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Transdisciplinary facilitation exists in the space between traditional specialisms and disciplines. It is the point where people not only bring their expertise and experience to the table, but simultaneously transcend this to engage in new, ungenreable activities and actions in collaboration with others.

why it important right now?

Healthy, collaborative relationships have always been a major key to success in any enterprise, and are the bedrock to society. But why is transdisciplinary collaboration particularly important right now?

Parallel to the development of global telecommunication networks and media, there has been a strong global trend evident to network, and collaborate, across traditional boundaries of sector, geography, discipline, and religion.

The degree of percieved complexity, in our lives has increased to the point where finite understandings or boundaries are almost obsolete, except for very few manufacturing and administrative tasks and processes.

The 'known' world has become increasingly 'unknowable'.

The growth of sophisticated online social networking and media tools (eg. Ning, Linked inFacebook, Youtube, flickr) has allowed us to build maps to navigate complex global relationships, and to bridge geographic distance. Also to work in ways that were never though possible previously. They have also meant that traditional notions of what of 'truth are no longer valid, or at least very unstable. (Especially when faced with constructivist tools such as 'wikipedia' where knowledge is collaboratively generated rather than disseminated by 'experts').

Social media has allowed other people's stories to be heard and shared in our own living room, making it very difficult to live in a world where environmental, social, economic and cultural crisises are 'other people's problems' and 'out of site and out of mind'.

Also a number of interventions and solutions are needed to engage with the incredibly complex nature of the crises facing us. Climate change, poverty and conflict are interwoven, and caused by thousands of different actions at one level…and on another spawned from a way of thinking that has dominated our plant since the enlightenment, and is based on concrete a concrete seperatist reality and fixed, objective truth. To deal with issues such as climate change, interventions need to join and transcend current disciplines rather than be formed within each of them seperately.

What helps?

There are a number of factors that support trandisciplinary collaboration in my experiencethese include:

buy-in and participation from every level of leadership flexible organisational structures, formal and informal communication and evaluation systems. healthy, open and trusting relationships with some geography of interest and repeat engagement (networks and partnerships) intermediaries that support interaction eg. facilitators and brokers like Foam, Brussels a commitment to participation and equity, coupled with an understanding of power and rank differentials meta-reflective capacity and self awareness - i.e. the ability to look at ones actions and assumptions from a distance

“We define interdisciplinary studies as projects that involve several unrelated academic disciplines in a way that forces them to cross subject boundaries to create new knowledge and theory and solve a common research goal. By unrelated, we mean that they have contrasting research paradigms. We might consider the differences between qualitative and quantitative approaches or between analytical and interpretative approaches that bring together disciplines from the humanities and the natural sciences. We define transdisciplinary studies as projects that both integrate academic researchers from different unrelated disciplines and non-academic participants, such as land managers and the public, to research a common goal and create new knowledge and theory. Transdisciplinarity combines interdisciplinarity with a participatory approach.”

http://learningforsustainability.net/research/interdisciplinary.php

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