ABSTRACT
Transdisciplinarity has become commonplace, particularly in sustainability research. However, we are confronted with a plurality of transdisciplinarity. Moreover, plurality can be found not only among different transdisciplinary projects but also within a single research group or at different levels in the design of a research project. In this chapter we follow two interrelated principal objectives: First, we describe the transdisciplinary research experience of the research group ‘PoNa – Shaping Nature’. We employ Maasen’s typology of transdisciplinarity that distinguishes between interventionist, distributive, explorative and methodological transdisciplinarity in order to describe the plurality of transdisciplinarity over the duration of the research project. Our aim is to move forward the discussion on plurality of practices and meanings of transdisciplinarity. Second, we present concrete results of a picture-discourse analysis in the field of agro-biotechnology, with the aim of demonstrating the relevance of pictures for social-ecological research and for joint work with practitioners. We give an example of how the praxis of transdisciplinarity changed over the duration of the project as the interaction of researchers and practitioners increased. Furthermore, we show how a picture based transdisciplinary work enables both researchers and practitioners to engage in a dialogue about such abstract matters as understandings of nature.
