‘Interdisciplinarity’ is a bit of a buzzword in the Dutch university sector. It is also one of the most prioritized policy goals at a national and European level. Yet, ‘interdisciplinarity’ remains ...under-defined, and the challenges and obstacles unique to doing interdisciplinarity remain fuzzy. How, then, are we supposed to adopt an interdisciplinary approach if we don’t even know what the word means? In this peer-reviewed edited volume of student scholarship, we delve into what it means to do interdisciplinarity in response to this challenge. Drawing upon both the disciplinary expertises of professional researchers and educators, and the experiences and analyses of students actually enrolled in interdisciplinary programmes, this volume is unique in offering both high-level conceptual analyses of the virtues and problems inherent to interdisciplinary research, and on-the-ground case notes of what interdisciplinary teaching and research looks like in practice.
Hazards and disasters arise from interactions between environmental and social processes, so interdisciplinary research is crucial in understanding and effectively managing them. Despite support and ...encouragement from funding agencies, universities, and journals and growing interest from researchers, interdisciplinary disaster research teams face significant obstacles, such as the difficulty of establishing effective communication and understanding across disciplines. Better understanding of interdisciplinary teamwork can also have important practical benefits for operational disaster planning and response.
Social studies of science distinguish different kinds of expertise and different modes of communication. Understanding these differences can help interdisciplinary research teams communicate more clearly and work together more effectively. The primary role of a researcher is in contributory expertise (the ability to make original contributions to a discipline); but interactional expertise in other disciplines (the ability to understand their literature and communicate with their practitioners) can play an important role in interdisciplinary collaborations. Developing interactional expertise requires time and effort, which can be challenging for a busy researcher, and also requires a foundation of trust and communication among team members. Three distinct aspects of communication play important roles in effective interdisciplinary communication: dialects, metaphors, and articulation. There are different ways to develop interactional expertise and effective communication, so researchers can pursue approaches that suit their circumstances. It will be important for future research on interdisciplinary disaster research to identify best practices for building trust, facilitating communication, and developing interactional expertise.
What if we used the stories that researchers and practitioners tell each other as tools to advance interdisciplinary disaster research? This article hypothesizes that doing so could foster a new mode ...of collaborative learning and discovery. People, including researchers, regularly tell stories to relate “what happened” based on their experience, often in ways that augment or contradict existing understandings. These stories provide naturalistic descriptions of context, complexity, and dynamic relationships in ways that formal theories, static data, and interpretations of findings can miss. They often do so memorably and engagingly, which makes them beneficial to researchers across disciplines and allows them to be integrated into their own work. Seeking out, actively inviting, sharing, and discussing these stories in interdisciplinary teams that have developed a strong sense of trust can therefore provide partial escape from discipline‐specific reasoning and frameworks that are so often unconsciously employed. To develop and test this possibility, this article argues that the diverse and rapidly growing hazards and disaster field needs to incorporate a basic theoretical understanding of stories, building from folkloristics and other sources. It would also need strategies to draw out and build from stories in suitable interdisciplinary research forums and, in turn, to find ways to incorporate the discussions that emanate from stories into ongoing analyses, interpretations, and future lines of interdisciplinary inquiry.
Hazards researchers frequently examine complex socioenvironmental problems, a difficult undertaking that is further compounded by the challenge of navigating the many disciplinary approaches in the ...field. This article draws on key insights from studies of the interdisciplinary process and proposes the “sharing meanings approach” for improving interdisciplinary collaboration in hazards research. The sharing meanings approach addresses common challenges to interdisciplinary teamwork and organizes them into four focal areas: (1) worldviews (including ontological, epistemological, and philosophical perspectives), (2) language, (3) research design, and (4) project goals. The approach emphasizes the process of sharing rather than seeking to develop a single set of shared meanings related to the four focal areas. The article identifies common challenges and recommends strategies and actions within each focal area for guiding teams toward sharing their implicit meanings. A hypothetical example is introduced to demonstrate how the approach offers a path for revealing and overcoming the common roadblocks experienced in interdisciplinary hazards research. By making interdisciplinary hazards teams’ implicit assumptions explicit, the sharing meanings approach offers an operational process to seize on moments of difference as productive tension and to see such challenges as opportunities—rather than obstacles—for innovating toward hybrid methodological research designs in hazards research.
