiations are in the centre of attention.
Summary of main points
The main points of this session are:
A short recap of epistemological and collaborative transdisciplinarity
Relationality of knowledge producers, objects of knowledge and research interests
Postcolonial critique: Othering and epistemic violence
Situated knowledges and the science question
Reflexive positionality
Throughout the last five decades, transdisciplinarity has evolved from a theoretical proposition to develop a unified axiom of science into a research design for integrating different non-academic and academic knowledges with the aim of solving practical problems. It has also transformed from a concern mainly of the hard sciences, such as physics, mathematics and psychology, into a social science and science & technology studies concern. The themes of sustainability, urban planning, public health and others are more prominent in transdisciplinary debates today. The focus is almost exclusively on collaborative designs across social and cultural spheres, indicating multiple inequalities and difference markers.
Recent transdisciplinary literature provides a broad introduction into how a research process evolves, where and how collaboration might be induced and how a transdisciplinary scholar might navigate through the process of such endeavour. However, science and practice are not imagined as dialectically interdependent, but as two distinct, albeit equitable parts of the game. This, however, ignores the lived realities of knowledge production in which science, and in particular modern positivist epistemology, sees itself as explaining the world and stating the truth. This position, although criticized ever since, remains dominant.
To provide students with theoretical and methodological concepts to be aware of such criticism and how to integrate it into transdisciplinary and other research, the session continues
with some contributions of postcolonial critique engaged in breaking down the scientifically substantiated stereotyping and othering of non-western collectives and people and their knowledges.
Colonising discourse (Chandra Talpade Mohanty) and epistemic violence (Gayatri Spivak) conceive knowledge produced in the context of colonialism and imperialism as a functional device of subjugation and domination. Both authors challenge this methodology which create imperialist and sexist knowledge on the colonial people, which are still in place globally.
Standpoint theory (Sandra Harding) and situated knowledges (Donna Haraway) similarly address the subjugation of knowledge as a patriarchal strategy to consolidate and maintain societal hierarchies. They criticize the alleged objectivity and neutrality of science as marginalizing embodied perspectives located in life-world experiences as non-representative, and hence untruth. The authors argue that it is the perspectives from the margins which are better able to see. To meet this dilemma, reflexive positionality is one possible way to understand the relationality of research endeavours and processes of knowledge production – transdisciplinary or not. This session therefore introduces reflexive positionality (Gillian Rose) as a guiding methodology for any transdisciplinary practice, and as it’s very pre-condition.
It is highly recommended to use the reading material throughout the session.
Use of reading material
Chandra Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes (1984) criticized how production of knowledge about women of the ‘Third World’ by Western feminist writers, using their methodological universalism, conferred their own experiences of gender relations onto women of the Global South. Mohanty sees the universalist assumptions of women’s oppression as mere cultural reductionism, which does not consider the voices, experiences and agencies of women, nor the historical and geographical circumstances of theirlived experiences. As such, the colonizing discourse on lived experiences of women in the Global South is keeping up the legacy of colonialism, racism and what Gayatri Spivak (2010) has termed ‘epistemic violence’: The subjects of power are the objects of knowledge, deprived of any chance to produce knowledge on their own experience, and silenced and unable to speak (Dotson, 2011). The not-ability to speak on the side of the subaltern (Spivak, 2010) is thus directly related to the inability to listen on the side of the hegemonic group (Mohanty, 1984).
Donna Haraway’s (1988) seminal text on situatedness of knowledge and the science question in feminism addresses the false and misleading neutrality and objectivity of scientific
knowledge. She criticized the epistemological position that scientists can obtain a neutral and objective, and hence absolute, knowledge. Rather, she says all knowledge is situated. Knowledge becomes comprehensible, reasonable and accountable if it defines itself as partial, not all-embracing.
The concept of situated knowledge is based on standpoint epistemology. Sandra Harding’s (1987) text on feminist methodologies refers to critical theory and its assessment of
positivism and the relation between theory and political and social transformation, the life-world struggles,as well as the question of values in science. With transdisciplinarity, the positivism dispute has swung back to natural sciences, where nature and technology are increasingly seen as endowed with agency and the dualism between the (researcher) subject and the (object of) knowledge is being questioned.
