Creating Common Ground in Transdisciplinary Research Collaborations
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
I wanted to, I was talking with Mathias about what could you possibly expect from this part and certainly there are many people here with a lot of experience, much more probably than what I have, in what is this stage of problem framing. But I wanted to focus this presentation a bit more on
00:24
a part of the process that is not too often discussed and that I find it is really important in intercultural, international, transdisciplinary research collaborations, which seems to be the kind that we are,
00:42
most of us, getting involved with and which seems to be the trend in addressing complex problems. So, not to give away all the context, but we're going to talk a bit about the reflexive nature of transdisciplinary research, acknowledging diversity, how to level the ground and address power, and
01:03
creating this common ground, understanding perspectives, generally. If I am poignant about some of the things I say, it's on purpose, and I would like to hear your opinion about some of the issues that I'm going to bring up, because I know that we
01:21
come from very different backgrounds and with our shared experiences, we can make this way more rich. So, just to go back to what we were saying this morning, as an orientation in research, transdisciplinarity certainly is about creating this effective collaboration to address any number of complex problems,
01:45
usually among diverse societal stakeholders, participants, you can call it many, many different terms. I will use stakeholders for now and then switch, but importantly, we all know that in transdisciplinary research, all these participants that will sit in a table
02:06
come with different interests, different backgrounds, different knowledge systems, different expectations. So, I am going to be using knowledge system a lot, so I wanted to bring the definition that I understand, and a knowledge system,
02:23
it is a network of actors, organizations and objects that bridge knowledge and know-how with action. This means that I do not refer only to a knowledge system as a specific ontology or a specific epistemology,
02:41
but rather, it involves world views that shape the mental models of perceived reality by a group that define their expectations, their preference, and therefore influence behavior. But this knowledge system involves more than the actor representing an epistemic system and these
03:03
abstract world of ideas, it also represents the tangible institutions and networks that each knowledge system creates and it's embedded in. So, we all have discussed more or less that transdisciplinary partnerships require
03:20
effective communication across societal stakeholders. I keep emphasizing effective because it is not just about communication. It's about the communications we choose to have being effective and efficient, reaching the goal that we need to reach together. So, therefore, what is the right
03:43
transdisciplinary vocabulary and what is the team ethos? I am an anthropologist by training first, so I will use a lot of jargon from my discipline and please just tell me if something is not understandable, but I think we can all say that there's a spirit, a
04:09
collection of tools, or just a collection of procedures, but rather there's an artsy, an art in this confirmation for effective communication.
04:21
Therefore, it also requires nurturing the ability to listen to all of those coming together in these TV processes and certainly, we discussed this morning, it involves going beyond the comfort of your safety zone, of your own knowledge system.
04:41
We are required to contemplate our own paradigms and our own belief systems critically in this conversation taking place. We do not take for granted that knowledge is absolute and that our knowledge is the one dictating the whole transdisciplinary process. Therefore,
05:01
it is a highly reflexive process. So, I would like to give you examples of one case study to illustrate what I'm saying and it comes from this project that is ongoing in Guatemala between Switzerland partners from the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute who have teamed up with Universidad del Valle
05:25
to produce a transdisciplinary research process exemplified in this. This is the Maya cross that represents a balance and so part of creating this TD atmosphere has been
05:42
designing, the guiding, showing in a pictoric manner how the different stakeholders in this project organize. So, we have science and academia with these two stakeholders. We have the communities organized in councils and in
06:01
Maya councils of elders. We have the government, two authorities involved, Ministry of Health and the Ministry in charge of Animal Health, and we have an industry partner, the largest telecommunications company in Latin America. Why are all these people sitting together? Because this case study is about surveilling and
06:25
responding to zoonotic disease, which is disease transmitted from animals to humans in very impoverished Maya communities of Guatemala and we propose this to be a case for One Health. So, I want to point that
06:42
every TD process begins with a real problem that has been identified by more than just us academics. And in the case of this case, in this case study, it is to fill the gap of unknown zoonotic disease. But it is a research for development project,
07:00
it is an R4D, which means that we are trying to understand these epidemiological aspects so that there is better decision-making at the level of government, the level of institutions to tailor, to design responses to this problem. So, we need to
07:22
understand the local explanatory models of the population that is living in this very poor area, and we also need to correlate them with biomedical models. Even though my case is about health, this could be about anything else where there is more than one knowledge system involved.
07:43
And for this project, we need to implement a participatory surveillance and response to these diseases, reducing the time to detection and control of an outbreak. So, we suspect that 60% of all the infectious diseases in the area is of zoonotic origin, but there is no data.
08:03
So, this is about filling that gap from the science perspective as well. And since it is an R4D, it is also about translating into recommendations for policy and action. These are three main project phases. We completed the cross-sectional epidemiology study. We are about to complete
08:24
syndromic surveillance, community surveillance, and we are already going into transforming these results into policy and action. So, what is the common goal we have here? That even though it's still in these words,
08:44
it is the product of stakeholder workshops to estimate this burden of zoonotic disease under the current socio-economic constraints of the population to tailor this surveillance system to fit the needs of local population. It is not something that we design on our own because most likely it's going to be off reality.
09:07
So, I wanted to start by saying what is this reflexive process we're talking about? First, I would like to say we need to understand and acknowledge diversity. We always say
09:21
transdisciplinarity is about joint problem framing, joint problem representation, joint discussion of possible methodologies, even joint data collection many times, and joint data analysis. And all these joint stuff implies that there's a bunch of us with different
09:41
interests and backgrounds coming together. So, who is in this dialogue, in our TD groups? Who do they represent? Each person sitting down at the table, who do they represent? What interests do they bring? And you know there are tools for these specific questions. There are tools for
10:01
designing, for seeing the interests of each stakeholder and defining which ones we're going to address, which ones are left out. And we ask what knowledge systems do they bring along, and how is this knowledge important to the problem we are addressing? We are not saying if this knowledge is important, we are assuming that if they are sitting here with us, we identify
10:23
that they hold a piece of the puzzle and that their knowledge system is important. But do we often ask ourselves how many disciplines do we have in our group? I mean, I know we know in our current research project we have eight different disciplines,
10:42
but are we aware of the knowledge systems our disciplines imply? Because a social scientist will focus on different aspects that are natural scientists, and even between, for example, medical traditions, a nurse will pay more attention to care, whereas a doctor will pay more attention to diagnosis,
11:03
whereas an epidemiologist will take more attention to causation, phenomena, patterns in the population, and they are all under the term health. So it is important to know which disciplines from this practice and academic setting are present in our groups, because we need to understand where are
11:22
potential places for conflict and divergence between our systems. How many languages in our trans-disciplinary settings? Often we use English as a lingua franca, but are we inducing power differentials because of this?
