COMMUNITY RESILIENCE REQUIRES COLLABORATION: PROMOTING TRANSDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH TO ADDRESS SOCIOECOLOGICAL HAZARDS

While there is notable and widespread increase in awareness of the interdependencies, multivalent complexity, and ambiguous cascading effects involved in addressing human communities resilience and responsibilities in relation to natural and expanding ecological hazards (disaster risk and reduction, socioeconomic disparities, climate impact, sustainability, emerging infectious diseases, etc.), understanding of the requirements and needs of transdisciplinary research projects commensurate to the complexity of the issues addressed remains inadequate in many ways. Developing cross-sectoral, cross-cultural, and cross-disciplinary teams capable of influencing beneficial change across disparate communities entails longitudinal relationships built through consistent communication, shared knowledges, and reciprocal trust. Many sectors of investment, supporting institutions, and funding organizations continue to resource convergent community research initiatives as innovative temporal projects toward fixes producing programs, tools, or techniques, rather than establishing ongoing and adaptive relations compatible with the uncertainty and contingencies of the problems being addressed. This presentation will discuss obstacles and challenges experienced in developing the Disaster Resilience Analytics Center at Wichita State University, and strategies employed to aver them in order to deepen understanding across stakeholders and participants of the novel collaborative relationships transdisciplinary research initiatives comprise.