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Transdisciplinarity is creative human agency including cognitive, intellectual and behavioural activities of individuals and groups. These activities define and are mutually defined by beliefs and ideas, knowledge and know-how, language and meanings, norms and rules, and opinions and values. The cultivation of transdisciplinary projects should embrace these cultural, social and psychological predispositions because they are core constituents of a trans-anthropo-logic. This requires transcending common research methods used in scientific studies and using scaffolding that facilitates agency, and positioning individuals and groups. However, scientists are rarely trained to pilot projects involving multiple stakeholders with different positions. This article explains why trained facilitators are needed to pilot transdisciplinary projects. They can cultivate transcendence and transgression – both analysed by the late Julie Thompson Klein – beyond the scope and purpose of common research methods. In essence, transdisciplinary practices respect different ontologies and epistemologies while incorporating ethical principles and moral values. The cultivation of transdisciplinary projects should accommodate and reduce asymmetries of power between politicians, public administrators, property owners, researchers and laypeople that are shaped by extant historical and societal variables in specific situations. Transdisciplinary projects should also apply multiple sources of quantitative data and qualitative information that represent the complexity, diversity and perhaps incommensurability of intentions, meanings, perceptions and values about specific subjects or situations. This is being achieved by innovative projects that should become beacons for change.
This study draws attention to the role of urban redevelopment practices in shaping indigenous social infrastructures and community life in the post-displacement and resettlement period. From decolonial and relational perspectives, I explore how relations with social infrastructures change because of urban redevelopment practices following displacement and resettlement in Hasankeyf caused by the Ilısu Dam. To understand the relations between Indigenous resettlers and social infrastructures, I focus on residents’ lived experiences, practices and sense of belonging by examining the affective implications of the changes in the social infrastructures and affordances resulting from urban redevelopment practices (before and after the flooding of Hasankeyf in 2020 and resettlement in 2021). A mix of qualitative methods was used by combining a decolonial method of cuerpo-territorio, interviews and observations. The intertwining of the colonial framework with the practices of urban redevelopment in Turkey is evident in the process of the resettlement of Hasankeyf. The downplay of the reconstruction and protection of indigenous social infrastructures during urban redevelopment after the Ilısu Dam has damaged the sense of belonging, community relations, affective experiences, indigenous cultural practices and social development of the resettlers. I extend the understanding of indigenous social infrastructures in the social infrastructure literature introduced by Klinenberg and by Latham and Layton. I outline five key aspects that highlight the need for and importance of indigenous social infrastructures in the context of urban redevelopment through resettlement.
This chapter discusses emergent questions about energy justice and climate justice scholarship, pedagogy and praxis, based on several interdisciplinary, community-engaged research projects in India and the United States. Based on qualitative research and fieldwork-based methods, the chapter argues that rather than a fixed set of principles or ideas, the concepts of energy and climate justice are polysemic and grounded in the environmental and social justice struggles of specific geographic contexts. The chapter concludes with several questions for researchers to grapple with, centring questions of responsibility, positionality, reciprocity and building just relations across international contexts or across institutional identities while conducting fieldwork, and across epistemic divides in interdisciplinary teams with both positivist and critical scholars across the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and engineering.
This chapter reflects on the volume’s contributions, recognizing the varied and contested ways we enact justice in our work and lives. Critically, this book does not represent a singular view of justice, but instead uses a plurality of perspectives to argue for a broad view of justice as praxis. What emerged from these diverse accounts were a common questioning of the purpose of the university, the role that a contemporary academic ought to play, the importance of context in determining our capability to do just research and the little-discussed emotional labour all research entails. The chapter develops a set of core elements for ‘best practice’ alongside a series of reflective questions that researchers can use to support engagement with just research as a messy and constant work-in-progress. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of being responsive to the dynamic, multidimensional and intersectional contextuality of research to make space for the reflexive and dialogical nature of justice.
This chapter offers an analysis of the power dynamics of practising epistemic justice in research, by examining the spaces created for collaborative knowledge production about Rwanda. Drawing on reflections on the Rwanda Diaspora Youth Partnership Programme (RDYPP), a one-year participatory study seeking to understand how British youth from Rwandese backgrounds experienced engagement with post-genocide reconstruction, we argue that co-created spaces can work towards producing scholarship that is ‘organic to the contexts’ (Nhemachena et al, 2016) while also centring multiple epistemic contributors as part of a critical and pluralized academic landscape. However, we also acknowledge the inherent tensions and tradeoffs associated with the influence of academic environments and the day-to-day spaces of collaborators’ lives. We conclude by emphasizing the potential of collaboration as a tool for intersubjective learning and un-learning within networks of differently positioned knowledge holders, and therefore as vital for disrupting the pre-existing frameworks that contribute to epistemic injustices in Rwandan research.
This chapter mobilizes feminist action research together with Fraser’s three dimensions of social justice (economic, socio-cultural and political) to navigate (food) injustices across different scales in and beyond academia. It expands the framework by incorporating ethics of care to focus on the micro-dimension of the day-to-day research activities. Applying a care-full participative justice lens brings to the fore the mundane, messy practices, which are explored alongside the ‘spectacular’ decisions about recruitment of participants, the choice of methods or the questions of dissemination. It advocates a justice approach in academia as a humble way of being and performing everyday more-than-research decisions, rather than disconnected, disengaged pieces of research activities and writing.
Reflecting on the appeal for ‘multispecies justice for all’, this chapter argues how this might be addressed to better challenge speciesism, and inform new radical geographies of liberation. To these ends, the main body of the chapter is composed of four case studies, commentaries and reflections, in which each author draws on a range of personal experiences and context to think through ways in which they are trying to share space more justly. Looking to the future, the chapter argues for the importance of embracing a vegan praxis more fully, to better inform and animate multispecies justice research, teaching and activism.