11:41
So how many languages and what do we need to account for these plurilingual conditions? How many cultures are present in this room? Anthropologists don't like to use cultures anymore, this concept, but you understand if I say this. Cultures are changing and there are no distinct cultures, but yet it's a term we can more or less understand.
12:06
How many belief systems are present in that group? How many ways of understanding the problem at hand, and how many value systems? And why is this relevant? Because we don't often ask ourselves this when we are designing a
12:21
TD process, when we are in the first workshop of defining, you know, the joint problem or presentation. How many value systems are present there? Did we do our homework before we jumped into this to know these answers? And I wanted to share part of a
12:42
sad story and a success story, because this morning you were saying that you only hear the good part about TD. This is a picture of our last transdisciplinary workshop in Poptuna in Guatemala and there were 26 30-something people, I don't remember. And yes, of course, there was a huge diversity
13:01
between people from government, between communities, between representatives of science. But we could see two trends emerging from the start obviously, which was there is more or less, and this is just one of the boundaries that I want to exemplify. So we had a biomedical system emerging, you know,
13:22
that's the people who believe in DNA and the cell as the minimum, you know, element of constituting life. And there was another group that is more belonging to the Maya system that understands reality from another perspective. And
13:41
these two groups are put together. There are other categories, but I'm just going to focus on this one, and they are put together in a situation that they've never found themselves before. Because we have to be aware that when we do transdisciplinary research, we are creating conditions that are not mimicking reality. And
14:04
if we are jumping into these, we need to kind of be aware of where are we putting everyone, in which arena are we putting all our stakeholders to define jointly a problem. Why is this important?
14:22
Let's just look at one thing. Under which rules of engagement do we have a transdisciplinary process? Whose values are we using to define the rules of the study process? I heard some of you comment on tools you use, and there are tools in the TD Toolbox and in other places,
14:41
to look at value systems and what are going to be the rules that you explain to everybody they need to follow. So in our previous, in a previous transdisciplinary project in Guatemala between five councils of elders and the Etihad in Zurich, we had a very interesting research process around cancer between Maya doctors and oncologists and
15:06
psychoneuroimmunologists and all these other people. And of course, there was a science protocol because we needed an IRB approval. We needed to present an ethics approval to conduct our research. And this was done within academia, within science. So of course, we explained to all our Maya partners
15:23
this is going to be a project based on evidence. It's going to be objective. It's going to be reliable. We have to do time management well. We need evidence. We need deliverables, and we're going to have a gender balance because that's what we want in academia. And
15:41
we imposed this protocol, and it was necessary because, for example, in my app, in my app practice, time is cyclical. So things repeat themselves, and if you don't put a stop, you never get a deliverable. And in science, we have budgets and timelines. So that was important. But the interesting thing came in the first TD workshop where one of the elders
16:06
presented their own value systems and challenged us, and we were not ready for it. We were actually very much embarrassed because when we were explaining all of these concepts as rules of engagement, he said, well, that's all very good, but this is not transdisciplinary
16:24
because these are your value systems. Do you understand ours? And so he presented not this graphic, a much simpler version. This is a refined version that came afterwards, and he was explaining his view of how life is constituted, and here was him and
16:43
the community and the perception of the larger environment and the cosmos and the creator. But he said the most important thing for us is that there are three rules that are basic and non-negotiable, and he explained tzalah bil, that can roughly translate as harmony, nimbel, as respect, and
17:02
tzahil wank, as coexistence. And these have specific explanations. It's not just a shallow word, and from the combination of these three, he was saying that's how we bring balance to a TD table. So each one here needs to understand these three concepts, and he proceeded to explain for about an hour
17:21
what these issues meant, what these words meant. And in doing so, he gave us a huge lesson on how we approach from the start a transdisciplinary partnership and how we needed to revise our assumptions from values. So
17:41
it also went farther because we had presented to the IRB all these steps, and they were approved, and all of a sudden we find ourselves with the need to redefine the research protocol because otherwise it was lip service. Yes, we're doing a transdisciplinary project. Everybody is sitting at the table. We have our Mayan. Let's take a picture.
18:05
We all look so cool together, but in reality they were challenging us because they really read what transdisciplinarity was, and transdisciplinarity to Spanish, and then give it to the elders, and they took it to heart.
18:25
So they said, you know what? So nice that you are taking these samples to the lab to check for pathogens, you know, for mutations in the cells and oncology, whatever, but that is your lab. We have our lab, and our lab is the sacred fire ceremony.
18:41
So we are not going to give you interviews before we ask our ancestors for permission to give you this knowledge that we've been keeping in sacredness for 2,000 years, just like that. If our ancestors say yes, you can have it, we will give it to you. And we had no choice, and this was not just makeup on the project.
19:01
We had to assign a considerable amount of the budget to include what was later referred to as the Maya protocol. This is a bit extreme. I'm sure that not everybody needs this level of extreme joining of protocols, but it's just to show you that we might find ourselves in places that we did not foresee when engaging in transdisciplinary research.
19:27
So this protocol, for example, including fire ceremonies, including leaving time to the elders to decide on their own, doing their own consultations with their families and ancestors on their own, coming back one time, a second time, and a third time, having meetings with each elder within their council and the larger councils.
19:49
And, just to give you another example, finally we were done. We got approval to really engage in this transdisciplinary research, and then who's going to do the research? Not the scientist.
