Reassembling the Scholar: A Conversation About Positionality in Transdisciplinary Processes

Transdisciplinary research (TDR) is a framing of scientific practice in which collaboration on problems or issues of common interest is located outside disciplinary approaches, and is geared towards a transformation of the current situation towards something more desirable, albeit without necessarily knowing what that is. Any form of ‘transformation’ invariably has a normative component, and the same goes for positionality. A TDR context thus has much to do with both. The issue of positionality specifically in inter- and transdisciplinary research settings has become a more prominent object of study within these scholarly traditions. This contribution takes the positionality of the researcher as the departure point. The chapter is written as a conversation of the first author (CG), an early career researcher, with the co-authors (SH, MS, JW, TZJ), who are more experienced researchers from various fields of science and society working in inter- and transdisciplinary settings, using a dataset of ‘learning questions’ from a postgraduate training programme on TDR. These questions reflect on what researchers find important (often at the beginning of their career) in making sense of their own efforts in implementing this form of research practice.