Join guest speaker Professor Gabriele Bammer in the Trans-disciplinary Seminar Series presented by School of Culture, History and Language and Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Languages.
Tackling complex problems, such as illicit drug use, biodiversity loss, or mass refugee movements requires transdisciplinary or related approaches. However, the expertise required to undertake transdisciplinary research is often overlooked and underrated. Taking illicit drug use as an example, transdisciplinary research skills complement those of the disciplines, which bring important, but only partial, understanding to bear (eg pharmacologists contribute knowledge about the effects of illicit drugs, criminologists about impacts on property theft and other crime, legal experts about regulations and laws, historians about how those laws came into being, and so on).
Transdisciplinary integration and implementation skills are also essential. Integration skills are required for developing a more comprehensive understanding of the problem by integrating disciplinary perspectives, and also adding in the understandings provided by stakeholders, including the lived experience of illicit drug users or of dealing with illicit drug use as treatment service providers, police officers, or government policy makers. Implementation expertise is also required to support using the improved understanding for evidence-informed government policy, community practice, business innovation or other measures. Specific elements of this expertise will be described and discussed, along with where such expertise can currently be found, learnt from and built on.
Gabriele Bammer is developing the new discipline of Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) to improve research strengths for tackling complex real-world problems. She looks at applications in population health, in environment and in security. She is a professor in the Research School of Population Health at The Australian National University. She runs the popular Integration and Implementation Insights blog.
Her books include Disciplining Interdisciplinarity: Integration and Implementation Sciences for Researching Complex Real-World Problems (author, 2013), Change! Combining analytic approaches with street wisdom (editor, 2015), Research Integration Using Dialogue Methods (co-author, 2009), and Uncertainty and Risk: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (co-editor, 2008).
The CHL trans-disciplinary seminar is intended as a forum for ideas that link and speak to the different disciplinary strands in the school. How might we identify the gaps – the synapses – between our individual endeavours and interests, and assemble them together into something still more interesting and challenging? Fire up your synapses, and join us on the last Monday of each month at the CHL trans-disciplinary seminar.
Event Speakers
Professor Gabriele Bammer
Gabriele Bammer is a Professor in the Research School of Population Health at The Australian National University. She runs the popular Integration and Implementation Insights blog.