Our Order of Knowledge: Disciplinarity, Transdisciplinarity, and Beyond

This chapter examines the development of disciplinarity as an outcome of Western order and binary logic and how this has resulted in reductive thinking and disciplinary specialization. Such specialization can thwart the ability of engineers and other practitioners to redress complex challenges that require an understanding beyond reductive simple systems thinking. Transdisciplinarity offers an approach to work beyond siloed knowledge to comprehend and intervene with complex challenges from across a full spectrum of ways of understanding. Learning to listen and work with local knowledge through assets-based approaches, such as Positive Deviance, further supports transdisciplinarity and can foster the most appropriate engineering interventions for any given context.