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Learn About Interdisciplinary Research

Research approaches.

The U.S. National Science Foundation gives high priority to research that is interdisciplinary — transcending the scope of a single discipline or program.

NSF's support of interdisciplinary research and education is essential for accelerating scientific discovery and preparing a workforce that addresses scientific challenges in innovative ways.

This page covers the ways NSF supports interdisciplinary research and how to prepare an interdisciplinary proposal, including how to submit an unsolicited proposal when there is no natural " home " for it in one of NSF’s existing programs.

On this page

• ● What is interdisciplinary research?
• ● How does NSF support interdisciplinary research?
• ● How to prepare an interdisciplinary proposal
• ● Who to contact
• ● Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

What is interdisciplinary research?

Credit: Jurgen Schulze, University of California, San Diego

The definition of a "discipline" and the varieties of cross-disciplinary research — from multidisciplinary, to interdisciplinary, to transdisciplinary — are constantly evolving. Although there is not always agreement on these definitions, it is clear that areas of research are dynamic: continually emerging, melding and transforming. What is considered interdisciplinary today might be considered disciplinary tomorrow.

A working definition of interdisciplinary research can be found in the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine's report, Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research :

Interdisciplinary research:

• Integrates information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts or theories from two or more disciplines or bodies of specialized knowledge.
• Can be done by teams or by individuals.
• Advances fundamental understanding or solves problems whose solutions are beyond the scope of a single discipline or area of research practice.

How does NSF support interdisciplinary research?

1. Solicited interdisciplinary research

Numerous NSF programs are designed to be explicitly interdisciplinary. Solicitations, which invite proposals to these programs, are posted on the NSF website . NSF's interdisciplinary research programs broadly fall under the three categories below:

Cross-cutting programs

Many of NSF's interdisciplinary programs involve several of NSF's directorates. Examples of these programs include:

• Building Theoretical Foundations for Data Sciences (TRIPODS)
• Coastlines and People
• Dynamics of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems
• Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases  
• Growing Convergence Research
• Research on Emerging Technologies for Teaching and Learning
• Smart and Connected Communities

Areas of national importance

NSF develops funding portfolios that focus on complex societal challenges of national interest, often in collaboration with other federal agencies. Examples of these programs include:

• The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier
• National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes
• Navigating the New Arctic
• Understanding the Rules of Life

Center competitions

Many of the centers funded by NSF bring together interdisciplinary research teams. Examples of NSF's center competitions include:

• Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers
• Science and Technology Centers

2. Unsolicited interdisciplinary research

NSF invites interdisciplinary proposals that are not targeted by a program solicitation, as long as they are appropriate for NSF support . Depending on its focus, such a proposal may:

• Be reviewed by a single core program.
• Be co-reviewed by more than one program.
• Extend beyond the scope of any current program.

See " How to prepare an interdisciplinary proposal " to learn how to submit an unsolicited interdisciplinary research proposal.

3. Education and training

NSF has numerous programs supporting the development of the next generation of researchers. The support from these programs is in addition to the support for undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to conduct research on NSF-funded grants. Examples of these programs include:

• Research Traineeship Program
• Research Experiences for Undergraduates

4. Workshops, conferences and symposiums

NSF sponsors forums designed to promote interdisciplinary perspectives and research.

How to prepare an interdisciplinary proposal

Preparing an unsolicited interdisciplinary proposal.

Follow the guidance below for how to submit a proposal with ideas that are in novel or emerging areas extending beyond any particular NSF program.

1. Prepare a summary of your proposal ideas.

Develop a short 1–2 paragraph description of your proposal idea that you can send by email and discuss with NSF staff. Make sure your idea is appropriate for NSF funding by viewing the Programs and Funding Opportunities section of the agency's Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide .

2. Contact an NSF program officer.

The program officer you contact will provide guidance on how and where to submit your proposal. To find an appropriate program officer, consider these options in the following order:

• Identify a program officer through an existing NSF program. In many cases, there will be an existing NSF program for which the proposal idea may be appropriate. Read the program description or solicitation. If your idea seems appropriate, contact one of the program’s program officers.
• Identify a program officer through other means. If your proposal doesn’t clearly fit an existing program, it may make sense to first contact a program officer with expertise in your discipline. They may consult with other NSF staff or recommend another officer for you to contact. You may also contact a program officer you already know, such as one who is managing an award for you or who you met at a conference. 
• Contact a point of contact listed below. If you think your proposal will be of particular interest to one NSF directorate or office, reach out to the relevant point of contact for that directorate. That person is responsible for identifying a program officer in that directorate who will discuss your proposal with you.

Points of contact:

The contacts below are responsible for identifying a program officer in their directorate who will discuss your proposal with you.

If there is not an obvious point of contact from one of the options below, email NSF at [email protected] or call (703) 292-4840.

