Building and sustaining transdisciplinary research teams for environmental justice: Lessons from the manufactured ecosystems project

The Manufactured Ecosystems (MEco) Pilot Project that ran between 2023 and 2025 at the University of Guelph sought to avert the pitfall of traditional approaches to research while contemplating one of the most serious and urgent existential crises of our time–what total climate failure could mean. The Project teased out how we could create more engagement between community, art and science for ecosystems preservation, enhancement, and replacement, simultaneously with how we could foster community trust. As the researchers conducted their research, they also became the researched, engaging in meta-research to investigate transdisciplinary collaboration. Methods: We used an anti-colonial, praxis-based definition of ‘university’ and qualitative research interviews with eight members Results: Researchers committed to Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in predominantly white institutions operate from the fringe. Discussion: Deconstruction of knowledge hegemonies and disciplinary pedigree are important breaks with ‘tradition’ that foster practices and policies that support new logics for research development. Conclusion: There are epistemologies (e.g. Black, queer and Indigenous) which challenge knowledge hegemony and unequal power relations between western and non-western ways of knowing and creating knowledge, western academies can become more inclusive and honour the commitments made to equity, diversity, inclusion, Indigeneity, and accessibility by engaging these approaches.