The transdisciplinary literature review is an opportunity to situate the inquirer in an ecology of ideas. This article explores how we might approach this process from a perspective of complexity, and addresses some of the key challenges and opportunities. Four main dimensions are considered: (a) inquiry-based rather than discipline-based; (b) integrating rather than eliminating the inquirer from the inquiry; (c) meta-paradigmatic rather than intra-paradigmatic; and (d) applying systems and complex thought rather than reductive/disjunctive thinking.
What sets transdisciplinarity apart from multi- and inter-disciplinarity is that it is grounded in a fundamental reappraisal and reformulation of the nature of knowledge and inquiry. While considerable steps have been made to articulate the more theoretical dimensions of transdisciplinarity, a new fertile ground is the application of a transdisciplinary approach to education, specifically graduation education, and to very basic dimensions of scholarship such as the literature review. Interweaving dimensions of theory and practice, I have reflected on some of the issues that arise in the process of developing a transdisciplinary literature review, emphasizing in particular the creative/constructive and complexity dimensions of the process.
Learning Change 