Understanding the formation of interdisciplinary research (IDF) is critically important for the promotion of interdisciplinary development. In this paper, we adopt extracted keywords to investigate ...the features of interdisciplinarity development, as well as the distinct roles that different participating domains play in various periods, and detect potential barriers among domains. We take
joint attention
(JA) as the study domain, since it has undergone a development process from a topic of one domain to interdisciplinary research (IDR). Our empirical study has yielded interesting findings. First, we detect the phenomenon of knowledge diffusion as it evolved through three domains of JA. It enabled us to observe the shift of roles the domains played during the process of IDF, as well as the existence of potential barriers among these domains. Second, according to the diffusion and development process of JA among domains, three phases that an IDR field in general goes through were identified: a latent phase, an embryo phase, and a mature phase. Third, domains may play different roles in distinct periods, with the formation of IDR. Four roles are identified: knowledge origin, knowledge receiver, knowledge respondent, and interdisciplinary participant. This paper showcases how to detect the evolution of IDR by analyzing keyword evolution. By giving the profiles of IDR fields and descriptions of keyword evolution, it would be valuable for policy makers and regulators to promote IDR development.
This article analyses the effect of degree of interdisciplinarity on the citation impact of individual publications for four different scientific fields. We operationalise interdisciplinarity as ...disciplinary diversity in the references of a publication, and rather than treating interdisciplinarity as a monodimensional property, we investigate the separate effect of different aspects of diversity on citation impact: i.e. variety, balance and disparity. We use a Tobit regression model to examine the effect of these properties of interdisciplinarity on citation impact, controlling for a range of variables associated with the characteristics of publications. We find that variety has a positive effect on impact, whereas balance and disparity have a negative effect. Our results further qualify the separate effect of these three aspects of diversity by pointing out that all three dimensions of interdisciplinarity display a curvilinear (inverted U-shape) relationship with citation impact. These findings can be interpreted in two different ways. On the one hand, they are consistent with the view that, while combining multiple fields has a positive effect in knowledge creation, successful research is better achieved through research efforts that draw on a relatively proximal range of fields, as distal interdisciplinary research might be too risky and more likely to fail. On the other hand, these results may be interpreted as suggesting that scientific audiences are reluctant to cite heterodox papers that mix highly disparate bodies of knowledge--thus giving less credit to publications that are too groundbreaking or challenging.
This article suggests that there is a mobility bias in migration research: by focusing on the “drivers” of migration — the forces that lead to the initiation and perpetuation of migration flows — ...migration theories neglect the countervailing structural and personal forces that restrict or resist these drivers and lead to different immobility outcomes. To advance a research agenda on immobility, it offers a definition of immobility, further develops the aspiration-capability framework as an analytical tool for exploring the determinants of different forms of (im)mobility, synthesizes decades of interdisciplinary research to help explain why people do not migrate or desire to migrate, and considers future directions for further qualitative and quantitative research on immobility.
Zhijun Ning
Angewandte Chemie (International ed.),
July 26, 2021, Letnik:
60, Številka:
31
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
“My favorite thing about my lab group is interdisciplinary research atmosphere. … My biggest inspiration is walking along the grand gallery in ShanghaiTech campus …” Find out more about Zhijun Ning ...in his Introducing … Profile.
As emphasis on interdisciplinary and convergent research grows, researchers and institutions can benefit from additional insights into how to build interdisciplinary integration within the research ...process. This article presents signs of successful interdisciplinary research and proposes strategies that researchers can implement to help create and sustain integration across fields. Drawing on the authors’ experiences, other examples from hazards research, and the literature on interdisciplinarity, the article asserts that successful interdisciplinary research incorporates full intellectual participation by each contributing field, forming a multiway partnership. Such work can frame new research questions, develop novel approaches, and generate innovative insights across and within disciplines. It can also address complex questions at the intersections of established fields, beyond what the collection of contributing fields can produce on their own. To build integration across fields, researchers can use strategies such as interweaving perspectives in the research foci, interacting regularly at the working level, and interconnecting knowledge and ideas throughout the research process. Another strategy is leadership that enables contributions from multiple fields and empowers interdisciplinary synthesis. During the research process, researcher commitment, curiosity, willingness to take risks, and flexibility are also important, along with patience and persistence as challenges arise.
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