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Transdisciplinarity and Sustainable Development

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Encyclopedia of Sustainability in Higher Education

Introducing Transdisciplinarity: Beyond Multi- and Interdisciplinarity

According to Thomas Kuhn, practitioners of a scientific discipline share symbolic generalizations, models and exemplars, which define the problems and possible solutions offered by their discipline (Kuhn 1970; Aram 2004). Disciplines are the basic building blocks of the academic knowledge production. Most commonly, the distinction between multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research is made as follows. Multidisciplinary research is considered as a loose collection of distinct disciplinary components, without further efforts for integration between these components. Interdisciplinary research in contrast refers to a more synthetic intent to integrate knowledge from different disciplines, by a more or less integral relationship between knowledge sources (Aram 2004; Bammer 2013; Li and Sakamoto 2015; Edelenbos et al. 2017). Inter- and transdisciplinarity share the common idea of an opening or a...

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Correspondence to Marc Craps .

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Craps, M. (2019). Transdisciplinarity and Sustainable Development. In: Leal Filho, W. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sustainability in Higher Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11352-0_234

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