Recent SHAPE-ID Activity

SHAPE-ID continues shaping discussion and policy around inter- and transdisciplinarity across Europe and beyond. Here’s a round-up of activity in the twelve months since the discussion on the 2023 LERU Report on Implementing interdisciplinarity in research-intensive universities: good practices and challenges.

Scholarly Publications: As well as various articles and chapters in edited collections, July 2023 marked the publication of SHAPE-ID’s Foundations of Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Research: A Reader, written and edited by Dr Bianca Vienni-Baptista, Prof Isabel Fletcher, Prof Catherine Lyall, along with contributions from Dr Doireann Wallace and Dr Jane Ohlmeyer. As the first ever comprehensive reader for inter- and transdisciplinarity, it offers extracts from key academic texts on topics such as the design, funding, evaluation and communication of research, and is accessible for academia, industry, and funding organisations.

Conference Outputs: SHAPE-ID members are disseminating knowledge about the project worldwide, from international conferences through to postdoctoral training events. This includes several discussions and poster presentations at the EU-SPRI Annual Conference held at the University of Sussex (14-16 June 2023), and Dr Maciej Maryl’s panel on “Digital humanities – collaborations with different actors, disciplines and stakeholders” at the CHANSE Kick-Off Conference, which took place at Tallinn University, Estonia (1-2 June 2023). Workshops that utilise the recently published reader include regular evaluator training blocks conducted by Prof Catherine Lyall as part of the UKRI Interdisciplinary Assessment College’s webinar series (Sept 2023-April 2024), and Dr Vienni-Baptista’s professional developmental course “Fundamentos metodológicos para la investigación inter- y transdisciplinaria” (Methodological foundations for inter- and transdisciplinary research) (Feb-April 2024) at Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara, Mexico.

Inventories and Beyond: The toolkit is receiving interest from various academic consortiums, including The Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity (ITD Alliance), who added SHAPE-ID to their toolkit inventory, “Visualisation of a landscape of toolkits for Inter- and Transdisciplinary research,” last November. The toolkit is also expanding its reach through “UNA-Integra: integrando conocimientos y saberes en latinoamérica” (UNA-Integra: integrating knowledges in Latin America), a translation project taking place at Universidad Nacional, Costa Rica, to generate a repository of knowledge with the aim of overcoming the fragmentation of disciplines.

Finally, SHAPE-ID was referenced in the European Commission’s final monitoring report on the assessment of the integration of SSH across Horizon 2020. The report provides insight on how EU-funded research and innovation projects have delivered quantitatively and qualitatively across the three pillars of Excellent Science, Industrial Leadership, and Societal Challenges. The toolkit is cited as a concrete output that was developed following the launch of SSH monitoring.

– Article written by Dr Sarah Cullen