Cross-directorate, NSF-wide

Jessica Robin, OD/OISE

Telephone: (703) 292-8706

Email: [email protected]

Office of Integrative Activities

Randy Phelps, OD/OIA

Telephone: (703) 292-5049

Email: [email protected]

Directorate for Biological Sciences

James O. Deshler, BIO/DBI

Telephone: (703) 292-7871

Email: [email protected]

Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering

James Donlon, CISE/CCF

Telephone: (703) 292-8074

Email: [email protected]

Directorate for Education and Human Resources

Gregg E. Solomon, EHR/DRL

Telephone: (703) 292-8333

Email: [email protected]

Directorate for Engineering

Sohi Rastegar, ENG/OAD

Telephone: (703) 292-5379

Email: [email protected]

Directorate for Geosciences

Barbara Ransom , GEO/OAD

Telephone: (703) 292-7792

Email: [email protected]

Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Dean Evasius, MPS/OAD

Telephone: (703) 292-7352

Email: [email protected]

Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences

Brian Humes, SBE/SES

Telephone: (703) 292-7281

Email: [email protected]

Preparing a proposal for an existing program?

If you are submitting a proposal to an existing program that is designed to be interdisciplinary or encourages interdisciplinary work, simply prepare your proposal in accordance with the program description or solicitation.

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

1. does an interdisciplinary proposal have to be transformative.

No. The extent to which a proposed project is potentially transformative is just one of the considerations included in NSF's Intellectual Merit review criterion. See NSF's " Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide " for more details.

2. Will interdisciplinary proposals be given preference when funding recommendations are made?

If a proposal is reviewed through an existing NSF program, this will depend on the program's criteria.

Some programs are specifically restricted to interdisciplinary research topics. In those programs, a great deal of weight is given to "interdisciplinary" aspects of the proposed work. Some other NSF programs, while not so restricted, explicitly encourage interdisciplinary research and consider it as a positive factor.

In programs that do not distinguish interdisciplinary research as a priority, the review will be based on the combined assessment of the project according to NSF's Merit Review criteria and any other special criteria that may be part of the program's solicitation or description. In these programs, interdisciplinary proposals that advance the program goals are encouraged and funded, and any "weight" is based on the anticipated potential of the project, not whether it is interdisciplinary or single-disciplinary in nature.

Finally, if a proposal is not reviewed through an existing program, it will be reviewed using the two NSF Merit Review criteria: Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts.

3. Has NSF set aside funds for interdisciplinary research proposals?

Collaborations of interdisciplinary teams are encouraged throughout many NSF solicitations. For example, facility and center programs may call for interdisciplinary efforts.

In programs that do not explicitly call for interdisciplinary research, funds are not set aside for such proposals. However, a division, office or directorate may designate funds to support projects with noteworthy characteristics or potential, which could result from an interdisciplinary approach.

4. I discussed my ideas for an interdisciplinary proposal with several program officers but was discouraged to submit. What are my options?

Program officers play a critical role in providing guidance to the community on the various funding opportunities at NSF. You may have been discouraged to submit because your proposal is outside the scope of NSF’s programs and funding opportunities described in the " Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide ."

Even if you are discouraged from submitting, you always retain the option to submit a proposal. To submit, you can contact one of the points of contact identified on this page, or you can contact NSF at [email protected] or (703) 292-4840. NSF's points of contact are responsible for finding an appropriate mechanism for reviewing your proposal.

5. Is the merit review process less receptive to interdisciplinary proposals?

No. Funding interdisciplinary research is a high priority for NSF and, in turn, program officers will identify appropriate panelists and ad hoc reviewers to ensure that the full range of interdisciplinary research is covered by a proposal's reviewers.

But it is important to remember that being interdisciplinary does not automatically make a proposal more worthy. Unfortunately, NSF must decline a high percentage of meritorious proposals for a variety of reasons.

NSF's program officers have the responsibility and authority to recommend awards for proposals that were not among the most highly ranked by the review panels in order to maintain a balanced portfolio of investments.

6. If my funded interdisciplinary research project is not successful in achieving its stated goals, will this jeopardize future funding possibilities?

As with any prior NSF award, reviewers are asked to comment on the quality of prior work when evaluating a proposal. Note that your proposal may contain up to five pages to describe those results.

7. May I submit the same interdisciplinary research proposal to more than one program concurrently?

No. As indicated in NSF's " Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide ," you are required to select one applicable program announcement, solicitation or program description when preparing your proposal. In some instances, you can also select more than one of NSF's programs or units that you feel are appropriate to co-review your interdisciplinary research project.

Even if you submit your proposal to one program, an NSF program officer may elect to have your proposal reviewed by more than one program.

8. If my interdisciplinary research proposal is reviewed by more than one program, will it be subject to "double jeopardy"?

Preliminary analyses indicate that proposals that are co-reviewed by two or more programs actually have, in most cases, a slightly higher chance of being recommended for funding than do proposals reviewed in a single program.

9. May I add extra pages to the project description because my proposal is interdisciplinary?

No. Your proposal must conform to the " Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide " or to the limitations specified in the program solicitation.

10. How will differing program target dates, deadlines or submission windows affect the review of an interdisciplinary proposal that is reviewed by multiple programs?

