25. Research for Transformation & Flourishing

From dissemination to mobilization

Dissemination shares findings. Knowledge mobilization (KMb) pursues use. The difference is consequential.

Dissemination ends when the paper is posted, the brief is delivered, the talk is given. KMb begins there. It plans for adoption, adaptation, and policy change as outputs in their own right, alongside the academic publications.

A research project oriented to mobilization specifies, at proposal time:

• Who needs to use the findings (specific decision-makers, not "the field")
• What decisions the findings could inform
• Through what channels the user will hear about the findings
• In what form the findings need to be in to be usable
• What signal will tell you mobilization succeeded (citation in policy, practice guideline change, programmatic adoption, community uptake)

Without these specifications, "we hope this will be used" is hope, not strategy.

Participatory action research

Participatory action research (PAR) is research as iterative cycles of plan-act-observe-reflect with community partners as co-researchers, not subjects. It is a long tradition (Lewin, Freire, Fals-Borda) that takes community knowledge as constitutive of the research, not as data to be collected.

A PAR project differs from a standard study in several ways:

• The research question emerges from community partners' priorities
• Methods are co-designed and often include community-driven data collection
• Analysis is participatory, with community partners as co-analysts
• Action — based on findings — is built into the research cycle, not a downstream consequence
• The relationship is ongoing across cycles, often years

PAR isn't "qualitative research with community involvement." It is research structured to produce action with community as co-researchers. Doing PAR well requires structural commitments (paid roles, decision rights, ongoing relationship) and time horizons (multi-year, not single grants).

Knowledge mobilization strategies

Several KMb strategies are well-supported:

• Brokering — intermediaries who translate between research and practice (knowledge brokers, embedded research staff in agencies)
• Co-production — including users in research from the start, so they're invested in the findings
• Just-in-time briefs — short, decision-oriented documents delivered at the moment a decision is being made
• Communities of practice — ongoing forums where researchers and practitioners exchange knowledge
• Capacity building — training users to interpret and apply research independently
• Champions — identifying and supporting decision-makers willing to advocate for findings inside their organizations

Different strategies fit different contexts. KMb planning is itself a research design question.

When action is premature

Not every finding supports action. Some findings are:

• Single-study, unreplicated
• Promising in one context but unknown in others
• Suggestive but with wide confidence intervals
• Theoretically supported but lacking implementation knowledge

The honest stance is to name where action is premature alongside where it's supported. A KMb plan that pushes premature action does both the science and the users a disservice. Sometimes the most useful KMb output is "this looks promising; here's what would be needed to know whether it can scale."

Transdisciplinary careers

Transdisciplinary work is increasingly viable across multiple career paths:

• Academia — tenure-track positions in interdisciplinary departments, schools of public health, education, social work, environmental studies; positions explicitly oriented to engaged scholarship
• Government and policy — research roles in federal agencies, state offices, intergovernmental organizations
• Philanthropy and foundations — program officer roles that fund research, often with translation responsibilities
• Community-based organizations — research staff in advocacy and service organizations
• Industry and consulting — applied research roles in private-sector firms working on public-interest problems
• Hybrid roles — positions split across multiple institutions, common in implementation science and community-based research

The tenure-track is one path. Treating it as the only path narrows impact unnecessarily. Naming alternative paths during training and mentoring expands what graduate students can imagine for themselves.

Building a transdisciplinary practice

A working transdisciplinary practice typically includes:

• Ongoing community partnerships rather than project-based engagements
• A mix of methods — comfort moving across paradigms by question
• Capacity to do the structural work — MOUs, decision frameworks, accountability structures
• Translation craft — writing for policy, practice, and community audiences
• Knowledge of funders willing to support transdisciplinary work and structural requirements they impose
• A community of peers doing similar work, for learning and accountability

Building this takes years. It's worth naming as a deliberate trajectory rather than something that "happens to" researchers.

Personal research commitment

The final exercise of the course: write your personal research commitment. Three sentences:

1. What problem do you serve? Be specific. Not "health" — a problem at a specific scale and location.
2. Whose definition of success governs your work? If the answer is "mine" or "my discipline's," the work is mono-disciplinary. Transdisciplinary commitments name communities, partners, or non-academic stakeholders whose definition of success shapes the work.
3. How will you know if you're contributing? Specific signals — community use, policy adoption, practitioner adoption, capacity building — not just publication counts.

Writing this down is uncomfortable. Most researchers never do. Doing it once is a useful diagnostic; doing it annually is a discipline that reorients work toward what you actually believe matters.

The provocation

The lesson — and the course — ends with a provocation: how will your research contribute to human and planetary flourishing?

Flourishing is bigger than impact factors and bigger than disciplinary contribution. It includes the well-being of the communities you study, the practitioners you serve, the planet you inhabit, and the future readers and users of your work.

The provocation isn't rhetorical. It's a question to sit with. A defensible answer names a specific population or system you serve, a definition of success co-owned with that population, and at least one concrete commitment that's structural rather than aspirational.

Most researchers respond to this provocation with vague gestures. The transdisciplinary discipline is to write the answer down, share it with peers and partners, and revisit it as the work evolves.

Closing

Knowledge mobilization pursues use, not just sharing. Participatory action research integrates community as co-researchers across iterative cycles. Transdisciplinary careers extend across academia, government, philanthropy, community organizations, and hybrid roles. Personal research commitments — what problem you serve, whose definition of success, what signals you'd accept — are worth writing down.

The course material ends here. The work begins (or continues) with what you do tomorrow.

If you've been thinking about a specific project while taking the course, consider applying Module 5's commitments to it: audit the beneficiaries, plan dissemination across audiences, write your own positionality statement for the project, identify the structural commitments that would move it from rhetorically transdisciplinary to actually transdisciplinary.

Or revisit Module 1 with new eyes: the same paradigm vocabulary reads differently after the rest of the course. The 5 Lenses Framework and the five ways of knowing become operational rather than abstract.

Either way: thank you for the time and attention. Research for flourishing is built one project at a time.