20:01
You can come and watch, but an elder is not going to tell you, Monica, what you want to hear. He'll tell you the surface, but if you want to go into the deep layers of this knowledge, it's about trust, and these guys trust you because they were your teachers, but these other elders don't know you. So you can come and listen as an apprentice, but it needs to be in their Maya language,
20:22
it needs to be done by an ajtij, a specialized healer that does all this research, and so it turns out we had to hire and train for six months high-ranking Maya healers to act as researchers side-by-side with us so that we could get to the layers of knowledge that we needed.
20:42
Okay, let's look at the CVs. No, what CVs? That's your way in the university. We need to know their nawal, which means what is their Maya name in the sacred calendar, because that's their gifts. So you're not going to hire just someone with a good CV. In addition, they have to have the perfect
21:02
energy, nawal, in the calendar system so that we can hire the right person. This prolonged the time for research, but it really showed us how arbitrary we had been even in designing the TD process. So learning from this,
21:21
we learned about control issues, and it's hard for us to give up control. In my department in Guatemala, they told me, the old archaeologists and anthropologists said, you are crazy. You do not give power to the Maya people, because you give them a hand and they'll take your shoulder,
21:41
and then your leg, and then your neck, and you lost your entire project. And this was really the belief. So going into transdisciplinary research meant having to almost stop collaboration with the older, with the seniors, who were not trained in this approach, because they did not want to give up control in designing the
22:03
methodology and conducting all the research. So then what is important about this giving up control? It is not just that we think we might lose our objectivity. It also brings something important about
22:23
where are we standing, and are we aware of where we are standing? And therefore comes the issue of ethnocentric bias. Ethnocentrism is a term that just means, I think my culture and my group are the coolest, and that's my reference. And so anybody else that is here in this room,
22:47
it's okay. Maybe I tolerate you, but I will, by nature, define how I see the world based from what my group believes is more important. And so in academia,
23:01
we have ethnocentric behavior all the time, because we think we have the right paradigm. We think we are the objective ones. We think we are right on, and sometimes this translates into biases. So if I show you this picture, what do you think?
23:22
Scientist, man, that's a scientist. But if I show you this picture, what do you think? The most benign term I got from my colleagues was elder. Everything else was very racist. Indio, and all sorts of categories in Spanish you wouldn't understand. So
23:43
they were sitting, our colleagues, the scientists, were sitting in the table with these other knowledge systems, and they really thought their knowledge system was superior. Not when you ask them, come on, we are all politically correct. The problem with ethnocentric bias and behavior
24:04
is that we don't notice it unless we are being extremely reflexive. And these can induce problems in this first part of framing together the problem. Because if you think the way you approach a TD problem is
24:21
the right one, how can you really understand all the perspectives in that room? We don't know what we don't know. So we cannot account for how much is out there. But I noticed this morning when our groups were giving back the results of the discussions that
24:46
inadvertently the person in charge to give out the answers from question one and two synthesized everything we said in her language, in her terminology, and reduced it to a place where I did not understand anymore what we had discussed.
25:03
But we do this all the time because we synthesize, and we synthesize according to our ethnocentric biases and our understanding of the world. So then I want to give you a tool that is mostly from social sciences, you might have heard of it, but it's been proven really useful in our TD workshops when we are in this joint problem framing
25:25
process. And these are emic and etic constructs. So the anthropologists and others may know what these are, but emic constructs traditionally were defined as those constructs of a culture that are deemed
25:45
understandable and valid by the members of that culture. It's called the insider's approach. I as part of a group believe the world is round because that's how I was taught. My emic view is that in spite of being here, we're in a round earth.
26:03
But the flat earthers believe the earth is flat and therefore their emic view is that the earth is flat. And no matter what we say, their emic view will remain the same, and they will find evidence that corroborates their emic views.
26:21
But we also had something called etic constructs, and traditionally etic constructs were the observations of a knowledge system on another knowledge system. So traditionally in anthropology we would have ethnographies, the nice savages from the Yanomami
26:41
rainforest. And we had these anthropologists describing these exotic cultures and describing the emic constructs of that culture, but then doing an abstraction and putting it through the lens of science and then constructing etic explanations. Which means the Yanomami,
27:02
I observed that the Yanomami hit their kids a lot, so I conclude it's a very aggressive society. But when you go deeper into emic knowledge, it has explanatory models of its own. And in this case of Chagnon and the Yanomami, it was famous that one of his students found out that the whole
27:21
construction of a very aggressive culture that was 400 years existent in our academic knowledge was wrong. And for example, one concrete aspect was parents hitting their kids all the time just because it was about spirits living in the rainforest and the screaming of children being able to
27:42
keep them away to protect the children themselves. So was it necessary to understand the emic construct? In that example, who knows, but in transdisciplinary research, emic constructs made a whole difference in how we approach a problem. So
28:05
traditionally, scientists looking at stakeholders, but what happens in a TD process? We all look at each other. So for example, the Maya belief system has a lot of conditions that I won't explain, but the biomedical system believes in cells, DNA, RNA, and pathways.
28:24
Inside the cell, for example. What happens when we ask the Maya people to give us an opinion on the emic constructs of scientists, and when we ask scientists to give us their opinion on the emic constructs of Maya healers? So when we are in an argument, in a transdisciplinary process,
28:41
it's been really useful to explain these concepts to our participants because then they don't fight with each other. They discussed ideas. One example was having an elder into a heated argument with an oncologist, and the oncologist was being very closed-minded according to the Maya healer, and at one point in the dialogue, this
29:07
old man that you see here says, I understand you're not attacking me, but you are not understanding my emic construct, and I am doing all the effort to understand your emic constructs.
29:20
And we were all like, did this just happen? They were able to abstract, to make this jump, and not make it a problem about the two persons, but the ideas, and they were able to relate what they were talking about. So an example to get this is
29:41
perception of the basic constitutive elements of life in the human body, and in biomedicine, it's all material systems. In biomedicine is energetic systems. This is a human body, and it's composed of all these hierarchies, all the way to DNA and beyond.
