Multidisciplinary Viewpoints on Global River Systems

Abstract

In January 2014, 27 scholars from across the disciplines met at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis for the Rivers of the Anthropocene conference to present their research on global river systems. While they were here, we interviewed eleven of them about the methodological and conceptual challenges of transdisciplinary approaches to environmental research. In our paper, we synthesize those interviews into an accessible report detailing the presenters’ responses. The sources of information that we use are the interviews themselves, which we cross-reference with the recorded presentations from the Rivers conference, as well as published work on transdisciplinarity. This research is important because it shows how studying the effects humans have had on global river systems from a multidisciplinary angle gives us, as a society, a better idea of how to address the problems caused by human alterations to the natural environment.