Deliverable 2.1

Preliminary Report of Literature Review on Understandings of Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Research

Authors: Bianca Vienni Baptista, Maciej Maryl, Piotr Wciślik, Isabel Fletcher, Anna Buchner, Doireann Wallace and Christian Pohl

Work Package: 2

Published: 11 December 2019

Description: This report presents emerging findings from a literature review being undertaken as part of the SHAPE-ID Horizon 2020 project (https://www.shapeid.eu), which addresses the challenge of improving interdisciplinary research (IDR) and transdisciplinary research (TDR) between Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) disciplines and other scientific disciplines. The report describes efforts to build a robust sample of literature, aligning qualitative and quantitative methodologies and beginning to map understandings and factors for success and failure in the literature.

Deliverable 2.2

Report on Survey among interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary researchers and post-survey interviews with policy stakeholders

Authors: Jack Spaapen, Bianca Vienni Baptista, Anna Buchner and Christian Pohl

Work Package: 2

Published: 6 March 2020

Description: Through a qualitative survey among European researchers and interviews with policy makers we hope to enhance knowledge about interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration. The survey and interviews were carried out as part of Work Package 2 of the SHAPE-ID Horizon 2020 project (https://www.shapeid.eu), which is also conducting a systematic literature review. We aim to serve the research community and relevant stakeholders in society with new insights, examples of good practice and tips on how to overcome difficulties that might help their current and future interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary endeavours. We focus on Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS), but are also interested in the growing collaboration between these fields and the so-called STEMM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine and Mathematics). We address two main questions: (i) When developing a European interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary project, what are the main difficulties people encounter in realising a good research team that is balanced in terms of the various interests and goals of the different participants, and (ii) Which factors of success and failure do researchers integrating AHSS in larger projects consider relevant for their daily practice of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research?

Deliverable 2.3

Final Report on Understandings of Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Research and Factors of Success and Failure

Authors: Bianca Vienni Baptista, Isabel Fletcher, Maciej Maryl, Piotr Wciślik, Anna Buchner, Catherine Lyall, Jack Spaapen and Christian Pohl

Work Package: 2

Published: 31 March 2020

Description: This report presents findings from a literature review and survey undertaken as part of the SHAPE-ID Horizon 2020 project (https://www.shapeid.eu), which addresses the challenge of improving interdisciplinary research (IDR) and transdisciplinary research (TDR) between Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) and Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM) disciplines. One of SHAPE-ID’s first objectives was to review existing research on IDR/TDR. Through an extensive evidence-scanning exercise drawing on previous work undertaken and complemented by a survey and interviews, the project aimed: (i) to disentangle the different understandings of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity; (ii) to identify the factors that hinder or help inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration; (iii) to clarify which understandings of IDR/TDR and which factors of success and failure are specifically relevant for integrating AHSS in IDR/TDR.

Deliverable 3.1

Matrix for Integration of Learning Cases and Framework of Analysis

Authors: Carlo Sessa and Giorgia Galvini

Work Package: 3

Published: 7 November 2019

Description: SHAPE-ID has been funded by the European Commission to explore the challenge of how to better support the integration of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) perspectives into interdisciplinary research with Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and other scientific disciplines, including Medicine, particularly in the context of addressing societal challenges. In this context, SHAPE-ID Work Package 3 (WP3) is organising a series of workshops to learn directly from the experiences of researchers from across disciplines, as well as policymakers, funders and representatives from research performing organisations, industry, civil society and the cultural sector. This project deliverable comprises two parts: Section A illustrates the matrix for integration of learning cases and the framework of analysis co-designed with SHAPE-ID partners at a Co-Design Workshop, held at ISINNOVA in Rome, on 13-14 June 2019. Section B illustrates a challenge-oriented research evaluation framework, criteria and tools proposed to evaluate research projects, as well as an evaluation methodology proposed for the learning workshops.

