Towards a unified concept of transdisciplinary research

Abstract

In 2005, the Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa (TDSA) was forged on the concept of transdisciplinarity. Being appointed as the editor of this journal in 2022, I am newly confronted and intrigued by the term transdisciplinarity. I found myself asking – and being asked – what it means for scientific research and its purpose for broader (southern African) society. Thinking about the journal more specifically, what kind of submissions and audience should it attract under a transdisciplinary mantle? It is (fortunately) outside the scope of this editorial to review the history of the scholarship of transdisciplinarity. That said, it is both a historical and emerging paradigm in the philosophy of science. Scholars such as Piaget and Mittelstrass pioneered the concept in the 1970s and 1980s. Arguably, however, the roots of transdisciplinary thinking in science can be traced back further to when paradigms for understanding complexity started emerging. There is now a substantive body of transdisciplinary academic work. However, what can we distil as transdisciplinary thinking or paradigm elements? How do these interact with the scientific research endeavour? I would venture a few propositions at the risk of reducing (or ignoring) the wealth of literature on transdisciplinarity. These are my ideological takeaways from attempting to be a transdisciplinary scholar in southern Africa and must be treated with caution. Firstly, in a transdisciplinary paradigm, (traditional) disciplinary boundaries are fluid and not incommensurate. Fluidity goes to ontological, epistemological, methodological and axiological boundaries – an argument I unpacked in Van Zyl. The very notion of ‘boundary’ is not valuable for the transdisciplinary paradigm, much like ‘objectivity’ is not helpful in the constructivist paradigm. This is not to say that disciplinary boundaries are non-existent but instead dynamic and permeable.