Transdisciplinarity

Research on global societal challenges – climate change, social inequality, public health –increasingly requires interdisciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration between different scientific communities. However, the potential of transdisciplinarity, cross-disciplinary collaborative projects, knowledge transfer, and data reuse is often not fully realized because content and data must cross methodological and disciplinary boundaries, both technically and intellectually. The conference paper defines concepts of transdisciplinarity from different scientific disciplines and shows differences in the meaning of the term transdisciplinarity across fields. Furthermore, the paper focuses on two levels: (1) Identifying types of content divergences between source and target discipline and (2) strategies for overcoming these barriers in practice.