Deadlines: Abstracts 13th October, decision 27th October, 2025; full submission 14th January 2026
CFP Abstract: In recent years, transdisciplinary research methodologies have been gaining prominence. Intended to foster more just research environments, such methodologies recognize diverse actors and forms of expertise in responding to the challenges of global polycrises. This Thematic Cluster brings together perspectives from history, philosophy, and social studies of science on transdisciplinary knowledge production. Directed at concrete socio-environmental problems (e.g. deforestation, biodiversity loss, soil erosion, climate change, public health, and so on), the compiled works discuss case studies of transdisciplinary research, as well as meta-reflections on the achievements, challenges and theoretical conflicts of collaborative knowledge making. Viewed collectively, these perspectives reveal the theoretical depth and practical challenges involved in navigating disciplinary and epistemic divides. They underscore the need to examine not only how transdisciplinary approaches operate in real-world settings but also how they are conceptualized and framed across various intellectual traditions. As such, we encourage authors to draw on their applied experiences in transdisciplinary research environments within and beyond Latin America, and to reflect on the theory and practice gap in multi stakeholder knowledge production, such as power and positionality conflicts, epistemic resilience, multispecies justice, care relationships, and intercultural dialogue.
Keywords: transdisciplinary research, co-production of knowledge, epistemic diversity, polycrisis
Guest Editors:
Julia Turska – Wageningen University & Research
Thomas Rickard – Federal University of Minas Gerais
Luana Poliseli – Wageningen University & Research
Luis Reyes-Galindo – Independent Researcher
Review and publication: rolling review and publication on acceptance from February 2025 Submission guidelines: https://tapuya.org/for-authors/submission-guidelines/
Abstracts to geosspecialissue@gmail.com
Full submissions via Taylor & Francis portal upon acceptance of abstract
INTRODUCTION
Deforestation, biodiversity loss, and extreme weather events are intertwined with public health, agricultural activities, and urban development. Transdisciplinary research, a collaborative approach to inquiry that integrates knowledge from multiple disciplines and involves stakeholders from outside academia—such as community members, industry, or policymakers—to address complex, real-world problems (Lang et al., 2012), is increasingly recognized as necessary to advancing adequate responses to such polycrises as it can weave together knowledge and epistemic tools across academic fields and society sectors. At the same time, transdisciplinary research was developed and exists within systems and assumptions that have contributed to these polycrises. As such, it is essential that established and emerging critical theoretical discourses about transdisciplinary research environments be reflexively engaged with the social context in question. The perpetuation of exclusive, unjust, and unequal knowledge-making practices also risks undermining the validity, utility, and credibility of the knowledge
being produced. Yet more significantly, knowledge making is not only produced by weaving academic fields, it is also inextricably bound up with society, development, governance, and management. It is here that key research assumptions – such as the political neutrality of knowledge claims, or questions of knowledge transfer and replication – come to perform as part of unethical systems.
To take some examples, conservation agendas’ ties with socio-ecological research have been associated with the privatisation of common land, aggravating inequalities, and suppressing social movements (Apostolopoulou et al. 2021). Ethnobiology, which has been highly dependent on local collaboration, has also often embedded deceptive and extractive patterns of knowledge making that exclude those it depends upon (McAlvay et al. 2021). Furthermore, DePuy et al. (2021), in reviewing global institutions and process for environmental governance, find that a “modernist ontology” dominates, enacting nature as an inert resource to be extracted for profit – this is despite decades of discursive commitment to participation as a core principle from global institutions, national governments, and funding partnerships. And at the local scale, Indigenous and local collaborations with the state in research and management often clash at the expense of those without the resources, authority, and power to be heard (Green 2013).
All this has not been without concern from within research communities, established and new. Studies at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Philosophy of Science have been particularly generative. Harding’s (1995) concept of strong objectivity and Haraway’s (1988) notion of situated knowledge have engaged academic and researcher demands with feminist and social critique. They show that sciences can retain unique resources in valuing rigour, transparency, and utility while embracing more nuanced and valid notions of knowledge and knowledge production. Such sentiments have found inspiration and familiarity in the Global South, such as in the work of Leonardo Boff (2014), who conceives of knowledge as relational, plural, and as conducted with respect to sacred service (see also Freire and Macedo 2014; Klein and Toledo Ferreira 2024). Frameworks, lessons, and orientations for more critical transdisciplinary working and activity at the science-policy interface abound (Landström 2023; Tambe et al. 2023; Anderson et al. 2022; Wyborn et al. 2021). And Indigenous scholars have variously taken direct aim at scientific methods and frameworks, analysing their deficiencies and proposing alternatives (Smith 1999; Chilisa 2012; Jimmy, Andreotti, and Stein 2019).
To take the challenges, critiques and proposals of this arena seriously means engaging a critical and reflexive approach from the outset. It means questioning the ideals – inherited and incentivised – of neutral, detached and independent research, of objective and scalable knowledge. To take this seriously means working through stories that encounter theory as a practice in itself, to be chosen, carried, and interrogated with concern for context. All research, transdisciplinary or otherwise, unfolds in a unique moment that is bound up with the people and place it forms an evolving part of. The relations that researchers inevitably enter into, intended and unintended, known and unknown, are to be opened to concerned and collaborative attention. The intention of making knowledge together is not abandoned but expanded, made more complex.
