'Interdisciplinarity' has become a rallying cry among funders and leaders of research. Yet, while the creative potential of interdisciplinary research is great, it poses many challenges. This book provides a practical guide to interdisciplinary research: to help build interdisciplinary skills and mobilise a new and growing research community.
'Interdisciplinarity' has become a rallying cry among funders and leaders of research. Yet, while the creative potential of interdisciplinary research is great, it poses many challenges. If you don't have disciplinary boundaries, how do you decide what to include or leave out? And what are the parameters for evaluating the research? This book provides a practical guide for researchers and research managers who are seeking to develop interdisciplinary research strategies at a personal, institutional and multi-institutional level. The book draws on examples from across the social and natural sciences but also offers valuable lessons for other combinations of more proximate disciplines. At a time when interdisciplinary research is increasingly centre stage in the research agenda, this book offers a crucial practical guide for researchers, research funders and managers from all backgrounds and contexts.
Research Journeys in/to Multiple Ways of Knowing is an interdisciplinary collection of Indigenous research and scholarship that pushes boundaries of expectation and experience. While the topics are diverse, there are many points of affinity across the issues including themes of identity, advocacy, community, rights, respect, and resistance. The authors present counter-narratives that disrupt colonial authority towards multiple ways of knowing. Regardless of worldview or specialization, the chapters in this book have something to offer. Like the whorl of a spiral, the curve can be observed as traveling inward or outward. At different points in the conversations, the assertions may be congruent or disparate from the reader's perspective. The discussions may resonate on individual or societal levels. While tensions may arise, the push and pull of competing constructs demonstrates that the ideas are connected and held in relationship to one another--negotiating alterity is a space of reconciliation. Together the pieces contrast, blend, and broaden the landscape of Indigenous research and decolonizing discourse. "I hope you enjoy the critical and creative gifts here and witness and participate in the vibrancy, dynamism, and beauty of Indigenous scholarship." - Niigaan Sinclair, Associate Professor, Department of Native Studies, University of Manitoba, from the Foreword of Research Journeys in/to Multiple Ways of Knowing.
This groundbreaking, open access volume analyses and compares data practices across several fields through the analysis of specific cases of data journeys. It brings together leading scholars in the philosophy, history and social studies of science to achieve two goals: tracking the travel of data across different spaces, times and domains of research practice; and documenting how such journeys affect the use of data as evidence and the knowledge being produced. The volume captures the opportunities, challenges and concerns involved in making data move from the sites in which they are originally produced to sites where they can be integrated with other data, analysed and re-used for a variety of purposes. The in-depth study of data journeys provides the necessary ground to examine disciplinary, geographical and historical differences and similarities in data management, processing and interpretation, thus identifying the key conditions of possibility for the widespread data sharing associated with Big and Open Data. The chapters are ordered in sections that broadly correspond to different stages of the journeys of data, from their generation to the legitimisation of their use for specific purposes. Additionally, the preface to the volume provides a variety of alternative “roadmaps” aimed to serve the different interests and entry points of readers; and the introduction provides a substantive overview of what data journeys can teach about the methods and epistemology of research.
This book provides useful insight into how academics from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, such as science, engineering, technology, social science, policy, design, architecture, built environment, business, and management, have been conducting research into how to realise net zero emissions to address climate change. This book explores the ways in which countries around the world have pledged to achieve net zero emissions through decarbonisation processes. It presents the highest calibre research and impact activities carried out in the UK, Europe, North America, Australia, Asia, and Africa. Such activities include conceptualisation, opportunity identification, specific case studies, demonstration of proof of concepts, provision of evidence, education of the general public, and knowledge transfer to companies. Further to this, the chapters also bring to light personal career journeys to net zero by current and future international research leaders. From this book, readers will gain a full understanding of net zero research via multiple disciplinary pathways, be inspired by personal accounts, and will learn key methodologies, including quantitative and qualitative approaches. The diversity of authors and topics make the book widely applicable to a range of fields, and it will be of great interest to researchers, students, practitioners, and decision makers working towards the goals of net zero and decarbonisation.