30:00
This is a human body in the Maya system, 20 energies in the body, whatever. So what is the point of having this dialogue? That from exchanging knowledge with each other and truly attempting to understand the emic views of each other, one of the conclusions in the workshop was, you know what? E equals MC squared.
30:21
The issue is that we in biomedicine prefer to understand health from the perspective of matter, and you prefer to explain it from the perspective of energy, but it's one and the same. Having this conclusion be reached in a TD workshop was beyond my expectations, but it showed that we really are
30:41
capable of getting out of our comfort zone when we are giving a pathway to do so. in our case that I was telling you, it turned out that researching all the emic construct around zoonosis gave us really important conclusions. One is that Maya models of zoonosis are too benign.
31:04
Maya medicine thinks that nature is benevolent and animals that give us milk and eggs and meat and everything else cannot possibly harm us. So there is no concept of a pathogen being able to be transmitted from a cow to a human, and our research, one of the diseases
31:23
we're looking for is brucellosis. So what does that show us? That when we are doing our project on the communication strategies, because it's a R4D, when we're in the development part transforming all our research into actions, we have to start from
31:41
explaining what a pathogen is and that animals in fact can give us diseases because it's not there. Just insects, but not the animals we're looking at for these type of diseases we're looking at. And the other important thing is that there is a concept of zoonosis on an energetical model.
32:02
So we don't have to do the, let's call it, inception from scratch. There's already, by researching the Maya emic views of healing and animal relationships from Maya healers, from midwives in one end, but also from doctors and nurses and those intermediaries that are the health promoters in each community.
32:24
We looked at five different models of zoonosis present in this area and having different degrees of understanding. So the issue is that we now have more evidence to say we cannot have the same education campaign for the communities in this area that are purely Maya-Trecchi because they have
32:45
one understanding and this area has another. But if we had only looked at Maya and biomedical models of zoonosis, we would have missed this entirely. But we went with each stakeholder and did this research through interviews, through workshops, and came up with this.
33:03
And another important example is that we found out that Maya emics are closer in practice to the theory of one health than any emic model of all the other participants, including most academics. For those of you who do not know one health, it's basically a proposition that
33:24
human health, animal health, and environmental health are interrelated, they have feedback loops, and therefore they are one and the same thing. And in zoonosis is the perfect example. So it turns out that all the Maya people participating in our workshop already understand that the degradation
33:43
due to transformation of the land use from you know, these rich socio-ecological systems to cattle farms or to palm industries in large areas is causing changes in the ecosystem and that these changes are
34:05
responsible for the diseases that we're seeing. Brucellosis, Leptospirosis, Rickettsia, Bartonella, and all the ones we're researching. So we don't have to work too hard in our for the part in the development part of what our actions we need to take at the community level to induce change because it was already there. But
34:27
funnily enough academics in our team did not understand these relationships. The nurses in the health post that had biomedical education do not understand these relationships. So our own team showed differentials in this basic understanding of our project
34:42
that showed us that we can never assume that just because we're sitting together and we all come from biomedicine or we all have degrees, we have the same paradigms and understanding. Most importantly that our behaviors differ from these understandings. And so what I propose
35:02
to all our project partners is that we see disciplines and cultures as epistemic systems. What this means is we are trying to reduce loaded words so that we can avoid as much as we can ethnocentric behavior.
35:21
If we referred as how cultural systems in this group, it's already loaded, culture. Ethnic background is already loaded. Some of these terms we have to be aware that they carry a political connotation, but I found out that if we talk about epistemic systems and we explain to our stakeholders what they are, we are closing to achieving epistemic relativism,
35:44
which is a precondition for having a dialogue at equal footing. As long as I continue to believe that my knowledge system is the thing that we all have to adhere to and I push it in the partnership
36:00
we're going to have a problem and it's difficult for scientists to give up on this. Doesn't mean we have to. I'm just saying that a precondition for equal footing is being able to achieve this type of epistemic relativism, which simply means no knowledge can be superior to any other knowledge system because if you get to the level of
36:22
understanding each knowledge system, you see that it is coherent internally. And so then the next issue I wanted to address is the issue of power. We have a hard time addressing power in TD, especially when we are in the problem framing part because
36:45
partners are equal footing are not a given and leveling the ground is by design, our design. Granted, when I first was in ETEHA in the TD lab, I mean TD sounded awesome, but we are in a perfect democracy.
37:06
Leave Switzerland and go to any other country and most likely you'll find that there are no perfect democracies. Even Switzerland isn't a perfect democracy, but you get my point. So go to the global south, have a north-south partnership, and that's when it hits you.
37:22
Ask the question, what creates power differentials in your team before you start the problem framing? How do these power differentials mute the capacity of some stakeholders to really participate in the TD process? It doesn't matter if you seat everybody and give them rules. You have to understand underlying assumptions.
37:46
So, language, we already discussed it. There are language barriers. So, can I ask you a question? Me puede en decir ustedes, cuantos ustedes en este cuarto entienden lo que lez voy a decir ahora. Cuantos ustedes, me pueden contestar
38:03
un problema e tico. Uno, dos, tres. Okay. Another question. Chacu, chacu, chacu, chacu. Anybody?
38:21
Okay, so we assume that in TD process multilingualism is not important, but we realize that it is. And the language that we're using to communicate holds power over everybody else. I cannot explain to you in English. My truest feelings and emotions as well as I can in Spanish.
38:41
So, let's look at multilingualism more seriously and account for what we need in multilingual TD partnerships. Also, looking at context, historical, structural. We'll look a little bit more into that later. Access. Socioeconomic constraints.
39:01
These are issues we don't like to address, but they are important and I'm going to show you with an example. Guatemala. Here it is. Understanding power and conflict between stakeholders is important so that the TD dialogue can happen at equal footing and
39:20
transdisciplinarity can truly become tangible. So, the issue is do we research historical conditions in the place where we're going to do research? Do we research what power relationships are there or do we just find out along the way? And I found out that if we do our homework before we jump into the partnership,
39:42
we tend to reduce conflict and we tend to run into less trouble. So, in the Guatemala case, we have 21 ethnolinguistic Maya groups. What does that tell me? Expect diversity. You want one conclusion from your project? Go somewhere else. You can have diversity.
