Open Access

Both sustainability and transdisciplinary research can change academic research, especially with regard to its relevance for, and relationship with, its environments. Transdisciplinary sustainability research (TSR), thus, offers the opportunity to change non-sustainable development paths of sciences themselves. In order to fully exploit this possibility, this PhD project addresses the question of how TSR, in the first place, does conceptualize and, in the second place, could conceptualize knowledge, research, and science. Firstly, this PhD project analyzes, from a discourse studies perspective, the term problem in TSR, against the background of discourses on sustainable development. Secondly, it explores the historicalanalytical and transformative concept of the problematic. The results, firstly, show the consequences of a problem-solving focus for TSR, and secondly, differentiate it from a transformative direction of problematic designing, as a more appropriate view on the dimensions of transformation and their qualities of change that matter for TSR. This PhD project aims to contribute to a self-understanding of, and a philosophical communication about, TSR, as a research form in the sustainability sciences. Keywords: Discourse studies, problem-solving, transdisciplinary sustainability research, transformative potential, dimensions of transformation.