Challenges for Inclusion and Diversities: Opening up and Closing Down in Collaborative Research and Practice

A transdisciplinary approach serves the dual aim of delivering new knowledge about a situation at hand, and actually interacting with and, hopefully, ameliorating that situation. This ‘action-orientation’ comes with many methodological and practical challenges as to the ‘how’ of transdisciplinary research, but also with a moral obligation to keenly look into the ‘who’-question: whose knowledge counts and comes to bear on dealing with a specific situation? As for those who are included, the question is how they can make their multiple identities come to bear on the issue at hand and how they can effectively use the room for maneuvering that their community of practice or epistemic culture allows them, in contributing to the (transient) transdisciplinary collective. This chapter sets the stage for a close scrutiny of challenges and opportunities in the light of openness and ‘closures’ of knowledge co-production that the chapters collected together in Part 2 of this book deal with, offering a selection of empirical studies that illuminate pertinent conceptual and practical ways forward to inclusive and diverse forms of transdisciplinarity in a variety of contexts. The chapter gives an overview of lessons from the literature on what including diverse groups of actors in transdisciplinary work entails in practice, contemplates the questions of whom to include, when, under what conditions, and to what end, and looks into some of the challenges implied in answering these. The chapter concludes with introducing the empirical chapters collected in this second Part of the book for practical illustrations of how such challenges can be dealt with in practice.