The annual business meeting is open to all NITRO-Oceania members (https://nitro-oceania.net/members/) and the agenda and papers were e-mailed today. We have scheduled two online meetings, and hope you will be available to attend one of them. The times are:
10am-12pm Western Australia
12-2 pm Papua New Guinea and Queensland
1-3 pm Australian East Coast and Tasmania (except Queensland)
2-4 pm Fiji
3-5 pm New Zealand and Samoa
If you are unable to attend either meeting, but would like to have input, please contact Gabriele.Bammer@anu.edu.au
People, communities and economies globally and regionally are facing multiple challenges. With the Covid-19 pandemic still amongst us, supporting healthy and thriving communities is one clear challenge. Caring for the environment amidst climate change, biodiversity loss and food insecurity is another. Geo-political insecurity and associated migration, violence and refugee flows are also dramatically affecting communities. These multiple crises are interconnected through complex relations and feedback loops, which cannot be addressed in isolation.
Working with partners, and across universities and other institutes, is central to creating the diverse knowledges and solutions necessary to address these challenges. They require transcending traditional boundaries of discipline-based research and education.
Despite the longstanding recognition that challenge-led research needs interdisciplinary collaboration as well as transdisciplinary approaches, universities and research ecosystems are not well equipped to nurture them. For instance, there are mismatches between inter- and transdisciplinary career pathways and institutional KPIs and funding. Publishing inter-and transdisciplinary research is often more complex and time-consuming.
NITRO-Oceania was established to help address these challenges by inspiring and supporting researchers to achieve transformational impact on global challenges and by championing interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in research policy and funding settings. In the upcoming members’ meeting, the NITRO-Oceania Executive will report on its activities over the last year, and invite all members to share their experiences.
We invite you to participate in a dialogue organised around five guiding questions:
1. What has worked well in inter- and transdisciplinarity in your organisation?
2. What is not worked well? What are the challenges?
3. What are you optimistic about?
4. What are you concerned about?
5. What should we do next to foster inter- and transdisciplinarity?
Come and join us for an exciting conversation!