Deliverable 3.2

Report of workshops and analysis of IDR/AHSS integration learning cases

Authors: Giorgia Galvini, Carlo Sessa, Doireann Wallace, Keisha Taylor-Wesselink, Jane Ohlmeyer, Catherine Lyall, Isabel Fletcher, Bianca Vienni Baptista, Christian Pohl, Maciej Maryl, Anna Buchner, Piotr Wciślik, Marta Błaszczyńska and Antonia Carlo González

Work Package: 3

Published: 4 December 2020

Description: The SHAPE-ID project was scheduled to organise six learning case workshops across Europe between December 2019 and May 2020 to enable stakeholders to explore best practices in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research (IDR/TDR) with an emphasis on research involving the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS).

The first three of these workshops – held in Dublin in December 2019, Edinburgh in January 2020 and Turin in February 2020 – took place as planned. The remaining three – intended to take place in Bilbao in March, in Warsaw in April and in Zurich in May 2020 – were postponed due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Due to the ongoing and uncertain situation with COVID-19, the SHAPE-ID consortium considered the organisation of in-person meetings no longer feasible and decided to reorganise the workshops in a remote setting. This choice, besides ensuring the protection of all participants’ health while reducing further delays to the project, has presented the opportunity to experiment with interdisciplinary/ transdisciplinary learning activities in a virtual environment.

This document reports on the workshops, organising the findings into a coherent framework in order to feed into a second report, D3.3 – Recommendations and measures to maximise IDR impact on society.

Deliverable 3.3

Recommendations and Measures to Maximise IDR Impact on Society

Authors: Carlo Sessa and Giorgia Galvini

Work Package: 3

Published: 15 January 2021

Description: 

Between December 2019 and October 2020, SHAPE-ID organised a series of six learning case workshops to consult expert stakeholders on improving pathways to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research (IDR/TDR) incorporating the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) in the context of addressing societal challenges. Some workshops (Dublin, Zurich) focused on broader questions around obstacles, enablers and processes of integration, while others addressed specific research challenges: how funding programmes could better involve Environmental Humanities perspectives in topics addressing environmental challenges (Edinburgh); how to enable Education for Urban Sustainability (Turin); how to reduce barriers to cooperation between Digital Humanities research and Cultural Heritage Institutions (Warsaw); and how to develop Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Social Good (Bilbao). The first three workshops were held in person, with the remaining three held online due to COVID-19 travel restrictions.

A comprehensive report of the workshop series has been produced as project deliverable D3.2 (Galvini et al., 2020). The current report aims to identify the full set of recommendations and practical measures emerging from the workshops to maximise the impact of IDR/TDR integrating AHSS on society. This is complemented by a Policy Brief, which distils key recommendations for policymakers on maximising AHSS integration in IDR/TDR to provide effective responses to societal challenges.

To organise recommendations emerging from the full workshop series, the current report develops a conceptual model using seven categories outlined by in a recent Joint Research Council report as essential to understanding our political nature: misperception and disinformation; collective intelligence; emotions; value and identity; framing, metaphor and narrative; trust and openness; and evidence-informed policy (Mair et al., 2019). The model, presented in Section 3, was considered as a helpful way of outlining a pathway to impact that accounts for the role of IDR/TDR with AHSS integration and has been used as a way of organising our workshop findings in Section 4.

A first set of recommendations is broader in scope, highlighting the value of the AHSS to better contextualise science advice to policy – the so called “applied humanities” – delivering context-sensitive research, reflectivity and a longer term view of problems and factors, the capacity to widen the scope of research and innovation to include broader societal and human-centric perspectives, and the contribution to strategic foresight informed by the greater capacity of the AHSS to understand the full complexity of the present context.

These recommendations are supported by examples of possible mission-driven IDR/TDR integrating AHSS to address societal challenges, such as climate change, ageing and the social impact and regulation of digital technologies.