40:01
Prepare for the challenge of addressing different knowledge systems, a lot of them. Our partnership had five languages. What do I understand? I need to budget translators and equipment and it's not cheap because in every TD stakeholder meeting I will have to have a German and English and a Greek translator with microphones
40:24
talking simultaneously and I have to train them beforehand in key terms because meaning does not equal words. So, we have to define glossaries. In transdisciplinary research, all projects should have glossaries of the most important terms
40:41
translated accurately for meaning, not just for words. Just to give you an idea, our last TD project had a glossary of 80 key terms and if we hadn't made it, we would have run into so much more trouble than we did. But that kind of reduced complexity a little bit. Another issue. We have a 0.38 human development index in that region where we are studying.
41:09
That region. What does that tell me? 56% of the population is in poverty, 42% in extreme poverty. What does that tell me? Do I want equal footing?
41:21
So, I have to budget stipends to pay opportunity costs and this was a major source of conflict with our Swiss partners. Because I was challenged. I don't get paid to come to Guatemala. I'm doing this on my own time. I don't have a salary. Why should I pay the Maya elders to come? I'm inducing a bias.
41:41
We are all equal. No one should get paid. Really? We're all equals, but we're not the same. Because that person coming from Switzerland is being paid a full salary and it's not sacrificing anything for being there and it's gaining prestige, access to data, whatever. What happened to our elders? You know how I understood it?
42:01
The women, the wives of all the Maya elders pulled me into the kitchen after one of the TV workshops. They used to cook the food and they sat me by the fire and they proceeded to reganarme, we say in Spanish, chastise me for about an hour. And they said, you know that because of your project my children didn't eat two days.
42:21
Because you're asking our husbands to come to your projects. We don't go because we can't afford to leave our families alone because I have no one else to feed my kids. My husband goes, I had to kill two of my chickens to feed them and those were meant to be sold for buying the school supplies for the next semester.
42:41
So the opportunity caused of our TD process was really harming the participation of those elders. And I was wondering why are they not coming? They're not interested. It was not about lack of interest, it was about survival. And if we don't understand the constraints of our partners in reality, we are inducing power differentials.
43:02
So there's a fine line between being paternalistic and being realistic of what we need to level. Same happens with gender, same happens with ethnicity, same happens with class, economic status. So we need to be aware of these fine lines between
43:20
paternalistic behavior and leveling the ground for participation. Also, we knew that that was a Maya and Quechua and Mestizo population, but so that there is going to be huge linguistic differences here. So we need to understand the history of mistrust and racism.
43:41
It was embarrassing to tell you that I had one of my students sitting here and a very sensible anthropologist and 20 elders tell her, you represent the status quo. You have enslaved my people. You, because she was of Spanish descent and she was tall and white.
44:00
And she had to put up with this for about 20 minutes, left crying, and quit the project. Because I could not foresee historical trauma. I did not, I was not realizing that the situation of historical differentials was so strong that given the chance to be at equal footing with white people from the city and academics,
44:22
we're going to have this condition where our group was going to be attacked. So we need to understand these histories and prepare for historical trauma manifestations when they happen. But look at this over here, and I'm going to hurry up. That map shows how many people were killed during the armed conflict in Guatemala.
44:45
There is historical trauma. The peace treaty was just signed in 1996. I need to know that. Because in our design for research, nobody wanted to sign consent forms. Because back in the 80s when you put your name on a piece of paper, you were disappeared and killed within a week.
45:02
Nobody was going to sign any form of consent. We had to go again through an IRB board and develop a different form of acquiring consent without having to ask anybody to sign any piece of paper. So we went into the MAYA protocol. But the issue is that when we look at all these conditions,
45:21
we are able to prepare in advance for what our TD partnership is going to do. So if you have historians, if you have anthropologists, if you have sociologists, if you have sociologists, talk to them in your teams and make them part of your team to understand the context where you're going to be working before you jump into this partnership.
45:41
So I want to give you just some terms. Perhaps some of you have heard of intersectionality. Others maybe don't use it so much. But it is an analytic framework that attempts to identify how there are interlocking systems of power that are impacting those who are already the most marginalized in society.
46:08
So intersectionality will consider that there are various forms of social stratification like class, ethnic background, gender, age, sexual preferences, religion, you name it.
46:23
Disability and they do not exist separately from each other. They are interwoven. And when we do intersectionality analysis in our team and then with the stakeholders, we are better equipped to address power differentials and design a TD process
46:42
that brings stakeholders truly to the table. So why did I put this picture here? Because we already know that in most countries in the global south, women and men have different opportunities. It's not the same having in a table a man and a woman.
47:01
Example, our TD project had to make a rule that women could breastfeed while in a TD workshop and the scientists that were offended at the beginning had to be explained that if we did not allow the women to breastfeed, they were not going to come because they were going to come with their babies, talk to their boobies, because that's how it happens in our countries. It's normal.
47:21
So there's one issue, but also being a Maya woman and a mestizo woman like me is different. And on top of that, being a rural Maya woman and a Maya woman in the city is different. And on top of that, as class, as socioeconomic indicators, as
47:42
distance to urban, add distance to urban centers or the places where we hold our workshops and you realize that there are issues of intersectionality affecting the participation in our groups. And here I would like to say, don't be shy in doing this exercise with your own research teams.
48:02
I frankly have to say that my PhD was a combination of really cool excitement and really pathetic sadness, because all the time I felt that we had to fight for spaces of communication. Because my colleagues who were white European males did not understand what it was to be a young
48:25
woman in Latin America talking to policymakers and how hard I had to fight for my positions of power and how easy it was for them to destroy my position with one stupid comment that was not thoughtful in one meeting.
48:42
So know your partners, know your members in your TD team and know how intersectionality affects the way you design your workshops. And also have those uncomfortable conversations before these nasty things happen in a TD process. And here I would like to suggest that you draw from CVPR for health.
