Bridging Worlds, not Blurring Lines: A Situated Epistemology of Transdisciplinary Research

Amid growing expectations for the social sciences to address grand societal challenges, collaborative research formats such as transdisciplinary research have gained increasing attention. While they seek to bridge scientific knowledge and societal needs, they also raise concerns about the politicisation of research, the erosion of disciplinary autonomy, and the instrumentalisation of engagement. Although these tensions are widely recognised, much transdisciplinary research exhibits a persistent imbalance towards instrumental forms of participation and solution-oriented outputs, often at the expense of critical engagement and scientific analysis. From a social scientific perspective, this imbalance highlights the need for critical capacity as key epistemic resource for navigating multiple problem framings, value claims, power relations and often implicit attempts to politicise research. Critical capacity is thus crucial for sustaining scientific autonomy, safeguarding the credibility of scientific claims, and upholding standards of scientific quality in transdisciplinary settings. To specify how such capacity can be cultivated in practice, the paper develops a conceptual framework drawing on Zuiderent-Jerak’s (2015) notion of ‘situated intervention’. Applied to transdisciplinary research, this framework entails a shift from solution-oriented engagement to process-oriented engagement and the practice of reflexive boundary work. Taken together, these two elements constitute complementary pillars for cultivating critical capacity in transdisciplinary research settings.