240123 SE VM3 / VM7 - Transdisciplinary Development Studies (2020S)

The seminar will introduce and discuss transdisciplinarity as a form of knowledge production, which gained conceptual and practical importance over the last decades.In the first part of the seminar.

The first part will focus on the history of transdisciplinarity, on how to do transdisciplinarity and on why transdisciplinarity, thereby re-thinking science and research paradigms. The aim is to initiate reflections about knowledge itself and seeks to trigger a critical view on how higher education institutions have often understood legitimate knowledge in ways that excluded voices from the Global South, women or, more broadly, experienced-based knowledge.

In the second part methodologies that worked well in a transdisciplinary context will be dicussed, like reflectivity and positionality, thereby refering to feminist and postcolonial approaches. The importance of participation when doing transdisciplinary research is another methododlogy taken up. How intersectionality can inform transdisciplinary research and influence the validity of transdisciplinary endeavors will be taken up as well as ethics in transdisciplinary research.

In the last part transdisciplinary research in the context of specific topics and themes. For example, transdisciplinary topics like migration or environmental changes will be introduced and discussed through case studies.