49:04
This is a great book that synthesizes some of the orientations. This is community-based participatory research. I found that transdisciplinary orientations sometimes lack tools for addressing these comfortable things. Undoing racism. Would you think you're racist?
49:24
If I look at you and I have a conversation most likely, no, I would not think you're racist, but we do have partners that come to the table with racist attitudes. How do you handle in a TD workshop someone from the private sector having a very
49:41
demeaning comment to another participant and putting them in the corner? That person will not participate again. How do we address this? So there are tools that, for example, undoing racism training is a very interesting tool. Are we aware of microaggressions? How do we how are we
50:02
alienating our own members in our TD team? How are we alienating the stakeholders in a room and we're not even noticing? There's a colleague I work with still now that is famous for his microaggressions in our TD team, and he was completely unaware that he was doing it. It caused severe problems in our project. After we had the tools to address microaggressions,
50:26
it changed. But it was sad. We lost two partners because of this type of behavior. And it's sometimes in our language, and we don't notice we're doing it. So look at tools for addressing microaggressions. Look at white privilege.
50:42
It's not a problem to say that we have different personalities. So I'm here with you and you may look at me in a way, but I don't know. Latin American, maybe of some Maya origin, maybe not, whatever. If I'm in my country, I'm seen in a different way. I am white.
51:02
I am privileged. I come from a family of very highly political influences. My uncle was president of my country. I represent the status quo when I'm in Guatemala, but when I'm here I don't have any power. And then
51:20
if I go to the U.S., I'm a minority. I'm considered a woman of color. So I change, and therefore oral stakeholders change in each other's view. The main point is that being aware of these conditions helps reduce conflict, and it helps us get to the next level. When we are aware of where we are standing in TD,
51:45
we can identify better what boundary objects are and what are bridging opportunities between divides. I've been giving you example of societal divides. Value system divides. Sociopistemic system divides. Knowledge system divides. But we have the chance to find
52:04
the famous boundary methodologies to breach or gap these divides. And I'm not going to address it because that's what the workshop is about. So if someone's interested, you're welcome to join.
52:21
But the important thing is, going back to the TD issue, finding common ground has to produce measurable results. So I'm going into all these things that we seldom discuss in transdisciplinarity, but going back to the origin. No matter all the tools we use for reflexivity in our joint problem framing and all of that process,
52:44
we have to remember that we're doing this for a reason, that we need results. And in our project these are the results we have reached when we apply these tools. So we do have an active participatory community-based surveillance system where all the materials were jointly defined by everybody, where people are using the surveillance system.
53:03
We have our database complete. We're beginning a one health national policy and we're designing projects together with the nurses and the midwives. So I would say we're on the good track, but it's been hard and it's not easy and we need to assume conflict will happen and we need to be
53:25
willing to engage in hard dialogues. One of the things I noticed is many of us in academia are not prepared for conflict. We don't like it. In my previous TD project, our colleagues promised to never work again in Guatemala and never work with me
53:44
because there was conflict every other week. But that is normal in real TD partnerships to ascend the honeymoon stage. A TD partnership that is three months, six months, nine months, most often will remain in what I call the honeymoon stage. Long-term TD partnerships because of the nature of research
54:04
tend to bring challenges, tend to promote different views and sometimes that creates conflict. But we have tools to address it and it's good to have in our teams people that can address these challenges. So to finish, I just want to say that TD is a reflexive process and that it builds cultural humility and
54:24
this is an important term to teach our students, to teach our colleagues and our research fellows because cultural humility in my view is a precondition of building this team ethos that truly brings mutual learning and the co-production of knowledge. So, that's it. Thank you.
54:52
Thank you, Monica. Stay here. Thanks a lot for this very impressive presentation and thank you for sharing with us even your personal experience in those TD projects and showing us that we really have to step out of our comfort zone when we do
55:07
transdisciplinary research. I'm very sure there are a lot of questions from the audience. So please raise your hands and ask. Maybe I was too sure.
55:30
And first of all, thank you very much for the presentation. It was very insightful and thank you for sharing that many details and for us to learn from. My question was about when you had this conflict with
55:43
the elders and the researchers that they did not want to to agree on belief system or the type of knowledge to use and how exactly did you manage or like you said that it involved more budget and I was wondering how did you manage to
56:04
to get that or get everybody to accept that it's going to take longer time and money. Thank you for asking that question. I forgot to stress that in a true TD partnership you need bridging persons and this is not always a given.
56:23
Bridging persons are persons that understand two epistemic systems or two knowledge systems or more and can truly bridge the divide. In my case I am a Maya. I was trained for six years by seven different Maya teachers in the Maya knowledge and began to be trained as a Maya healer. So from the inside of the culture
56:44
I understand a lot of the assumptions, but I'm also I also studied a PhD in Zurich and have this background. I understand the cell. So the point is that often you need these bridging persons. There was another bridging person between the Maya
57:00
between myself and all the Maya councils that build trust and there was another bridging person that bridged all these academic professors because he had trust. So the delicate part is we are not willing to accept the fact that in many TD
57:21
relationships you need bridging people and these are sometimes hard to find and it is these bridging people that often have the challenge of acting as watchdogs to ensure that participation and procedural fairness is present and these already is a bias. We were discussing this morning having different hats. I always say that transdisciplinarity makes you a bit schizophrenic because you always have to be changing.
57:45
So concretely what we did, the only way we could address it was by having every month one or two meetings between all the bridging persons and putting on the table all of the assumption, prejudices,
58:01
malos entendidos, all the things that we disliked and then first discussing in between us and then bringing the larger group. But I would say that conflict resolution took about 20% of our meetings.
58:25
Well, I would like to thank you Monica because it was very important everything what you said and because we were discussing today in the morning our posters, I was thinking about one thing that maybe we can think about more and it's about the
58:43
well the personal journey that you have to do in such a project. So I mean the role of the the scientist in this kind of involvement with stakeholders, with social actors.
59:00
So maybe you could share a bit of your of your personal journey in this well in in this kind of context because I find it's very important to think about ourselves. What role, what are we doing in such projects, in such kind of resources?
