One of UU’s central principles is Collaboration across borders. We are an international university with multidisciplinary education and research. This is a quote from Utrecht University’s strategic plan 2025: “The guiding principle is to train students to be critical global citizens with an eye for the importance of open society. We offer them opportunities to gain experience in different disciplines and to complete a large portion of the specialization phase outside their own program.” 

As UU-wide dean of Interdisciplinary Education Prof. Iris van der Tuin has been tasked with the development of a research-informed vision on, and a governance structure for developing and executing multi-department and multi-faculty educational modules or programs. ITD-Alliance is an important conversation partner in that to create training curriculum, guidelines, and frameworks to disseminate widely. 

Conversations around definitions of and perspectives on interdisciplinarity (This extends to transdisciplinarity as many UU initiatives are trans- rather than interdisciplinarity.); Mapping of and participating in research on interdisciplinarity; Educational benchmarking; Comparing notes on governance of interdisciplinarity.

We aim to better support our researchers in forming, finding, and creating inter- and transdisciplinary teams and projects to help solve global problems. Currently, we organise e.g. monthly events and courses for different career stages, and offer facilitation help and collaboration environment Tellus to enable inter- and transdisciplinary encounters and skills within our university. In this work, we believe that ITD Alliance could be a good forum for us to develop and learn new tools and share experiences of promoting inter- and transdisciplinarity.

We are interested in learning together with other inter- and transdisciplinarity specialists from all over the world. We hope that the Alliance will be an active and lively forum to share best practices, experiences, guides, and tools and to offer peer support and sparring. Through this we wish to be able to offer truly impactful support for researchers facing the challenges of inter- and transdisciplinary research.

Transdisciplinary research is a core element of ISOE’s activity profile. Since the institute’s foundation, ISOE researchers contributed to the development of transdisciplinary concepts and methods, and applied them in specific, place-based projects. By becoming a member of ITD Alliance, we aim to strengthen our international network to foster knowledge exchange, learning and collaboration with international researchers in the field. In addition, we believe that joining forces between various networks and organisations engaged in inter- and transdisciplinary research is key to transforming the science systems to improve the context conditions for such kind of research.

ISOE is active in the ITD Alliance as we expect to join forces for:

• Creating an international community of inter- and transdisciplinary researchers
• Fostering learning and knowledge exchange between researchers from different places and schools of thought and practices
• Increasing the visibility and transformative power of currently dispersed efforts in transdisciplinary (sustainability) research
• Improving the conditions for doing inter- and transdisciplinary research through creation of awareness and lobbying, e.g regarding the need and specificities of the inter- and transdisciplinary research modes, the need for changes in career path opportunities, funding mechanisms etc.

The Center for Ocean and Society conducts interdisciplinary research on ocean and society and involves societal actors in transdisciplinary projects.

The research at the Center for Ocean and Society is based on the understanding of seas and coasts as socio-ecological systems. Experts from economics, geology, oceanography, fisheries biology, chemistry and other disciplines work together on projects with the active involvement of societal actors. This makes it possible to examine a topic from different perspectives and changes the approach to these problems. To assess different scenarios, methodologically specific models from economics as well as climate research, ocean research and ecosystem research are linked.

The projects work on a local, regional and global level and actively involve non-university knowledge carriers in the development of research questions. Solutions for coping with the climate and ocean crisis are to be developed through the cooperation of participants from research, politics, business and civil society. The overarching goal of the research is a science-based and independent contribution to the implementation of the sustainability goals of the UN Agenda 2030.

The Center for Ocean and Society conducts research on the following topics:

• Marine and Coastal Resource Economy
• Marine and Coastal Geohazards
• Marine Food Security

The Center for Ocean and Society is a cross-faculty platform of the priority research area Kiel Marine Science (KMS) at Kiel University. KMS is comprised of more than 40 working groups from seven faculties at Kiel University and acts as the umbrella organization for ocean and climate research in the natural and social sciences.

The Center for Ocean and Society promotes the dialogue between science and society and therefore strengthens the exchange between scientists, civil society, politics and business. This transdisciplinary approach intends to support solution-oriented science to find ways for sustainable management of coasts and oceans. The objective is to combine scientific methods with practical knowledge to develop solutions that are acceptable for society, can be put into practice by politics and will be feasible from an economic point of view.