This may lengthen the review process somewhat if one program's submission cycle differs substantially from another's. The points of contact identified on this site will assure that an appropriate review is carried out, and program officers will work together to conduct these reviews as expeditiously as possible.

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• Published: 22 September 2020

Transdisciplinarity as a discipline and a way of being : complementarities and creative tensions

• Cyrille Rigolot   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8316-0226 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  7 , Article number:  100 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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• Development studies

Transdisciplinarity is generally defined by the inclusion of non-academic stakeholders in the process of knowledge production. Transdisciplinarity is a promising notion, but its ability to efficiently address the world’s most pressing issues still requires improvement. Several typologies of transdisciplinarity have been proposed, generally with a theoretical versus practical dichotomy (Mode 1/Mode 2), and effort has focused on possible linkages between different types. However, in the last two decades, transdisciplinarity has significantly matured to the extent that the classical theoretical versus practical distinction appears clearly limited. In this paper, a reframing of the debate is proposed by considering transdisciplinarity as a new discipline and as a way of being . The conception of transdisciplinarity as a discipline can be related to the recent development of the broader discipline of “integration and implementation sciences” (i2S), to which “practical” Mode 2 transdisciplinarity is a major contributor. When transdisciplinarity is considered as a way of being , it is inseparable from personal life and extends far beyond the professional activities of a researcher. To illustrate this conception, the work and life of Edgar Morin can be used as an exemplary reference in conjunction with other streams of thought, such as integral theory. Transdisciplinarity as a discipline and transdisciplinarity as a way of being have complementarities in terms of researchers’ personal dispositions and space for expression in academia. The proposed distinction also raises the question of the status of consciousness in transdisciplinary projects, which may be a fruitful controversial topic for the transdisciplinary research community.

Introduction

In the context of unprecedented worldwide crises, transdisciplinarity is increasingly mentioned as a promising way of producing knowledge and decision-making (Lang et al., 2012 ). Transdisciplinarity is often characterized by the inclusion of non-academic stakeholders in the process of knowledge production (Scholz and Steiner, 2015 ). The notion of transdisciplinarity emerged in the 1970s and developed in different streams that correspond to different communities and contrasting research practices (Klein, 2014 ). Several typologies have been proposed to characterize these different streams and their relationships. In one of the most common typologies, based on the work of Gibbons et al. ( 1994 ) in the sociology of science, Scholz and Steiner ( 2015 ) distinguish two modes of transdisciplinarity: “Mode 1” transdisciplinarity, which is mostly theoretical, is motivated by a general search for a “unity of knowledge” and corresponds to an “inner-science activity”, while “Mode 2” transdisciplinarity, which is mostly practical, is typically characterized by the inclusion of stakeholders in participatory problem-solving approaches that are applied to tangible, real-world problems (Scholz and Steiner, 2015 ). Mode 1 transdisciplinarity is typically associated with the quantum physicist Basarab Nicolescu’s proposal of a methodology based on three axioms: (1) levels of reality, (2) the principle of the hidden third, and (3) complexity. These axioms are extensively developed in the literature (Nicolescu, 2010 ; McGregor, 2015a ). In another famous typology, Max-Neef ( 2005 ) proposes distinguishing “weak transdisciplinarity”, which can be applied “following traditional methods and logic”, and “strong transdisciplinarity”, notably inspired by Nicolescu’s work, which is characterized by a specific quantum-like logic and breaks with the assumption of a single reality (Max-Neef, 2005 ). From this perspective, transdisciplinarity is more than a new discipline or a super-discipline; it is “a different manner of seeing the world [that is] more systemic and holistic” (Max-Neef, 2005 ). As a last example, Nicolescu ( 2010 ) distinguishes three forms of transdisciplinary: (1) theoretical (referring to his own work and that of his collaborator, Edgar Morin), (2) phenomenological (corresponding to Gibbon’s Mode 2), and (3) experimental (which is based on existing data in a diversity of fields, such as education, art, and literature).

Transdisciplinarity is often described as a promising notion, but its ability to efficiently address the world’s most pressing issues still requires improvement. Although several transdisciplinary projects with non-academic stakeholders have led to significant improvements in addressing important issues, many other projects have been disappointing as the benefits claimed for participation are often not realized (Frame and Brown, 2008 ). One common response to overcome these limitations is to provide a better link between different types of transdisciplinarity regardless of the typology used. For example, for Scholz and Steiner ( 2015 ), a major challenge for transdisciplinarity is to better link Mode 1 and Mode 2 as a way to maintain high quality standards and to prevent transdisciplinarity from “being increasingly used for labeling any interactions between scientists and practitioners”. For Max-Neef ( 2005 ), efforts are needed to perfect transdisciplinarity as a world vision “until the weak is absorbed and consolidated in the strong”. Nicolescu ( 2010 ) also stresses the need to acknowledge both the diversity and the unity of his three types of transdisciplinarity (theoretical, phenomenological, experimental). In line with these different calls, some approaches have been proposed to better link different types of transdisciplinarity. For example, Rigolot ( 2020 ) suggests that quantum theory can be used as a source of insight to narrow the gap between Mode 1 and Mode 2 transdisciplinarity.