Other recommendations are more focused on specific categories, highlighting: the capacity of the AHSS to redefine research problems to centralise the human dimension – e.g. the importance of narrative to support climate change research and policy missions; the need to take emotions, ethics and societal and individual values into account – e.g. in designing technology, or in policymaking for an ageing society; the role of artists, artist-led techniques and tools for sentiment analysis to discover and handle the impact of emotions; the role of applied humanities research to address the problems of misinformation, disinformation and the crisis of democracy; and last but not least, the capacity of well-structured IDR/TDR integrating the AHSS to cultivate the ground for collective intelligence, within and outside academia, supporting dialogue among disciplines, higher education institutions and the wider civil society, triggering teams and networks to co-create solutions for joint missions.

Deliverable 4.2

Draft System of Preconditions for Successful Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Integration

Authors: Keisha Taylor-Wesselink and Doireann Wallace

Work Package: 4

Published: 28 January 2021

Description: SHAPE-ID is a Coordination and Support Action funded by the European Commission, which aims to improve the integration of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences into interdisciplinary research (IDR) and transdisciplinary research (TDR). The project began with a number of activities intended to gather understandings and insights on best practices, barriers and enablers of IDR/TDR. We conducted an extensive review of academic and policy literature, surveyed interdisciplinary researchers across Europe, and organised a series of six learning case workshops (three in-person and three online) to learn from the experiences of researchers, funders, policymakers, decision-makers in higher education and representatives of other sectors that participate in and co-create research: industry, civil society and the cultural sector. Results from these activities will inform the final project output – a toolkit and recommendations to improve pathways to AHSS integration for each of these groups.

As an intermediate step, we undertook to establish a working system of preconditions for AHSS integration, using the outputs of the evidence-gathering phase: reports and a policy brief based on the literature review, survey and interviews (Work Package 2); and reports and a policy brief based on the learning case workshops (Work Package 3). The purpose of this task was, firstly, to synthesise results from the project and provide an organised point of access to what we have learned about the preconditions for good AHSS integration.  Secondly, our goal was to derive recommendations based on this synthesis for initiating the processes of change needed to move towards improved interdisciplinary integration among the AHSS disciplines and between AHSS and Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine (STEM) disciplines. A draft system of categories was presented to the SHAPE-ID Expert Panel in November 2020 and their feedback has informed this revised document. That feedback and the current document will inform the development of the SHAPE-ID toolkit.

In this document we begin with a discussion of the challenge of creating a system of categories adequate to such a complex domain, with reference to the project’s findings and a review of previous classifications of various kinds for interdisciplinarity (ID) and transdisciplinarity (TD). These are complex concepts and practices with contested definitions and multiple histories across different geographical regions – as are disciplines themselves. Furthermore, as our findings have reinforced, the challenge is compounded by the need to account for multiple stakeholders, levels of activity ranging from the individual to the research and innovation system in its totality (including its intersection with societal challenges and policy priorities) and the fact that different challenges arise at different phases of planning, developing and evaluating funding programmes and individual research projects. We recognise that just as no single definition is adequate for such a complex set of practices, there can be no single system of categories that exhaustively maps the relevant actors, relationships and processes. Any system of categories is necessarily provisional. However, this system of preconditions contributes to existing IDR/TDR knowledge by increasing understanding of the challenge of integrating the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (particularly the underrepresented Arts and Humanities) for IDR/TDR and how they can be supported for better outcomes.

We propose a system of preconditions for AHSS integration based on a mapping of the SHAPE-ID findings and further informed by a thematic classification derived from a review of the existing literature on classifications of IDR/TDR.

These preconditions fall into three broad categories:

1. Structural factors supporting AHSS integration, including research policy and funding and institutional supports;
2. Competencies and attributes necessary for AHSS integration, such as individuals’ attitudes and skills acquired through practical experience or training in IDR/TDR as well as disciplinary training;
3. Cross-cutting categories that underpin and connect the first two categories, for instance through improving shared understandings of IDR/TDR, clarifying partner roles and relationships in an IDR/TDR project and creating collaborative conditions.

Informed by this classification, the SHAPE-ID toolkit will offer practical recommendations and guidance for different users in achieving more successful AHSS integration.