Applied, Alongside, Against:
Participatory, transdisciplinary, and critical approaches to environmental knowledge and action

The YHYS 2025 Fall Colloquium centers on research that seeks to tackle environmental problems by transcending disciplinary boundaries and challenging injustices. We are particularly interested in interventions, understood broadly as research strategies that do not only aim to solve or resolve, but also to “smooth, interrupt, displace, replace, introduce, reframe, keep open, or maximize a friction” (Downey & Zuiderent-Jerak, 2021, p. 6). This year’s theme then explicitly recognizes that research on the environment is typically, and increasingly, invested in changing the status quo. Further, doing so often entails engagements between researchers and the broader society that may be antagonistic or synergistic, aimed at building coalitions or tearing down entrenched power structures (or all these simultaneously). We wish to explore together the conceptual, methodological, and practical strategies that can help us make research transformational.

Two approaches have already become well-established for transformational research. Participatory research is about intervening to make a change together with those who are affected by and therefore have first-hand knowledge of the conditions/injustices. Research participants are part of the research process to make visible and transform daily experienced injustices (Kindon et al., 2007; Manzo and Brightbill, 2007; Eubanks, 2009). For such projects to benefit their participants who are not ‘research subjects’ but ‘co-researchers’, the goal is often to produce practical/applied knowledge that enables action in a concrete place/in relation to a concrete issue (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Transdisciplinarity most often refers to collaboration between different knowledge holders and ways of knowing, such as disciplinary, artistic, local, indigenous, experiential, etc., and the involvement of relevant knowledge holders at all or many stages of the research process (Lawrence et al., 2022). It challenges not only the composition of participatory research groups but also the power dynamics within such groups. Power relations are often rooted in modernist dichotomies and unjust hierarchies. Without reflecting on and attending to these power inequalities, transdisciplinary collaborations for participatory research projects run the risk of merely paying lip service.

The question of how to collaborate without dominating the situation through claims to expertise, but through aligning interests and standing alongside others, is now a crucial issue (Stengers, 2023). It is particularly pertinent to those working in higher education and research institutions, where the urgent need to produce action-oriented knowledge is in tension with career strategies based on generalizable/universalizing knowledge (an issue pertinent across disciplines). 

Transdisciplinary and participatory research is also messy. The reality of particular projects can fit poorly with well-rounded theories neatly proclaiming the benefits of participatory research or transdisciplinary collaboration ‘toolkits’. We continuously need to reflect on what we are doing with a critical approach, which can lead to generative contradictions and turning against what is taken for granted: Is it even possible to design a research where, each participant, let alone everyone affected by the unfavorable conditions, benefits in the end (Kesby, 2007)? How to distribute benefits more evenly throughout the spatio-temporal scale (Pitt, 2016)? How to balance different matters and strands of care so that we can care for contradictory needs intermittently (Eren & Beaulieu, 2023)? What if designing yet another participatory research project is not what is needed anymore to care?

We invite this year’s Colloquium participants to share strategies, insights, experiences, or stories that have emerged from partnerships within, and especially beyond, academia. Session leaders and presenters are encouraged to showcase the institutional and interpersonal relationships involved in their work, including the contrasting perceptions and disagreements through which knowledge and power structures become visible and negotiated.

Now in its fourth decade, YHYS has an opportunity to further strengthen the outward engagements of its members and their diverse research methodologies, collaborations, and connections to society. While our professional careers may benefit the most from academic citations, our direct engagements with society likely give us the best chance of changing the world.

References:

Downey, G., & Zuiderent-Jerak, T. (Eds.). (2021). Making & doing: Activating STS through knowledge expression and travel. MIT Press.

Eren, S., & Beaulieu, A. (2023). Between a bird-in-the-hand and species data in the bank: Intermittent care in conservation science. Theory, Culture & Society, 02632764231187584.

Eubanks, V. (2009). Double-bound: putting the power back into participatory research. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 30(1), 107–137

Kesby, M. (2007). Spatialising participatory approaches: the contribution of geography to a mature debate. Environment and Planning A, 39(12), 2813–2831.

Kindon, S., Pain, R., & Kesby, M. (Eds.) (2007). Participatory action research approaches and methods: Connecting people participation and place. Routledge.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press

Lawrence, M. G., Williams, S., Nanz, P., & Renn, O. (2022). Characteristics, potentials, and challenges of transdisciplinary research. One Earth, 5(1), 44-61.

Manzo, L., & Brightbill, N. (2007). Toward a participatory ethics. In S. Kindon, R. Pain, and M. Kesby (Eds.), Participatory action research approaches and methods: Connecting people, participation, and place (pp. 33–40). Routledge.

Pitt, H. (2016). An apprenticeship in plant thinking. In M. Bastian, O. Jones, N. Moore & E. Roe (Eds.), Participatory research in more-than-human worlds (pp. 106-120). Routledge.

Stengers, I. (2023). Making sense in common: A reading of Whitehead in times of collapse. U of Minnesota Press.