In this paper, another strategy is proposed by reframing the entire debate. Each of the mentioned typologies of transdisciplinarity has important limitations, and the very idea of a typology itself has become limited. As discussed in the next section, the notion of a Mode 1 transdisciplinarity and the related “theoretical” transdisciplinarity in Nicolescu’s terms were somewhat misleading notions from the start. In contrast, Mode 2 transdisciplinarity has evolved considerably in the last two decades, particularly with regard to its openness to shared methods and theories. The hierarchy introduced by Max-Neef ( 2005 ) between weak and strong transdisciplinarity also seems questionable. To move forward, rather than proposing another typology, it might be more fruitful to engage a dialog between transdisciplinarity as a new discipline and as a way of being . The next section presents the emergence and main characteristics of both the discipline and the way of being . Transdisciplinarity as a discipline can be seen as emerging from “Mode 2” transdisciplinarity as a result of a “bottom-up” mutualization of methodologies and theories. As an exemplary illustration, it can be related to the recent stimulating development of “integration and implementation sciences” (i2S) (Bammer, 2017 ; Bammer et al., 2020 ), although the correspondence is not exact (i2S is larger than transdisciplinarity as a discipline). Insights from complex thought (Morin, 2008 ) and integral theory (Wilber, 1995 ; Esbjörn-Hargens, 2009 ) are used to illustrate transdisciplinarity as a way of being . The third section of this paper presents the complementarities and creative tensions between a transdisciplinary discipline and a way of being before concluding with the added value of the proposed approach.

Mode 2 transdisciplinarity and the discipline of “integration and implementation sciences”

The emergence of a new academic discipline requires a broad research community with a common purpose that collaborates not only on a practical level but also on methodological and theoretical levels. Following this approach, transdisciplinarity as a discipline can be understood in terms of Mode 2 transdisciplinarity and insights from integration and implementation sciences. The notion of Mode 2 transdisciplinarity was adopted in the Zürich congress in 2000 by the major academic transdisciplinarity research community, which ultimately became the Swiss-based TD-net Network for Transdisciplinarity Research (McGregor, 2015a ). The “Zürich approach” discarded the notion of transdisciplinary as a methodology with axioms, as proposed by Nicolescu, which was later labeled “Mode 1” (Scholz and Steiner, 2015 ) or “theoretical” (Nicolescu, 2010 ) transdisciplinarity. According to Klein ( 2014 ), the Zürich congress 2000 was a pivotal event in the evolution of transdisciplinarity discourses. Originally, Mode 2 science was characterized by six principles (Gibbons et al. 1994 ) that would later be used as a basis for an “ideal-type” Mode 2 transdisciplinarity (Scholtz and Steiner, 2015 ): (1) Mode 2 knowledge is produced in the context where it will be applied; (2) it has its own distinct characteristics beyond disciplinary knowledge; (3) Mode 2 is heterogeneous in terms of skills, viewpoints and participants’ experiences; (4) structures are seen as transient and evolving rather than rigidly hierarchical; (5) the resulting knowledge is socially robust and relevant for the actors involved; (6) the quality of the produced knowledge is ensured by adequate criteria and procedures (McGregor, 2015a ). Following the principles of Mode 2, Scholtz and Steiner ( 2015 ) identified a possible “kernel” of transdisciplinary processes, which can be seen as a common purpose for the related community, in “the mutual learning among scientists and practitioners about a complex, societally relevant problem”.

As Mode 2 transdisciplinarity emerged at the expense of the methodology proposed by Nicolescu ( 2010 ), it became characterized by the adjective “practical” by contrast. Because the Zürich approach refused to embrace an overarching methodology (i.e., Nicolescu’s methodology), it became associated with “the refusal to formulate any methodology” (Nicolescu, 2010 ) and, correlatively, with an aversion to theoretical developments. However, recent breakthroughs have led to a move beyond what now appears as an over-simplification, as exemplified by the development of a new discipline of integration and implementation sciences (I2S) (Bammer, 2017 ). Integration and implementation sciences (i2S) does not strictly correspond to transdisciplinarity as it encompasses many other approaches, such as system dynamics, sustainability sciences and action research (Bammer, 2017 ). However, there is a significant overlap, as indicated in the definition of i2S as “a new discipline providing concepts and methods for conducting research on complex, real-world problems” (Bammer, 2017 ). In particular, the domain of application of i2S includes topics such as the synthesis of disciplinary and stakeholder knowledge, the understanding and management of diverse unknowns and the provision of integrated research support for policy and practice change (Bammer, 2017 ). As noted by Bammer ( 2017 ), the development of the i2S discipline was motivated by the difficulty of interdisciplinarity (including transdisciplinarity) in fitting into the mainstream and the fragmentation of methods and academic communities, which led to extensive “reinventing of methods”. A major advance has been to build a methods repository, which is also open to theoretical exchanges and development (Bammer et al., 2020 ). In a post on the i2S blog Footnote 1 presenting discussions held at the 2015 TD-net conference, a group of researchers discuss the role of theory specifically for transdisciplinary research. For this group, “theory makes clear what transdisciplinary researchers value and stand for”, which is why they feel “a responsibility to build and articulate it”. This group also insists on the specificities of transdisciplinarity research and the importance of “holding theory lightly and approaching and using it pragmatically”. While the distance from Nicolescu’s overarching approach clearly remains, such recent reflections unambiguously break with the previous view of a mostly practical transdisciplinarity that is methodology and theory averse.

