Topics, Themes and Application
This session elaborates on the possible ways to approach migration studies from a transdisciplinary perspective. Transdisciplinary migration research is underrepresented in transdisciplinary scholarship compared to other fields of scholarly inquiry such as urban planning, natural resources management, or public health. It is also less prone to collaborative research practice such as action research, or collaborating with social movements or social groups from civil society. At the same time, the migration question is also closely related to identification and othering processes, and hence also about identity politics. Because of this, its analysis is often messy and ambiguous. From a transdisciplinary point of view, discussing the political interests and the discriminatory and exclusionary social practices which make migration a problem should become more central to migration studies than they usually are. We thus argue that such a shifting of focus in migration studies, which could be achieved by pursuing a transdisciplinary approach, would help to understand more closely the intersection of societal, political and economic powers constituting the migration subject.
The aim of this session is three-fold: 1) To problematize the relationship between environment and society to reveal their fundamental interdependence. Here, it is also emphasized how knowledge production shapes the co-produced relationship between environment and society and its governance. 2) To highlight the inherently political nature of environment-society relations, drawing on the field of political ecology and its key themes: scarcity, ecological modernization, the market and processes of commodification, and the commons. 3) To explore examples of transdisciplinary research in relation to real-world challenges of environmental change.
This section contains an example of a 4,5 hour teaching session on transdisciplinarity in the context of “Environment and Social Movement in South East Asia”. The session, developed by Ta-Wei Chu from Chiang Mai University, is divided in three parts: “Introduction to Transdisciplinarity”, “Knowledge Production and Integration”, and “Transdisciplinary Environmental Research”.
This section is not a part of the teaching manual, but concerns related students’ reflections on transdisciplinary work (with a particular focus on KNOTS). Two working papers were produced in this respect.