59:22
In such teams, in case we have a team or in case we are alone. It's also because we are persons and we are we are dealing with person and with emotions and well all these human issues. Thank you. Yeah, thank you.
59:43
Well when I said that TD is highly reflexive it starts with us and I was using the word mirrors this morning and we have toolboxes and we always want to find recipes, somebody else was saying this morning, that make us accountable to our peers and that
01:00:00
make it seem objective. And therefore, to earn the title of scientist, because otherwise, what are we doing in academia if it's all abstract stuff that we do? So I would have to say that my journey has been about finding good mirrors. Get the hardcore scientist in your team,
01:00:22
the one that will question you every single time. The one that, what we call the square academic, who will challenge you all the time to see whether he doesn't have a point, that you really are crossing into the dark side of not being objective and always putting
01:00:42
your scientist hat down. But also have the mirror of the community leader. Have the mirror of each one that is important to this dialogue. And I think that that is more, like you say, the ability to collaborate with people
01:01:00
of so many different backgrounds that keep your checks and balances. One of the colleagues I admire the most is Martin Hitziger. He's a German and we fought every week. And in our current TD project and in the one we're designing, we fight every single meeting, because we disagree on almost everything. But it brings such a richness to our TD project,
01:01:21
because he's my watchdog. When I'm deviating too much into what he calls that paternalistic behavior of yours, he pulls me back and questions me. And I do the same for him. So our students quit the first time they saw us fight.
01:01:41
But he and I went for coffee 10 minutes after getting into a huge argument and we discuss our differences. But we lost our team of young scientists because we had not explained to them. We developed that relationship. I would guess we all have to find our own formulas for being able to have these checks and balances.
01:02:11
There was one question. Yeah, thank you very much for the nice talk. It was really nice to hear it so hands-on
01:02:23
and to get the real insight. What I wondered, how did you, for the start, how did you approach the people and how did you actually engage them? You told us a little bit more how it was during the proceeding,
01:02:40
but how was the start of the project and of the partnership? Spent a lot of time finding the right bridging person. One and a half years in my first project. It is not easy and you cannot always do it. I understand. In the previous project on cancer research,
01:03:02
I started from my teachers. I had seven Maya teachers that trusted me and we had a relationship and I asked them whether we could do research on cancer. They said, let me ask my council, my council, my council, my council, and this council asked like that until we went to the highest head
01:03:21
of the Maya ambassador council and he bridged for us to all the other councils I could have never had access to on my own. It would have taken me years to build that trust. So we cannot underestimate pre-existing relationships of trust, but they are not always existing.
01:03:41
So maybe we spend a little more time in finding that bridging person that can understand us and that other system. And I do realize that this is utopic because we cannot, we don't always have this. So we also need to understand the limits to have a real TD partnership. Sometimes it's in these relationships of mistrust
01:04:04
that we cannot really have a dialogue. To be frank with you, we have this Tigo corporation sitting in our TD table and I have family who own part of this company and I know how they think. They couldn't care less
01:04:20
about this health technology development. They just care about how good they look. And he gives it to me straight. I have a cousin tells me, you know what, blah, blah, blah, with development and all that stuff, I want to look good in the media. So give me a good video that shows how good my company is to those poor Indians.
01:04:40
I have to be, I have to transparently communicate with this person in that language. I don't have to agree and I don't have to endorse this racist behavior, but I have to be realistic that he is a bridging person to that corporation. And if I lose that bridge person, I won't have anybody that gives it to me straight
01:05:01
because they couldn't understand why are they not giving us these other technology that I wanted. It doesn't look as good in the media as this technology that people can hold an apparatus and take nice pictures and it's as ridiculous as that. But just generally that's what I've found.
01:05:21
Does that answer your question or did I deviate it too much again? Okay. I would like to come back to these bridging persons you mentioned. So this to me seems like they serve the purpose of like door openers to the communities and to link you with the people and to build up trust.
01:05:42
But in very practical terms, if you conduct a stakeholder workshops, do these bridging persons also moderate or mediate the workshop? Or is this your role as a scientist? Because I think in many TD projects, we as scientists, we design the TD project and we conduct the stakeholder engagement,
01:06:00
we moderate the session so we have a double role in the end and this might be a bit problematic. So what is your suggestion in this case? If you have the time, practice cultural humility and spend a bit more time training your bridge persons in the academic thinking of TD.
01:06:21
It's not just about we changing them, us changing ourselves, changing us. It's these feedback loops. I always say if a TD research does not give back to academia, to science, new knowledge, new information, new theories, it's just participatory action research.
01:06:41
TD has to feed back into academia. But if it's only changing others and I'm not really, mutual learning is about they also learning our methods, not just them learning how. We all need to understand each other and these bridging persons are the best way.
01:07:02
And it doesn't take that much. I can tell you that, okay, maybe that's relative, but in four sessions, explaining what TD was and teaching them tools and whatever, these two bridging persons that I had working with me became really good agents in the TD stakeholder meetings because they are the ones who are aware.
01:07:20
They have the attendance to detective problems early on and disagreements early on. So I think we should train our bridge persons in TD. There is one question, Jenny.
01:07:42
So first of all, I'd like to thank you. I'm still overwhelmed by your talk. So first I didn't find any question because I was kind of letting that resonate first, but now I have one and I find that all very interesting. But what suddenly came up to me is as you're also empowering people with this process,
01:08:04
maybe you're also, you might get into conflict in political relations. Like I just, it's like very big bridge now, but I had this problem as I was doing refugee projects in Germany, empowering refugees
01:08:21
and doing intercultural gardening and suddenly they also want to have a say and they want to shape the sustainability debate, maybe like in the best case as I think, but some people don't want to have these people being empowered. And then I suddenly come into like larger political conflict,
01:08:40
world views and so on. And I could imagine maybe in Guatemala, there's also some people who don't want to see the Maya community being empowered, wanting to have a say, shaping the discourses, maybe bringing in the idea of health and so on. Did you get in touch with that? And if yes, how did you deal with it?
01:09:01
Definitely, I would say any North-South partnership or any partnership in the South will have this issue. That's why I started by saying that we don't have perfect democracies in most countries. And in this current project, I have two death threats.
