‘Transdisciplinarity’: A Framework of Knowledge Production in North-South Partnerships?

This issue of ASEAS brings together different articles reflecting and discussing scientifically, as well as more practically, challenges faced during the implementation of a capacity-building project on transdisciplinarity. The papers are the outcome of a common endeavor that was undertaken between 2016 and 2019 by universities from Southeast Asia and Europe in the context of the Erasmus+ Capacity Building in Higher Education program funded by the European Union. The project Fostering Multi-lateral Knowledge Networks of Transdisciplinary Studies to Tackle Global Challenges (KNOTS)1 and its implementation process, as well as conflicts, discussions and transformations that occurred during the various capacity-building activities on transdisciplinarity, will be discussed in the papers from different perspectives and with different foci. Taking transdisciplinarity as a departure for capacity-building activities and collaborations in the course of the KNOTS project was a response to trends and challenges in world development requiring new frameworks of knowledge production. All the participating institutes and universities in Vietnam, Thailand, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Austria saw the necessity to rethink what knowledge is and how research is done. All participating institutes and their members had either social science or humanities backgrounds and were working in interdisciplinary or disciplinary contexts. Some of the participants and the respective institutes were acquainted with the history and the concepts of transdisciplinarity, while others became familiar with transdisciplinarity only during the project. What all share, especially but not exclusively those coming from development studies, is the realization that the gravity and the scope of global transformations and inequalities due to climate change, migration or capitalist development and their interplay require a new “synthesis of knowledge” (Basile & Baud, 2019, p.11). This synthesis of knowledge not only includes various disciplines and non-academic actors and their knowledge, but especially knowledge, approaches, and contributions from scientists from the so-called Global South, as well as experiential knowledge from practitioners and/or marginalized social groups. It is this knowledge that