How to assess societal impact of research: Approaches and experiences from different transdisciplinary and participatory research fields

In the proposed online Workshop, prepared together with the "tdAcademy Fellow Group on impact assessment in transdisciplinary research", we aim to bring together scholars from transdisciplinary research areas of sustainability sciences, research-for-development and health research to elaborate on the strengths and weaknesses of their respective approaches of monitoring and assessing societal impact of research from a conceptual and empirical stance.

Key questions are:

1. To what extent are the same conceptual and terminological underpinnings understood and applied differently in various research communities? How could a common understanding support the development of context sensitive methods for tracking impact?

2. To what extent might challenges and respective methodological advances match or differ according to their field contexts.

3. How can visualization and narratives be used to increase understanding of impact pathways?

Addressing these questions could be a useful basis to learn from one another and, eventually, combine methodological elements. Therefore, in the workshop we want to address the following questions in an open discussion format:

1. What are the main concepts and terms used in relation to assessing societal effects in the respective research area and how are they defined?
2. What are the key challenges in methodologies to trace and assess societal contributions of research?
3. What is the role of visual and narrative change models in facilitating discussion about societal effects, and how are they used?

In an open call for contributions, we invited scholars from the different research fields to contribute brief responses to these questions form their own experience. We asked contributors to complete a short template before the workshop. The filled out templates and a first synthesis document are accessible online here.

For more infromation about the ITD21 and how to participate please click here.

This session will be chaired by the tdAcademy fellow group on impact assessment in transdisciplinary research as part of the International Transdisciplinarity Conference 2021. 
During the workshop, approaches and experiences from different transdisciplinary and participatory research fields will be discussed to answer the question: How to assess the societal impact of research?