Transdisciplinarity as a way of being

To date, most academic debates about types of transdisciplinarity have focused on the Mode 2 or Zürich transdisciplinarity approach, on the one hand, and the theoretical work of the quantum physicist Nicolescu ( 2010 ), on the other hand (Scholtz and Steiner, 2015 ; Bernstein, 2015 ; McGregor, 2015a ). Although these debates have yielded stimulating insights regarding, for example, the complementarity of Mode 2 transdisciplinarity with Nicolescu’s axioms, they may have reached a limit. In particular, Nicolescu’s propensity for theoretical developments and his background as a quantum physicist have contributed to the idea of a “theoretical” transdisciplinarity, as he labels it, and even further to a Mode 1 transdisciplinarity, typically associated with the image of the “ivory tower” (Scholtz and Steiner, 2015 ). To move the debate forward, the work of the French philosopher Edgar Morin can be used as a key reference for further exploration. Morin’s work and “complex thought” are widely acknowledged as a major contribution to domains such as philosophy, sociology and biology but, surprisingly, to a lesser degree to transdisciplinarity (compared to Nicolescu). However, Morin is a cosignatory with Nicolescu of the seminal “charter of transdisciplinarity” (Nicolescu et al., 1994 ). Morin himself did not engage in academic debates about transdisciplinarity as Nicolescu did (which is indicative of Morin’s approach to transdisciplinarity as a way of being ). As summarized by Montuori ( 2013 ), “ Morin’s work does not come from an attempt to escape life for an ivory tower (…) but from an effort to immerse himself in it more deeply ”. As several other commentators have noted, Montuori ( 2013 ) shows how Morin’s transdisciplinary work and well-known “complex thought” are deeply integrated with his own life experiences, including events such as the death of his mother and his participation in French resistance, about which Morin constantly reflects in journals and autobiographies. Morin is also deeply engaged in the public and political debate in France. He played a significant role, for example, in the emergence of ecological questions in the public debate (Morin and Kern, 1993 ). For Montuori ( 2013 ), Morin’s transdisciplinary approach “ does not seek to simply solve a problem, but is rather a quest for meaning derived from personal experience ”.

From his own life experiences (such as the lies around his mother’s death when he was a child and his disillusionment with the French communist party), Edgar Morin developed a particularly strong sense of distrust towards self-deception and illusion. He became aware (and then theorized) that every form of knowledge is a construction resulting from specific sources and choices that themselves depend on historical contingencies and personal preferences (Morin, 2008 ). Consequently, transdisciplinarity as a way of being cannot be fairly represented by the biased perception of only one key author, including Edgar Morin. For Gidley ( 2016 ), a diversity of authors and research fields are complementary to Morin’s way of thinking. For example, integral theory shows particularly stimulating complementarities (Gidley, 2016 ; Kelly, 2018 ). In line with the search for a unity of knowledge in Morin’s and Nicolescu’s works (Klein, 2014 ), integral theory is an attempt “to integrate as many approaches, theories and thinkers as possible in a common framework” (Esbjörn-Hargens, 2009 ). On the basis of the philosopher Ken Wilber’s seminal work ( 1995 ), integral theory has been presented as a “theory of everything” that aims to gather “separate paradigms into an interrelated network of approaches that are mutually enriching” (Esbjörn-Hargens, 2009 ). Among other authors (e.g., Gidley, 2016 ; Kelly, 2018 ), Sue McGregor ( 2015b ) has identified some strong complementarities between integral theory and transdisciplinarity, for example, with regard to the consideration of different levels of reality. For this author, integral theory can be seen as an “internal life- and world-processing orientation” (McGregor, 2015b ), which precisely corresponds to the broad definition of transdisciplinarity as a way of being adopted in the present paper. A stimulating complementarity between Integral theory and Edgar Morin’s complex thought lies in the integration of spiritual knowledge: whereas integral theory insists that there is some truth everywhere and gives strong credit to religions as holders of truth, Morin is open to spiritual knowledge but is also constantly skeptical (Montuori, 2013 ; Kelly, 2018 ). This skepticism is related to Morin embodied distrust towards self-deception, errors and illusions, which he sees constantly in knowledge production, including in the realm of science (Montuori, 2013 ; Kelly, 2018 ).