01:09:20
So I have to be very aware. Challenging the status quo comes with transdisciplinary research in the context that some of us work. If we are not feeling comfortable taking those risks, we shouldn't do TD. But perhaps I'm too drastic, but I always say transdisciplinary lip service is not my thing.
01:09:42
If we're gonna do TD that's really crossed the boundaries, that's really have societal dialogues and having equal footing. That's why I said it's not a given. You need to design a methodology that assigns equal footing in extreme power differential societies.
01:10:01
And that comes with lots of risk. So maybe in some instances, we should not do TD research. I'm not advocating this is the panacea. I always tell my students, TD is for some things. You have interdisciplinary, you have participatory action research, you have all these other options.
01:10:22
My understanding is TD is such that you really have to understand the context to design a platform for mutual learning. Mutual learning is not gonna take place where there are power differentials. So I would say it just has to be a good reading of the context,
01:10:41
assessing your risks and deciding if you want to run the TD process still. Pragmatically, I wrote my will 15 years ago and I am aware and my husband knows. And it is a risk I choose to take because I see TD for true societal transformations.
01:11:00
Expect conflict when you want to have a societal transformation. So if we're not willing to be, how do you say this word in English? Realistic, then perhaps we're in the wrong profession. But that's my own opinion. Please don't take it.
01:11:51
Okay, so thank you for your presentation. So after all of this work and you're still working on, I was wondering if they ask you
01:12:01
for some particular outcome that they're waiting for you because I mean this international project or something, they ask you for some particular outcomes, the community. Oh, the communities, yes. In our first TD workshop, we have an exercise where we put three columns of paper in the wall
01:12:22
and we ask everybody to use flip charts to write down what they expect to get out. It's putting all the interest on the table very tangibly and we do it with flip charts because otherwise one person will monopolize the conversation. So everybody is forced to write three cards.
01:12:41
And then we ask them to come and present them and the plenary chooses which of these color cards go in the first column that says these are agreed results of the TD partnership. The second column is these are results that we cannot agree on now
01:13:03
but that we'll revisit in a year. And the third column is we are not getting in the vicinity of these results and they are immediately taken out of the TD process, but the whole group decides. So to give you an example, the Maya healers asked me to help them build a Maya university.
01:13:23
That's not gonna happen in the history of one three-year TD project. So instead of that, I didn't bring the third column. We downsized it to two different things and we put one in third column, the university and in the second column they added presenting them to other financial bodies
01:13:42
that are interested in documenting Maya knowledge. So then we refer them to other grants and other things. So it is basically a method for jointly deciding what are outcomes and we went back to that. I'm glad, I'm so glad we took pictures and we actually left it in everybody's handwriting
01:14:00
because at the third year of the project we were running into problems because the Maya healers were demanding things that they said we had promised. We put it in writing and we wrote a memo of understanding and we said specifically what were outcomes and what we were all agreeing on. This was also what saved our project when the professor that started it had to leave.
01:14:21
So there was an agreement for a book on Maya knowledge written by Mayas for the Mayas and so we got the funding for that because it was in writing and it was an agreement, an institutional agreement. So formalizing these things was always helpful to avoid us running into trouble and also making us accountable for what we said we were gonna deliver.
01:14:50
Thank you very much. I have a question on instrumentalization of a TD project, like being instrumentalized. Cassie said before that development moves more and more towards research projects
01:15:04
and also it's a project, it's a research for development project. So my question is that this development still happens mostly in North-South relations and is financed by someone with certain objectives. So what do you say about the risk of a TD project
01:15:26
being instrumentalized for certain goals of development aid? Or yeah, of course you can say health is always a good thing and a good TD project is always taking the people seriously but maybe in bad TD projects this might happen.
01:15:44
What's your opinion on this? You are absolutely right. Instrumentalization is a risk. It can be instrumentalized by academia, by government officials, by any partner in the project for their own interests and objectives and it's very hard to keep it going.
01:16:01
But then we go back to sustainability learning. Also the question for me is after the TD project is done, did anything change permanently or it was just a cool project that lasted three years and then nobody remembers anything and nothing happened. So it's also testing the TD approach
01:16:20
where when you retreat these stakeholders, did they learn something that is sustainable in the long term? Did they learn to talk to each other? Did they learn to define policies in a different way? Did they learn to, so on the one part we have to be aware of instrumentalization and trying to avoid it as much as we can.
01:16:41
I've seen projects where it's impossible to avoid it and then you have to be aware of the game you're playing and decide whether you want to go on. But the other issue is also are we giving that extra mile for sustainability learning because that has to transcend our TD projects. Otherwise it's more of the same.
01:17:03
All right. Is it a short one? Okay. I'll try to be short then. Because after this question and the answer, of course, I would like to continue to the workshop session. So let's see.
01:17:24
What here stands on using your own power that you actually have to get such a process started? Like assuming people are reluctant to even give you the chance to build that trust, like using your power to actually just get that started?
01:17:41
The short, honest answer is I use it all the time. The complicated answer is who, where is my moral compass on how I use it? And that's, like we say in Spanish, a whole other $20 bill. So it is basically you go then
01:18:00
into the ethic aspects of TD research. And if you know you have power to design a TD process that maybe you think is successful, will you use it or will you abstain from it? And then the other question is who says that your idea is gonna be the most successful one? Part of the TD project from the start
01:18:22
is making sure you put enough stakeholders to challenge you so that the Darwinistic principle arises. The more diverse your table, the more chances of finding a better adaptive strategy to your TD process. And that, again, to close it, ethical questions also come back in feedback loops.
01:18:43
They also have iterations around the project. And I would like to end by saying that in TD research for me and my team, our team, the hardest thing has been finding a moral compass that takes into account these ethical constructs
01:19:00
and values from so many different epistemic systems that we can still get an output, an outcome, but collaborate meaningfully. And I think that that is the hardest part when you have to make those decisions. Thank you. All right. Okay, thank you again, Monica. Very wonderful presentation and thank you for answering all our questions. Thank you.
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