Grounding futures: Trans-disciplining learning and community-building research

The terms interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research are adopted institutionally across the globe. To envisage the research ecosystems for sustainable futures and multi-species flourishing, we propose that such visions should acknowledge and honour potentially uncomfortable and vulnerable unlearning of taken-for-granted disciplinary norms, hierarchies, and assumptions about who has or has not been included in the discipline. In this essay, we share our own learning from our interdisciplinary collaboration across Education, Soil Sciences, Sustainability Studies, and Indigenous Sciences/Mathematics, which is grounded in our emerging transdisciplinary community. We see transdisciplinary work as a verb—one that involves questioning, negotiating, unsettling, and renewing the discipline. In pursuing transdisciplinary collaboration, we argue that the act of unlearning is necessary to question the status quo, colored by colonialism and speciesism perpetuated through dominant disciplinary norms. Longitudinal community building is also key to hold together each other’s limits of knowing and the discomfort of confronting academic harms, while grounding ourselves in the lives of (human and more-than-human) Peoples. Through a data-based collective reflection on our key (un)learning moments in our co-designed project, we highlight four axes of trans-disciplining that moved us beyond a human-authored future that neglects human and more-than-human relationships: a) knowing as grounding, b) experiencing time deeply, c) listening to the more-than-humans (the soil) with humility and reciprocity, and d) co-learning together and with the land. We see the act of trans-disciplining as creating a space and a path for alternative ways of knowing that are rooted in community wisdom and our learning with the land. • Trans-disciplining is a verb to unsettle and renew the disciplinary norms • Trans-disciplining is key for non-extractive future relationship with the soil and land • Future research ecosystems must acknowledge knowing as grounding • Listening to more-than-humans with humility and reciprocity contours responsibility • Trans-disciplining involves co-learning together and with the land