Complementarities and creative tensions

Some important characteristics of the i2S discipline were developed by Bammer et al. ( 2020 ) and can be used as a basis for characterizing transdisciplinarity as a discipline (although the i2S discipline is larger) in comparison with transdisciplinarity as a way of being . When transdisciplinarity is seen as a discipline (as part of i2S), it applies to particular issues or “wicked” problems (Bammer et al., 2020 ). More precisely, expertize in integration and implementation is required at different stages of the problem-solving process, from delimiting the problem to accommodating solutions. Bammer et al. ( 2020 ) also identify different realms where expertize can be found, which are related to communities of professional scientists or associated with academic research projects or research domains (such as unknowns and innovation). From the explorations of Bammer et al. ( 2020 ), it appears that the production of specific knowledge for the discipline of integration and implementation sciences occurs primarily in a community of professional scientists. On the other hand, from the perspective of a transdisciplinary way of being , every problem in real life can be framed as complex (Morin, 2008 ). Moreover, the relevant skills, knowledge and know-how to overcome such complex problems have been developed from ancient times and far beyond academia (Wilber, 1995 ). The way of being lens is also useful to make sense of why the first main practical application domain of Morin’s complex thought was education (Morin, 2002 ; Gidley, 2016 ). Transdisciplinarity as a new discipline and transdisciplinarity as a way of being partly overlap. Notably, the transdisciplinary way of being provides relevant “dispositions” to engage in the transdisciplinary discipline (McGregor, 2015b ). For example, participation in the public debate (agora) can be seen both as a possible characteristic of a transdisciplinary way of being (as exemplified by Edgar Morin) and as essential for the contextualization of problems in research projects (McGregor, 2015b ). Reciprocally, a transdisciplinary discipline provides specific skills and a much-needed space for the expression of the transdisciplinary way of being in academia (Ross and Mitchell, 2018 ).

However, tensions may also occur between transdisciplinarity as a discipline and as a way of being . In particular, this distinction raises the question of the status of consciousness in transdisciplinary research projects. In line with the developmental approach of the psychologist and epistemologist Jean Piaget, who coined the term transdisciplinarity (Nicolescu, 2010 ), a transdisciplinary way of being is embedded in an evolutionary approach to consciousness. A typical expression of Edgar Morin is that “we are at the prehistory of the human mind”, meaning that much of the human mental capacity remains to be explored. To a large extent, Morin’s approach is consistent with the deep exploration of transpersonal psychology by integral scholars (Gidley, 2016 ; Kelly, 2018 ). Transpersonal psychology refers to the integration of the spiritual and transcendent aspects of the human experience with the framework of modern psychology. The transpersonal is defined as “experiences in which the sense of identity or self extends beyond the individual or personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche or cosmos” (Walsh and Vaughan, 1993 ). Correlative with this conception, in the current context of worldwide unprecedented crisis, the transdisciplinary way of being encourages consideration of ideas such as a whole civilization change (Morin, 2011 ) based on an evolution of human thought or consciousness (Botta, 2019 ). However, many transdisciplinary scholars may hesitate to consider these ideas in the solution space of research projects. In particular, the potential tension is apparent in relation to integral theory, which explicitly and significantly includes spiritual knowledge and often associates an evolution of consciousness with processes of “awakening” (Wilber, 1995 ). Although integral theory is currently used by a large number of transdisciplinary scholars (Esbjörn-Hargens, 2009 ), it may be considered by other transdisciplinary scholars to be non-scientific and misleading. This tension is mostly implicit and seldom discussed in the literature, but it can manifest concretely as part of transdisciplinary research projects. Tension can particularly occur between a search for consensus that integrates and respects diverse stakeholders’ viewpoints as they are and the aim of transforming ways of thinking (including those of scientists themselves). In the first case, transdisciplinarity (as a discipline) is a means by which scientists contribute to problem solving. In the second case, transdisciplinarity (as a way of being ) is also a solution that must be enhanced in society at large.

Transdisciplinarity is a promising notion, but its ability to efficiently address the world’s most pressing issues has been intensively debated. To date, most debates have been structured by identifying several types of transdisciplinarity, generally with a theoretical versus practical dichotomy, and their possible linkages. In the last two decades, important efforts to mutualize methodologies and theories have led to the emergence of a discipline of integration and implementation, which enables the conception of transdisciplinarity as a discipline. Somewhat paradoxically, such a discipline seems to emerge from “Mode 2” transdisciplinarity as a result of a “bottom-up” mutualization rather than from the so-called Mode 1 “inner-science” transdisciplinarity. This distinction shows the interpenetration of Mode 2 and Mode 1 transdisciplinarity and the limits of existing typologies of transdisciplinarity. On the other hand, when transdisciplinarity is taken as a way of being , the need for knowledge and know-how for integration and implementation extends far beyond the scope of research projects and appears constantly and ubiquitously in real life. The relevant resources can be found not only in academia but also in domains such as literature and religion, keeping in mind the constant risks of errors and illusion (including in science itself). Compared to existing typologies, the consideration of transdisciplinarity as a discipline and a way of being could generate new insights in the ongoing debate about the potential and effectiveness of transdisciplinary approaches. Complementarities can be considered in terms of personal dispositions for the discipline and of a space for expression for the way of being in academia. The proposed reframing also sheds light on the status of consciousness in transdisciplinary research projects. In a sense, consciousness can be seen as a critical “unknown” for the activity of integration and implementation and a major topic for further investigation.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was funded by the French government IDEX-ISITE initiative 16-IDEX-0001 (CAP 20-25). This paper has benefited from discussions with Isabelle Arpin, Cécile Barnaud, Gaël Plumecocq, and INRAE ACT division (Sciences for Action and Transitions).

