Suchergebnisse

To solve the world's most complex problems, research is increasingly moving toward more transdisciplinary endeavors. While a lot of important work has explored the characteristics, challenges, opportunities, and operationalization of transdisciplinary research, much less is known about the circumstances that either facilitate or hinder the research process, particularly from the perspectives of graduate students who often participate in them. In this paper, we aim to address this gap by contributing our own experiences as a team of four graduate students and one community partner that collaborated on a food security project. To support our collaboration, we develop and apply an analytical framework that integrates transdisciplinarity and action research. Through principles of reflexivity, participation and partnership, methods and process, and integration, we find that the framework facilitated the development of shared purposes, mutual responsibility, and meaningful relationships, resulting in the co-creation of a guidebook for farmer-led research. Our main concern with the framework is not achieving the full integration of our disciplines and practices. Transdisciplinarity together with action research holds significant promise in a food security context, but only in the "right" circumstances, where considerable time is spent building relationships, opening communicative space, and reflecting on the work with collaborators.

While evaluations play a critical role in accounting for and learning from context, it is unclear how evaluations can take account of climate change. Our objective was to explore how climate change and its interaction with other contextual factors influenced One Health food safety programs. To do so, we integrated questions about climate change into a qualitative evaluation study of an ongoing, multi-sectoral program aiming to improve pork safety in Vietnam called SafePORK. We conducted remote interviews with program researchers ( n = 7) and program participants ( n = 23). Based on our analysis, researchers believed climate change had potential impacts on the program but noted evidence was lacking, while program participants (slaughterhouse workers and retailers) shared how they were experiencing and adapting to the impacts of climate change. Climate change also interacted with other contextual factors to introduce additional complexities. Our study underscored the importance of assessing climate factors in evaluation and building adaptive capacity in programming.

Network-centric warfare is the operational concept that provides information sharing amongst a large array of networked nodes, including mobile platforms, sensors, space systems, weapons, munitions and war fighters. This information sharing enhances battle space situation awareness, which allows war fighters to get the right information at the right time and place, and to make the right decisions ahead of adversaries. IPv6 is an enabling technology of network-centric operations and warfare for improving the scalability, robustness, agility, security, flexibility and manageability of military communication systems. The large address space, built-in stateless node discovery, Internet Protocol (IP) security (IPSec) and mobility functions offered in IPv6 will be an important enabler for information sharing and distribution amongst war fighters in a dynamic battle space environment. As described in a mid-2003 memo1, to achieve its vision of network-centric operations and warfare, the Department of Defense (DoD) established a goal to transition all military communications networks to IPv6 across the Global Information Grid (GIG), and for all systems that are part of the Defense Information System Network (DISN) that will interoperate with the GIG. The purpose of this paper is to present the Navy overall strategy of transitioning its critical network infrastructure to IPv6 to support network-centric warfare and fleet operations. The paper also highlights the U.S. Navy's recent accomplishments, namely the two Joint Staff IPv6 Operational Criteria - Criterion 4 (known as JCS 4) demonstrations of voice, data, and video integration. In addition, the paper discusses the way forward in light of the establishment and deployment of the multi-site Navy Technical Excellence Center with focus on current and future IPv6 test and evaluation - encompassing laboratory tests, field tests (i.e., experiments), demonstrations, and modeling and simulation - to address operational - - needs and requirements of the war fighters.