Methods

For stakeholder dialogue, the Center for Ocean and Society uses several methods the efficacy of which was proven in sustainability research:

• Co-Design: Research projects are developed together with stakeholder groups from civil society, business or politics. This enables identifying problems and working on actual challenges within marine topics at the interface of science and society.
• Co-Creation: Projects are realized together with non-academic stakeholders, incorporating all the diverse knowledge of experts outside the scientific institutions. The guiding principle is the co-creation of knowledge that will serve as a catalyst for change.

Societal dialogue is actively shaped through discussions with ministries, networking with associations of maritime industry or exchange with interest groups like fishermen, citizens from coastal communities or NGOs active in nature conservation.

Dialogue formats

Transdisciplinarity and stakeholder dialogue are characteristic features of all projects at the Center for Ocean and Society. Participation in national and international networks guarantees keeping track of actual debates in society and science.  

Further Information: https://oceanandsociety.org/en/home

CeOS shares the goals and principles of the ITD-Alliance. A membership fits excellent to its inter- and transdisciplinary approach. CeOS was founded as part of Kiel Marine Sciene as a special institution for strengthening inter- and transdisciplinary science. Therefore CeOS will be honoured to become a founding member of the ITD-Alliance in 2021.

Global exchange with other scientists and universities will inspire and support the transdisciplinary work at CeOS.

As CeOS is part of the Kiel Marine Science community at Kiel university with more than 40 working groups, CeOS will also act as a multiplier for transdisciplinary knowledge, tools and experiences.

Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences (“LANS”) is a small and dynamic department at the University of Birmingham. The programme is organised around the central tenets of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, with staff fully engaged in teaching methods of integrative learning and civic engagement. The programme is designed so that learning is not restricted to formal spaces, but includes our Cultural Programme and other events.

Since it was established in 2012, LANS has accumulated a wealth of experience in pedagogical innovation and the teaching of multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. Joining the ITD-Alliance would provide us with an important and new space in which we can contribute to key discussions related to these topics, provide a formal means of developing the research-teaching nexus, and provide LANS with greater visibility internationally.

LANS hosts the University of Birmingham’s Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning Group, which is available to all staff at the university. This would be an appropriate channel through which LANS can promote the benefits of its institutional membership of the ITD-Alliance. This would promote the ITD-Alliance widely across the university, as well as improve the levels of understanding, and quality of discussions, that are had about inter- and transdisciplinarity at the university.

Being part of an active and engaged community will allow LANS staff to have

ongoing discussions about teaching inter- and transdisciplinarity, which are otherwise typically had infrequently at conferences. These discussions will expose LANS staff to new ways of teaching inter- and transdisciplinarity, which will improve our collective understanding and how we teach our core curriculum.

Through working closely with Alliance members, we hope to build new partnerships that will benefit staff and which could lead to formal arrangements that benefit LANS students.

By participating in the working groups, we would be part of important discussions that establish coherence while maintaining a plurality of views on inter- and transdisciplinarity. We would be able to contribute to the impact that will be had by the ITD-Alliance as it builds its membership and extends its reach around the world.

The Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is a transdisciplinary (TD) research institute with a higher-degree research program. The ISF currently has 70 full-time researchers and 64 higher-degree research students. Established in 1997, ISF brings together expertise from diverse disciplines to deliver practical solutions for our partners and empower our researchers to effect positive change toward sustainable futures.  The Institute is independent of other faculties at UTS and is primarily funded through external research income and supports UTS’s ambition to be a leading public university of technology recognised for global impact. More information on our focus can be found here: https://www.uts.edu.au/isf

We see the ITD-Alliance as one way of ensuring that researchers and higher degree research students at the Institute for Sustainable Futures are connected to a global network of inter-and transdisciplinary individuals and Institutions, and are productively learning from and helping to inform this network.  Also, we believe that this collaborative network through the sharing of theories, methodologies, practices, and experiences, will help develop, evaluate and strengthen inter- and transdisciplinary learning and research within the Institute for Sustainable Futures.