The Third Edition of Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory offers a comprehensive and systematic presentation of the interdisciplinary research process and the theory that informs it. Authors Allen F. Repko and Rick Szostak illustrate each step of the decision-making process by drawing on student and professional work from the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and applied fields. Designed for active learning and problem-based approaches as well as for more traditional approaches, the book now includes more examples from real student research projects and adds more tables and figures to enliven the discussion.
Refuge in a Moving World draws together more than thirty contributions from multiple disciplines and fields of research and practice to discuss different ways of engaging with, and responding to, migration and displacement. The volume combines critical reflections on the complexities of conceptualizing processes and experiences of (forced) migration, with detailed analyses of these experiences in contemporary and historical settings from around the world. Through interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies – including participatory research, poetic and spatial interventions, ethnography, theatre, discourse analysis and visual methods – the volume documents the complexities of refugees’ and migrants’ journeys. This includes a particular focus on how people inhabit and negotiate everyday life in cities, towns, camps and informal settlements across the Middle East and North Africa, Southern and Eastern Africa, and Europe.
Religion is increasingly visible in the contemporary world as a complex phenomenon – requiring multidisciplinary research to do justice to the complexity. Multidisciplinary research is however, though lauded by many, notoriously difficult to bring to fruition. This volume takes on the challenge to bridge the gap. Contributions formulate the challenges many have faced, but few yet analysed and put into the hands of researchers concrete tools with which to set about designing and executing multidisciplinary research on religions, beliefs and religious behaviour. In an era where research funding increasingly expects interdisciplinary collaboration it provides guidance on constructive pathways and pitfalls to avoid. Contributors are: Riho Altnurme, Anders Bäckström, Lori G. Beaman, Karin Borevi, Leon van den Broeke, Valerie DeMarinis, Victoria Enkvist, Jonny Långstedt, Annette Leis-Peters, Anna-Sara Lind, Martha Middlemiss Lé Mon, Cecilia Nahnfeldt, Per-Erik Nilsson, Peter Nynäs, Margit Warburg, and Anne-Laure Zwilling.
These thirty-eight essays by the professors and research fellows of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy is dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the School. The core theme of the essays is governance in Asia and what its governments and peoples are doing for the public good. As Asia rises, its policymakers and citizens, and indeed the rest of the world, are increasingly asking how this dynamic region is making public policy, what we can learn from that exciting, often turbulent process, and how Asians can do better. The School's diverse and international group of scholars have written a set of informal, provocative, and passionate essays about governance in Asia — its past, present, and future — and why they study it. The volume — a candid, engaging act of transparency and disclosure — is also an invitation to join the conversation on the problems and promise of Asia and the larger dialogue on public policy and policy research in a globalized world.
Interdisciplinary research centers are blooming in almost every university, and interdisciplinary research is expected to be a cure-all for the ills of academic science. Do disciplines still matter? To what extent are interdisciplinary problem-solving approaches driven by socioeconomic stakeholders and policymakers rather than by academics? And how is interdisciplinarity organized? Through an in-depth sociological study of the development of nanomedicine in France and in the United States – an area that combines nanotechnology and biomedical research – this book challenges two conventional views of interdisciplinary research and academic disciplines. First, disciplines do not merely form separate "siloes" which hinder the development of interdisciplinary research: rather, they are flexible entities whose evolution supports the long-term institutionalization of interdisciplinary science in French and US academia. Secondly, interdisciplinary research has no intrinsic virtue: its ability to respond to societal issues and advance knowledge depends on continued political support and long-term cooperation between stakeholders. Interdisciplinarity might also be threatened by oversold promises and struggles for recognition. A study of the many challenges facing the formation of creative and sustainable interdisciplinary scientific communities, The Policies and Politics of Interdisciplinary Research tackles vivid debates among academics and research managers and will appeal to scholars of sociology, science and technology studies and science policy.