SESYNC - National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/15599

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Start date: 2020End date: 2023

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    Facilitating Interdisciplinary Meetings: A Practical Guide
    (2021) Graef, Dana; Kramer, Jonathan; Motzer, Nicole
    Facilitators can play an important role in helping research teams achieve equitable collaborations, reach decisions, manage time, keep work flowing, and—at best—seamlessly achieve their goals. Having a facilitator can allow team leaders to focus on the content of the meeting itself and engage with group members in a different way. Facilitation can also help teams address many of the challenges that can emerge throughout the course of collaborative interdisciplinary research, from negotiating diverse priorities and interests, to designing effective and productive meetings, to navigating philosophical differences and power dynamics within a team. This guide offers pratical suggestions for how best to facilitate team work.
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    Computer Based Concept Mapping: Flipping the Research Process
    (National Soci-Environmental Synthesis Center, University of Maryland, 2022) Palmer, Margaret A.
    The approach described is meant to facilitate the team-building process to accelerate interdisciplinary collaboration. It for use in workshops that bring together disciplinarily diverse groups who have not previously collaborated. A theme that is of interest to a broad array of scholars is identified. Selected themes should be those that can be conceptualized through many different frameworks e.g., food and water. A group of interested researchers are brought together and after introducing the theme and process, each individual participant uses a cyber platform to search for the types of data and data sets they believe important to the topic. This is followed by a facilitated group discussion focused on how each person approached data discovery—what topics and data they explored, in what order, and why? This exercise reveals differences in the assumptions, values, and perspectives that participants bring to a broad problem. Then the teams work iteratively in small groups to develop a research question(s) and identify associated types of data they can agree are critical. The search and discussion process facilitates the sharing and integration of knowledge. Because each person uses the same platform but queries it in diverse ways, then share how they went about the queries and why, the process promotes conversion of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge—allowing diverse participants to communicate through cross-boundary discussion. Since building such platforms is time-consuming and expensive to build, widely available literature search platforms could be used.
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    Best Practices for Interdisciplinary Team Research: Shaping a Team’s Social Environment
    (National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, University of Maryland, 2023) Margaret A. Palmer
    This paper describes the factors that most influence collaborative environments in interdisciplinary team research. Strategies and practical ways to enhance the collaborations are provided. These include the importance of social interaction time and types of these are suggested as are good practices for use in establishing project shared goals, meeting agendas, and facilitated discussions. Further, engaging in reflexive discussions of how the teamwork is proceeding and the effectiveness of team interactions are important and ways to do this mentioned. Devoting time to share expertise of team members is also important as is team member diversification in terms of knowledge content and skills; and ways to do these along with references are described. Particularly helpful are the specific activities suggested to elicit divergent views among team members which moves teams forward toward integrative problem solving.
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    How Is the World Shaped by Infrastructure Projects That Have Been Cancelled or Stalled?
    (2022-08) Graef, Dana J.; Cole, Montina; Covich, Alan P.; Huete-Pérez, Jorge A.; Maxwell, Amanda; Peyton, Jonathan; Stuhl, Andrew; Velásquez Runk, Julie
    This report is the result of an interdisciplinary, international effort to examine the socio-environmental consequences of large-scale infrastructure projects that have been planned but not built—and reasons why projects have been cancelled or stalled. Collectively, our team examined eight cases of cancelled or stalled infrastructure projects in the Americas, drawing from our experiences in academic research and professional practice. Across cases, we found that projects were cancelled or stalled for interrelated reasons including environmental impact assessments, litigation and legislation, strong opposition and media attention, and/or increasing costs and faltering justifications. Our work further shows that cancelled or stalled development projects can create socio-environmental consequences that persist and cascade over time. The consequences of unbuilt infrastructure projects include the following: the development of new research networks; the establishment of precedents for socio-environmental assessment; the strengthening of social movements, often against the proposed development; changes in land use and land tenure; the exposure of environmental racism and injustice; and shifted development interventions. In sum, paying attention to cancelled and stalled projects provides a transdisciplinary lens for understanding broader processes of development, knowledge, power, science, and socio-environmental change. We conclude that when proposed large infrastructure projects are assessed, additional attention needs to be given to how they may shape landscapes and societies even if they are never built.