Transdisciplinarity in the crosshairs: political threats to inclusive research

Transdisciplinary research (TDR) promises to address society’s most complex challenges by integrating expertise across disciplines and sectors. However, as political polarization intensifies, TDR’s commitments to collaborate across differences, engage lived experience, and generate social impact can become points of contention and vulnerability. Drawing on the case of Co-Designing for Trust, a TDR project on information resilience, we examine how institutional transparency and participatory design were reframed through partisan narratives and weaponized against researchers. We use this case to argue for a resilience-oriented reframing of TDR: one that anticipates system surprises and redistributes the burden of risk from individuals to institutions and networks. We outline strategies for protective infrastructure, from project-specific escalation protocols to field-level advisory networks, and propose a broadened notion of success that recognizes relational durability, ethical labor, and partner safety as core scholarly achievements. In politicized environments, resilient TDR requires more than resilient individuals — it requires resilient systems grounded in care, equity, and accountability.