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Rigolot, C. Transdisciplinarity as a discipline and a way of being : complementarities and creative tensions. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 7 , 100 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00598-5

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June 10, 2015

Build Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Research Skills

By Patrick McMahon

Discipline-specific research skills can be cultivated both through routine components of the advanced degree, such as required coursework, and other avenues, such as graduate internships. As you work to define and develop a research project, consider seeking relevant opportunities to build a diverse portfolio of research skills and methods.. As you progress toward completion of the degree, consider how you might translate research and data analysis skills into diverse career paths. For more guidance on translating your skills into diverse career paths, visit the Career Exploration and Preparation competency in this guide.

Steps You Can Take

Take on-campus courses.

Many departments offer formal training in the research methods associated with their discipline, allowing students to experiment with different approaches to answering research questions. Because these courses are often offered at an introductory level, it may be useful to revisit or sit in on a course you have already taken again in a later semester after having formulated an independent research project.

Particularly for students who work across disciplines, it may be relevant and useful to enroll in or audit methods courses offered in other fields. This is also a good way to broaden your skill-set in preparation for a variety of academic and non-academic careers. For instance, students in fields that rely primarily on quantitative data may benefit from taking a writing course in preparation for careers that require translating specialized findings for popular audiences or that broadly value strong communication skills. Similarly, many students in humanist and social science fields increasingly discover that their qualitative research and non-academic career preparation may be enhanced through the use of new digital and computational technologies.

Browsing the Berkeley  course catalog  will offer a sense of the wide variety of courses on offer at the University. Note that you may need the permission of the instructor to take a course in another department, and that it is best to request this permission well in advance of the beginning of the course.

Thanks to the Intercampus Exchange and Stanford-Berkeley Exchange  programs , graduate students with an excellent superior academic record may take a limited number of courses that are offered at Stanford or one of the other UC schools, and have the opportunity to make use of special facilities and collections and associate with scholars or fields of study not available on their home campus.

Take Time to Explore Scholarly Publications to Get an Overview of Diverse Research Approaches

While your department may specialize in a particular set of research approaches or methods, you may also wish to review other methods practiced by colleagues in the field, by academics in other disciplines, or (depending on your field) by practitioners associated with your field of study. Reviewing scholarly publications may inspire new research approaches or expand skills not necessarily honed in your home department, pinpointing new ways to distinguish and diversify your professional portfolio. The Library also offers  subject librarians who are available for consultation on particular research projects.

Participate in Working Groups and Attend On-Campus Lectures and Training Sessions

Advanced students may also wish to form research groups based on shared methods or questions that allow them to discuss the opportunities and issues associated with their approach. Creating and participating in research-based discussion groups can help not only to advance your research, but to cultivate leadership and collaboration skills valued in many professions. Some programs on campus, such as the  Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities , have existing groups that you can join and provide support for new working groups .

The Berkeley  D-Lab  offers many resources for acquiring computational and technical skills, which are now broadly used across academic disciplines and various career paths. D-Lab training workshops focus on a wide range of topics, which in the past have included workshops on Text Analysis Fundamentals, Preparing Your Data for Qualitative Data Analysis, Introduction to Georeferencing, and Introduction to Artificial Neural Networks. They also regularly hold training workshops to build skills in a variety of platforms and programming languages, such as Excel, R, Python, and more. Find upcoming trainings and workshops on the D-lab’s Upcoming Workshops page .

The D-Lab also hosts a team of  consultants  who offer free appointments and drop-in hours for advising and troubleshooting on qualitative and quantitative research design, modeling, data collection, data management, analysis, presentation, and related techniques and technologies. Should you have advanced skills in these areas, consider applying to become a graduate consultant at D-Lab.

Participate in Lab Rotations

Many lab-based disciplines have formal programs of lab rotations that allow students to explore a potential research area and develop practical skills. The research rotation offers the opportunity to learn new experimental techniques, gain familiarity with different areas of research, experience the operating procedures of diverse types of labs, and identify mentors within the discipline. While the academic objective is to identify a lab in which to conduct dissertation research, skills gained on rotation can also provide relevant training for research projects and career prospects beyond the dissertation.

In recent years, some non-lab-based disciplines have found it useful to model their operations on the lab-based disciplines. If you are unsure, consider asking your advisors and faculty working in your research area if they have a lab group. For more on lab groups in the humanities, see “ Designing a Lab in the Humanities ,”  Chronicle of Higher Education  (2017).

