Undisciplining Knowledge

Undisciplining Knowledge
Author: Harvey J. Graff
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2015-08-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1421417464

The first critical history of interdisciplinary efforts and movements in the modern university. Interdisciplinarity—or the interrelationships among distinct fields, disciplines, or branches of knowledge in pursuit of new answers to pressing problems—is one of the most contested topics in higher education today. Some see it as a way to break down the silos of academic departments and foster creative interchange, while others view it as a destructive force that will diminish academic quality and destroy the university as we know it. In Undisciplining Knowledge, acclaimed scholar Harvey J. Graff presents readers with the first comparative and critical history of interdisciplinary initiatives in the modern university. Arranged chronologically, the book tells the engaging story of how various academic fields both embraced and fought off efforts to share knowledge with other scholars. It is a story of myths, exaggerations, and misunderstandings, on all sides. Touching on a wide variety of disciplines—including genetic biology, sociology, the humanities, communications, social relations, operations research, cognitive science, materials science, nanotechnology, cultural studies, literacy studies, and biosciences—the book examines the ideals, theories, and practices of interdisciplinarity through comparative case studies. Graff interweaves this narrative with a social, institutional, and intellectual history of interdisciplinary efforts over the 140 years of the modern university, focusing on both its implementation and evolution while exploring substantial differences in definitions, goals, institutional locations, and modes of organization across different areas of focus. Scholars across the disciplines, specialists in higher education, administrators, and interested readers will find the book’s multiple perspectives and practical advice on building and operating—and avoiding fallacies and errors—in interdisciplinary research and education invaluable.

Interdisciplinarity for the 21st Century

Interdisciplinarity for the 21st Century
Author: Bharath Sriraman
Publisher: IAP
Total Pages: 510
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1617352209

Interdisciplinarity has become increasingly important for emergent professions of the 21st century yet there is a dearth of systematic studies aimed at implementing it in the school and university curricula. The Mathematics and its Connections to the Arts and Sciences (MACAS ) group places Mathematics as a vehicle through which deep and meaningful connections can be forged with the Arts and the Sciences and as a means of promoting interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary thinking traits amongst students. The Third International Symposium held by the MACAS group in Moncton, Canada in 2009 included numerous initiatives and ideas for interdisciplinarity that are implementable in both the school and university setting. The chapters in this book cover interdisciplinary links with mathematics found in the domains of culture, art, aesthetics, music, cognition, history, philosophy, engineering, technology and science with contributors from Canada, U.S, Denmark, Germany, Mexico, Iran and Poland amongst others.

Interdisciplinarity

Interdisciplinarity
Author: John H. Aldrich
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2014
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199331359

Examines the contemporary academy by connecting its discipline-based structure with its burgeoning interdisciplinary focus.

Interdisciplinarity for the Twenty-first Century

Interdisciplinarity for the Twenty-first Century
Author: Bharath Sriraman
Publisher: Information Age Pub Incorporated
Total Pages: 491
Release: 2010-10
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9781617352188

Interdisciplinarity has become increasingly important for emergent professions of the 21st century yet there is a dearth of systematic studies aimed at implementing it in the school and university curricula. The Mathematics and its Connections to the Arts and Sciences (MACAS ) group places Mathematics as a vehicle through which deep and meaningful connections can be forged with the Arts and the Sciences and as a means of promoting interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary thinking traits amongst students. The Third International Symposium held by the MACAS group in Moncton, Canada in 2009 included numerous initiatives and ideas for interdisciplinarity that are implementable in both the school and university setting. The chapters in this book cover interdisciplinary links with mathematics found in the domains of culture, art, aesthetics, music, cognition, history, philosophy, engineering, technology and science with contributors from Canada, U.S, Denmark, Germany, Mexico, Iran and Poland amongst others.

Creativity, Design Thinking and Interdisciplinarity

Creativity, Design Thinking and Interdisciplinarity
Author: Frédéric Darbellay
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2017-12-18
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9811075247

This book, at the crossroads of creativity, design and interdisciplinary studies, offers an overview of these major trends in scientific research, society, culture and economics. It brings together different approaches and communities around a common reflection on interdisciplinary creative design thinking. This collective effort provides a unique dialogical and convergent space that deals with the challenges and opportunities met by researchers and practitioners working on design thinking, creativity and inter- and transdisciplinarity, or at the interface between these areas.