THE PROPOSAL
To develop transdisciplinary practices that are more accountable to the social and political context in which they are embedded, we propose a Thematic Cluster conceived of as an organic networking practice, connecting diverse researchers and contexts through collaborative reflection and communication. References of interest include (but are not limited to) (de)coloniality, feminism, more-than-human participation, epistemic justice, and care in knowledge co-production settings. And while centred on Latin America, proposals from other geographical contexts are welcome. The constraint is that articles should critically and reflexively engage at the intersection of theoretical, ethnographical and practical experiences with research interventions which include non-academic stakeholders as knowledge makers. In this way,
we will learn through stories that chronicle and create relations. Contributions may support or offer recommendations, they may tackle theory-practice gaps, or they may simply register the astonishment, regret, achievements, or reflections of those in the field. Together, we invite the empathy, connection, and further reflexivity that are necessary for responsible and effective practice.
Tapuya is uniquely situated to host such a collection for the following reasons. First, although it centers on the Latin American context, it looks to embrace relationships beyond. And second, its focus on science and technology studies is not narrow, it remains open to new and diverse fields as it understands that transdisciplinary settings require a plurality of knowledge systems to respond to the polycrisis. Thus, this Thematic Cluster resonates with the diverse meanings of Tapuya, to engage knowledge making as a questioning process, to digest and make anew.
To kick-off this Thematic Cluster, we collected expressions of interest (presented in the abstracts below) from authors from diverse geographical contexts and institutional backgrounds to contribute with their reflections and experiences of transdisciplinary practices in Latin America and beyond. Their discussions embrace a variety of perspectives from the history and philosophy of science as well as science and technology studies, while also engaging with different approaches to transdisciplinarity across the abstracts. Some papers treat interdisciplinary methods as analytical lenses to examine specific practices or problems, whereas others position transdisciplinarity itself as the central object of study—for example, exploring the dynamics of transdisciplinary knowledge production. Taken together, these perspectives highlight both the conceptual richness and practical complexity of working across disciplinary and epistemic boundaries, suggesting that to fully understand contemporary knowledge-making, we must study both how transdisciplinarity functions in practice and how it is theorized across different contexts. These abstracts represent articles in the making and potential contributions to our Thematic Cluster on “Transdisciplinary Research for Socio-environmental Challenges”.
Anderson, Christopher B., Simone Athayde, Christopher M. Raymond, Arild Vatn, Paola Arias-Arévalo, Rachelle K. Gould, Jasper Kenter, et al. 2022. ‘Chapter 2. Conceptualizing the Diverse Values of Nature and Their Contributions to People.’ In Methodological Assessment Report on the Diverse Values and Valuation of Nature of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Bonn, Germany: IPBES Secretariat. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7154713.
Apostolopoulou, Elia, Anastasia Chatzimentor, Sara Maestre-Andrés, Marina Requena-i-Mora, Alejandra Pizarro, and Dimitrios Bormpoudakis. 2021. ‘Reviewing 15 Years of Research on Neoliberal Conservation: Towards a Decolonial, Interdisciplinary, Intersectional and Community-Engaged Research Agenda’. Geoforum, May. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.05.006.
Chilisa, Bagele. 2012. Indigenous Research Methodologies. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. DePuy, Walker, Jacob Weger, Katie Foster, Anya M Bonanno, Suneel Kumar, Kristen Lear, Raul Basilio, and Laura German. 2021. ‘Environmental Governance: Broadening Ontological Spaces for a More Livable World’. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 5 (2): 947–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211018565.
Freire, Paulo, and Donaldo P. Macedo. 2014. Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. 30th anniversary edition. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Green, Lesley, ed. 2013. Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge. Cape Town, South Africa: HSRC Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066. Harding, Sandra. 1995. ‘“Strong Objectivity”: A Response to the New Objectivity Question’. Synthese 104 (3,): 331–49.
Jimmy, Elwood, Vanessa Andreotti, and Sharon Stein. 2019. ‘Towards Braiding’, June. https://musagetes.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Braiding_ReaderWeb.pdf
Klein, Stefan, and Mariana Toledo Ferreira. 2024. ‘Lélia Gonzalez: An Amefrican Perspective to Reorient the Canon’. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society 7 (1): 2359840. https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2024.2359840.
Landström, Catharina. 2023. ‘Careful STS Interventions in Transdisciplinary Environmental Research’. In Ethical and Methodological Dilemmas in Social Science Interventions: Careful Engagements in Healthcare, Museums, Design and Beyond, edited by Doris Lydahl and Niels Christian Mossfeldt Nickelsen, 157–70. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44119-6_11.
Lang, D. J., Wiek, A., Bergmann, M., et al. (2012). Transdisciplinary research in sustainability science: practice, principles, and challenges. Sustainability Science, 7(1), 25–43.
Leonardo, Boff. 2014. Ecology & Liberation: A New Paradigm. Orbis Books.
McAlvay, Alex C., Chelsey G. Armstrong, Janelle Baker, Linda Black Elk, Samantha Bosco, Natalia Hanazaki, Leigh Joseph, et al. 2021. ‘Ethnobiology Phase VI: Decolonizing Institutions, Projects, and Scholarship’. Journal of Ethnobiology 41 (2). https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-41.2.170
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London ; New York : Dunedin, N.Z. : New York: Zed Books ; University of Otago Press ; Distributed in the USA exclusively by St. Martin’s Press.
Tambe, Sandeep, Aabha Ballal, Richa Tomar, Carina Wyborn, Ruth DeFries, Sunayana Ganguly, and Lynn Scarlett. 2023. ‘Bridging Science, Policy and Practice for Sustainability: Towards a Conceptual Framework’. Environmental Science & Policy 145 (July):208–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2023.04.007.
Wyborn, C., J. Montana, N. Kalas, S. Clement, F. Davila, N. Knowles, E. Louder, et al. 2021. ‘An Agenda for Research and Action toward Diverse and Just Futures for Life on Earth’. Conservation Biology 35 (4): 1086–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13671
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