Bianca Vienni Baptista (Postdoctoral Research Associate, Methodology Center, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany)

Dr Bianca Vienni Baptista has been trained as an Anthropologist at Universidad de la República in Uruguay. Since 2016, she works at the Methodology Center of Leuphana University Lüneburg as a postdoctoral researcher. Between 2007 and 2017, she was an Associate Professor at the Academic Department at Espacio Interdisciplinario, Universidad de la República, Uruguay.

As a researcher and lecturer, she works in the broad field of Science, Technology and Society Studies, focusing in particular on the study of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge production processes. As a result, she is interested in methods and tools as well as concepts and theories as means of achieving transformative and developmental change to solve multidimensional social problems.

She has been invited as a lecturer to several universities in Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina. She is a trainer at the Td Summer School since 2016 and has participated, under the coordination of Prof. Vilsmaier, in the Td Escuelas de Verano developed in Spanish in Montevideo (Uruguay), followed by Valparaiso (Chile) and Xalapa (Mexico). She has also contributed to the Seminar Transdisciplinarity in Action (ITA Workshop) in those countries.

There is an emerging agreement that interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are suitable ways of knowledge production to address urgent socio-scientific problems. The call for new productions of knowledge, new roles of science in society and a transformative science, one that actively tackles pressing societal challenges through inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge production, increase. ID and TD knowledge production function as placeholders of an “ideal” vision of the relationship between science and society.

This presentation introduces a framework for thinking about cultural and spatial conditions for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, teaching, and learning in higher education. The paper presents the progress done in the project entitled “Challenges in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge production: institutions, cultures and communities”. This research focuses on processes of institutionalization, cultural transformations and the characteristics of communities built in inter- and transdisciplinary processes.

The starting point for this study is a set of centres in Latin America and Europe that have tackled the challenge of incorporating inter- and transdisciplinarity in their institutional structure and study programs. The study integrates the concept of epistemic living spaces and interculturality as two crosscutting axes, which serve as frameworks for the empirical analysis.

The main outcome is to contribute to the construction of a field of research named “Studies on Inter- and Transdisciplinarity” (SoIT) within the framework of Science, Technology and Society Studies. Insights on how inter- and transdisciplinary cultures and communities can contribute to pressing societal challenges and their role in transforming societies, will be identified.