Adaptive scholarship and situated knowledges? Hybrid methodologies and plural epistemologies in climate change adaptation research

Abstract

Climate change, along with other so-called global challenges, demands that scholars work across disciplines. Drawing on Donna Haraway's idea of situated knowledges, this paper develops an approach to mixing disciplines by engaging in epistemological pluralism, or approaching a research problem through more than one way of conceptualising it. The example of climate change adaptation planning in Nepal is used to show how a hybrid methodology research design requires thinking through what can be known and also what cannot be known by using a particular method. The main argument is that it is not possible to prove methodologically which conceptualisation or analytical entry point is better than another. Rather, new insights are gained both by triangulating data from different methods, and by probing the ways that they present contradictory results. An interdisciplinary research design is therefore used as a kind of kaleidoscope wherein plural epistemologies help to reveal new, albeit partial and situated, patterns.

What's ontology got to do with it? On nature and knowledge in a political ecology of the 'green economy'

“…In doing so, other onto-epistemological possibilities for 'knowing nature' and conceptualising socioenvironmental issues are foreclosed (cf. Feyerabend 1999;Moreno et al 2015;Nightingale 2016;Sullivan 2010Sullivan , 2013a.…”

A synthesis of convergent reflections, tensions and silences in linking gender and global environmental change research

“…Additionally, and as suggested by Nightingale (2003, 2016), future studies can explore the value of mixing methods for highlighting that knowledge is partial and that vantage points from different methodologies produce different views of particular processes and events. Thus, mixed methods also help here to challenge ‘dominant’ representations of social-ecological dynamics demonstrating explicitly how they provide only one part of the story.…”

Local perceptions of land-use change: using participatory art to reveal direct and indirect socioenvironmental effects of land acquisitions in Kilombero Valley, Tanzania

“…People might glorify the past, and some claims might be rumors and speculations. That said, even though participants' perceptions do not always coincide with "reality," it is their "subjective reality," that is shaping current and future behavior and land-system changes (Nightingale 2003(Nightingale , 2015. An example is a story about beacons that have been put up in the wetlands (middle left part of the painting of the present in Fig.…”