Tribes and Territories in the 21st Century

Tribes and Territories in the 21st Century
Author: Paul Trowler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2012-01-25
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1136488510

The ‘tribes and territories’ metaphor for the cultures of academic disciplines and their roots in different knowledge characteristics has been used by those interested in university life and work since the early 1990s. This book draws together research, data and theory to show how higher education has gone through major change since then and how social theory has evolved in parallel. Together these changes mean there is a need to re-theorise academic life in a way which reflects changed contexts in universities in the twenty-first century, and so a need for new metaphors. Using a social practice approach, the editors and contributors argue that disciplines are alive and well, but that in a turbulent environment where many other forces conditioning academic practices exist, their influence is generally weaker than before. However, the social practice approach adopted in the book highlights how this influence is contextually contingent – how disciplines are deployed in different ways for different purposes and with varying degrees of purchase. This important book pulls together the latest thinking on the subject and offers a new framework for conceptualising the influences on academic practices in universities. It brings together a distinguished group of scholars from across the world to address questions such as: Have disciplines been displaced by inter-disciplinarity, having outlived their usefulness? Have other forces acting on the academy pushed disciplines into the background as factors shaping the practices of academics and students there? How significant are disciplinary differences in teaching and research practices? What is their significance in other areas of work in universities? This timely book addresses a pressing concern in modern education, and will be of great interest to university professionals, managers and policy-makers in the field of higher education.

Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research

Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research
Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2005-04-04
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0309165482

Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research examines current interdisciplinary research efforts and recommends ways to stimulate and support such research. Advances in science and engineering increasingly require the collaboration of scholars from various fields. This shift is driven by the need to address complex problems that cut across traditional disciplines, and the capacity of new technologies to both transform existing disciplines and generate new ones. At the same time, however, interdisciplinary research can be impeded by policies on hiring, promotion, tenure, proposal review, and resource allocation that favor traditional disciplines. This report identifies steps that researchers, teachers, students, institutions, funding organizations, and disciplinary societies can take to more effectively conduct, facilitate, and evaluate interdisciplinary research programs and projects. Throughout the report key concepts are illustrated with case studies and results of the committee's surveys of individual researchers and university provosts.

Interdisciplinarity

Interdisciplinarity
Author: John H. Aldrich
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2014-09-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0199331367

At the turn of the twentieth century, colleges and universities in the U.S. and elsewhere were convulsed with change, a change induced by the creation of the modern set of academic disciplines. Their emergence at that time fundamentally altered how universities were constructed and how they did their business. It is the model on which the academy of the twenty-first century operates. Very shortly after the creation of the disciplinary-based academy, pressures began to build, both in the academy and in the society that looked to the academy to help solve pressing social problems, to develop interdisciplinary approaches to address problems that fit poorly within the disciplinary structure. These external and internal forces never fully abated, and peaked after the Second World War. They have peaked again more recently, and the contemporary college and university is therefore a rich amalgam of disciplinary and interdisciplinary units, problems, approaches, and structures. Interdisciplinarity examines the contemporary academy by connecting its disciplinary-based structure with its burgeoning interdisciplinary focus. Part I looks at the value of the disciplinary structure in the contemporary university alongside the motivations that lead to calls for greater interdisciplinary approaches. Part 2 traces the development of external forces, particularly the private and public foundation, that shaped the development of interdisciplinary scholarship in the twentieth century. The final two sections examine in detail interdisciplinary education and the organization of university-based interdisciplinary research.

Beyond Interdisciplinarity

Beyond Interdisciplinarity
Author: Julie Thompson Klein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-02-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0197571174

Beyond Interdisciplinarity examines the broadening meaning of core concept across academic disciplines and other forms of knowledge. In this book, Associate Editor of The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity and internationally recognized scholar Julie Thompson Klein depicts the heterogeneity and boundary work of inter- and trans-disciplinarity in a conceptual framework based on an ecology of spatializing practices in transaction spaces, including trading zones and communities of practice. The book includes both "crossdisciplinary" work (encompassing multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary forms) as well as "cross-sector" work (spanning disciplines, fields, professions, government and industry, and communities). The first section of the book defines and explains boundary work, discourses of interdisciplinarity, and the nature of interdisciplinary fields. In the second section, Klein examines dynamics of working across disciplines, including communication, collaboration, and learning with concrete examples and lessons from research projects and programs that transcend traditional fields. The closing chapter examines reasons for failure and success then presents gateways to literature and other resources. Throughout the book, Klein emphasizes the roles of contextualization and historical change while factoring in the shifting relationship of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, ascendancy of transdisciplinarity, and intersections with other constructs including Mode 2 knowledge production, convergence, team science, and postdisciplinarity. The conceptual framework she provides also includes the role of boundary objects, agents, and organizations in brokering differences and creating for platforms for change. Klein further explains why translation, interlanguage, and a communication boundary space are vital to achieving intersubjectivity and collective identity. They foster not only pragmatics of negotiation and integration but also reflexivity, transactivity, and co-production of knowledge with stakeholders beyond the academy. Rhetorics of holism and synthesis compete with instrumentalities of problem solving and transgressive critiques. However, typical warrants today include complexity, contextualization, collaboration, and socially-robust knowledge. Crossing boundaries remains complex, but this book guides readers through the density of pertinent literature while expanding understandings of crossdisciplinary and cross-sector work.

Interdisciplinary Conversations

Interdisciplinary Conversations
Author: Myra Strober
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2011
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0804772312

Conversations across academic disciplines are the future. This work delves into the dynamics, rewards, and challenges of such conversations.