· Yasna Palmeiro
What is transdisciplinary research?
Extreme heat in schools is not a problem that belongs to a single discipline or a single sector. It involves climate, health, infrastructure, education and public policy, and it affects students, teachers, families and authorities alike. That is why EscuelasCool takes a transdisciplinary approach. In this note we explain what we mean by transdisciplinarity, drawing mainly on Utrecht University’s field guide to transdisciplinary research.
More than bringing disciplines together
The guide defines transdisciplinary research as research that integrates knowledge from different academic disciplines and also from non-academic actors in order to address societal challenges. It shares with interdisciplinarity the idea of crossing boundaries between fields, but adds a key element: recognising that people outside academia hold valuable knowledge about the problems being studied. Science stops being done for society and starts being done with it.
This implies a double demand. The knowledge produced must be rigorous by scientific standards, but also socially robust, that is, relevant and usable in the real context where it will be applied.
What transdisciplinarity is not
The guide draws two distinctions. It is not simply communication or outreach: presenting findings in the media or at conferences is a one-way flow of information. Nor is it extractive research, in which data are gathered from people through surveys or interviews without giving them a voice in the process. Both activities can be part of a transdisciplinary project, but what defines it is the co-production of knowledge: external actors help to shape the research, from the questions through to the results.
Three kinds of knowledge
When the aim is to solve societal problems, transdisciplinary research seeks to produce three kinds of knowledge: about how the system works (what is happening and what could happen), about desirable goals (where we want to go) and about transformation (how to get there). In our case, this means measuring heat exposure in classrooms, building with school communities a shared vision of what a protected school looks like, and defining with health and education authorities the policies needed to get there.
Attitudes for working this way
The guide highlights several necessary attitudes: accepting complexity, being open to a diversity of perspectives, producing outputs that are useful both to academia and to decision-makers, and acting with humility, without assuming that the research team already knows what the problem is. It also warns that disagreement is not an obstacle to be removed: pluralistic approaches can lead to more robust outcomes. Clarifying expectations and building trust with partners is a central part of the work.
An important caveat for Latin America
Much of the theory on transdisciplinarity has been developed in high-income Western European countries. The guide itself notes the warning that these methodologies cannot simply be copied into other contexts and need to be adapted to each reality. For a project working in Chile, Colombia and Peru, this is an invitation to build our own forms of collaboration, rooted in our territories.
Main source: Utrecht University. What is transdisciplinary research? Transdisciplinary Field Guide. Available at: https://www.uu.nl/en/research/transdisciplinary-field-guide/get-started/what-is-transdisciplinary-research