Workshop 'The Role of Context in Transdisciplinary Research'
2023-05-08 On Thursday, April 20, 2023, Dr. Claire Grauer and Sophie Rühl of the tdAcademy conducted a workshop entitled ‘The Role of Context in Transdisciplinary Research. Reflecting on my own research project’ at the School of Sustainability.
The workshop was part of an accompanying program for students of the Master's program in ‘Sustainability Science’ and ‘Psychology & Sustainability’ participating in this semester’s transdisciplinary research projects.
The aim of the workshop was to engage the students with the topic of context as an important aspect of their research. Both theoretical and practical approaches were introduced to facilitate a better understanding of contextual relations within the respective research project.
The workshop began with an interactive, relationship-based exercise revealing many previously unknown relationships among the participants. After exploring the concept of context together, it was discussed how perspectives, disciplines and situations can shape the understanding of context in different ways. Subsequently, the students applied the framework of 9 contextual inner and outer factors by Tolksdorf et al. (2023, under review) to their own transdisciplinary projects. This was very helpful for the students to better grasp the, rather abstract, idea of context and to reflect on the potentials and challenges of identified influencing factors on their planned research process.
Dr. Claire Grauer and Sophie Rühl recommend using the framework and guiding questions as tools for reflection at various stages of the research process to iteratively deepen the understanding of the context specific to the research.
If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact claire.grauer@leuphana.de.
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