Gillian Rose (1997) reviews the attempts of feminist writers to situate themselves and the knowledge they produce, and concludes that a transparent reflexivity is not sufficient for transformative knowledge production. Transparent reflexivity, she claims, repeats the god-trick of objective science of knowing and seeing outside and beyond our positionality. Rather, positionality, like identity, is not something static and fixed. Rose uses Judith Butler’s (1988) performativity to think about how we produce knowledge, but also about our researcher-identities. Reflexive positionality is a way to counteract our tendency to essentialize, fix and reify the permanently changing performative acts of research, and to
see positionality and situatedness as relational and processual.
Additional comments to the presentation
The reading material is very theoretical and abstract. Therefore, the session is particularly suitable as preparation for and reflection on collaborative experience. The session addresses students who are not well acquainted with critical theory and feminist and postcolonial texts. The discussion of seemingly simple concepts – such as the objectivity paradigm in science or the concept of identity are important didactic parts. However, they need to be supported by learning, and un-learning practical experiences.
Concluding remarks
The session aspires to introduce, intensify and foster a critical debate in settings where participants/students can practice their reflexivity in discussions among peers and field experience. Ideally, these groups encompass interactions between academic and non-academic actors, as well as across disciplinary, cultural, epistemological and social backgrounds. This is the setting where reflexive positionality, situated knowledges and epistemic violence can be constantly reflected on and discussed. This experience is essential in transdisciplinary teaching.
The session also includes three practical/interactive elements to be used to discuss science as a performative act, the concept of identity (researcher) in relational terms and the implications of transdisciplinary research. The exercises can also be used to discuss the main disciplinary assumptions, or to counteract different research paradigms among participants who draw on different academic traditions. The aim is to learn how we position ourselves always in relation to someone, or something. Identities are fluid, dynamic and situational. This perspective is not accessible in theory, with only the help of learning material, but requires interactive didactics of transdisciplinarity that are best encountered in practice.
Reflections
Science history is not a linear evolution, but full of loops and detours. Ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions we make are part of the overall social relations
and subject to change. What we know about the world, and how we therefore imagine reality depends on the when and where we live. The Enlightenment heralded secularisation and democratisation of knowledge production, and a humanist science based on an exclusive notion of humanity. The dominant modern scientific methodology was based on a generalised and universal version of the white, male, western reality that was made to be accessible to man (sic) through scientific methods, based on the principle of measurability and
classification. If we base transdisciplinarity mainly on the dominant modern scientific methodology, it will not be able to deliver on its promises of socially robust knowledge production (Nowotny, Scott, & Gibbons, 2003).
References
Butler, J. (1988). Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519.
Dotson, K. (2011). Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing. Hypatia, 26(2), 236–257.
Du Plessis, H., Sehume, J., & Martin, L. (2013). The concept and application of transdisciplinarity in intellectual discourse and research. Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599.
Harding, S. G. (Hrsg.). (1987). Feminism and methodology: Social science issues. Bloomington : Milton Keynes [Buckinghamshire]: Indiana University Press ; Open University Press.
Mohanty, C. (1984). Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. Boundary 2, Vol. 12/13 (Spring-Autumn), 29.
Nowotny, H., Scott, P., & Gibbons, M. (2003). Introduction:Mode 2’Revisited: The New Production of Knowledge. Minerva, 41(3), 179–194.
Nixon, J. (2017). Seeing What Is Questionable: Transformative Pedagogies and the Hermeneutic Subject. In P. Gibbs (Hrsg.), Transdisciplinary Higher Education: A Theoretical Basis Revealed in Practice(S. 17–29).
Rose, G. (1997). Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics. Progress in Human Geography, 21(3), 305–320.
Said, E. W. (1979). Orientalism(1st Vintage Books ed). New York: Vintage Books.
Spivak, G. C. (2010). “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. In R. C. MORRIS (Hrsg.), Can the Subaltern Speak?(S. 21–78). Abgerufen von http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/morr14384.5