Serve as a Graduate Student Researcher (GSR)

As in the lab rotation, participation in research projects as a GSR allows students to gain experience, identify strengths, and develop specialized interests. Work with your GSR supervisor to ensure that you are able to make the most of the opportunity: if you want to gain experience approaching the research question through the use of specific tools or methods, it is worth discussing the possibility with your research supervisor.

Be sure to keep track of the different skills you cultivate as part of the assistantship—when requesting recommendation letters to apply for jobs in subsequent years, it will be useful to remind your supervisor of the specific work you did for them. You may be surprised by how many of the disciplinary research skills honed in an assistantship correlate to desired qualifications for various professional positions and translate readily between academic and non-academic contexts. For examples, see Margaret Newhouse, “ Transferring Your Skills to a Non-Academic Setting ,”  Chronicle of Higher Education  (1998) and Stacy Hartman, “ Transferable Skills and How To Talk About Them ,”  MLA Connected Academics  (2016).

Complete Training in Responsible Conduct of Research

Your research may require you to protect the privacy of human subjects, to observe standards for research using animals, and/or to respect the rights of others to be recognized as contributors through proper citation, co-authorship, and obtaining copyright permissions. Online courses, workshops, and staff in the  Sponsored Projects Office  (SPO) can help you learn about these topics, and the Human Research Protection Program can answer questions about the process of getting approval for research with human subjects. 

Learning to use appropriate research methods and apply standards for responsible conduct provides practical experience for any future research-based career, but also engages broader critical-thinking skills about the ethics of research practices, protocols, and data analysis. The ability to conduct research responsibly in an academic setting testifies to the rigor and dedication that can make Ph.D.s appealing candidates for a variety of academic and professional careers.

Use Academic Breaks to Attend Intensive Skill-Building Programs

Some campus programs and centers offer high-intensity short-courses that take place during the spring or summer breaks. For instance, graduate students considering a career in industry or tech sometimes participate in summer bootcamps for coding or other technical skills, or participate in D-Lab summer trainings. These types of programs typically offer certificates of attendance or completion that should be listed (when relevant) on a CV or resume. In addition to the competencies they explicitly provide, they also attest to your ability to acquire a host of new skills in a short period of time.

Explore Bay Area Computational and Data Analysis Skill-Building Resources

As the home to Silicon Valley and multiple world-class universities, the Bay Area is an ideal location for those interested in learning, using, and building careers around computational and technical skills. Students looking to build computational or technical skills may also wish to participate in workshops or attend events at area hubs like the  Stanford Literary Lab  or the  UC Davis Postharvest Technology Center . Groups also exist for connecting locals with technical skills to burgeoning employment opportunities. For instance,  Tech SF  (a branch of the  Bay Area Video Coalition ) seeks to help unemployed tech professionals get the skills they need for a continually changing job market.

Take Advantage of Online Skill-Building Resources

Many discipline-specific, interdisciplinary, and generalist resources exist online for those seeking to expand their technical repertoire—particularly in the realm of computational skills. The  Institute for Digital Research and Education  offers resources, events, and consulting for UC-affiliates, including a wealth of materials accessible online.  BerkeleyX  provides free online courses in a variety of subjects for currently enrolled students, while sites like  Coursera ,  Code Academy  offer a mix of free and low-cost training sessions. Students employed by the University can also access many training videos and courses on LinkedIn Learning .

Students of color can explore the resources offered by the Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational & Mixed Methods , which focuses on advancing scholars of color in data science and diverse methodologies.

Acquire Foreign Language Skills Relevant to Research

Certain fields may require students to acquire foreign language skills as part of their progress to degree. However, even when not required, students may wish to acquire new language skills independently, either as a supplement to their academic research or as a bridge to a variety of future careers. UC Berkeley offers instruction in over 80 languages, and fellowships such as the  FLAS  and  Fulbright  are available for graduate students undertaking language study. With its emphasis on the study of critical and less commonly taught foreign languages, the FLAS program is designed to lead into careers in university teaching, government service, or other employment where knowledge of foreign languages and cultures is essential. Participation in the Fulbright program, which offers an English Teaching Assistant program and fellowships for study and research abroad, opens up a wide variety of career paths for graduate students, including  foreign service , academia, and many more.

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Article contents

Interdisciplinarity: its meaning and consequences.

• Raymond C. Miller Raymond C. Miller Department of International Relations, San Francisco State University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.92
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 20 November 2017
• This version: 27 August 2020
• Previous version

Interdisciplinarity is an analytically reflective study of the methodological, theoretical, and institutional implications of implementing interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and research. Interdisciplinary approaches in the social sciences began in the 1920s. At a minimum, they involve the application of insights and perspectives from more than one conventional discipline to the understanding of social phenomena. The formal concept of interdisciplinarity entered the literature in the early 1970s. The scholars responsible all shared the thought that the scientific enterprise had become less effective due to disciplinary fragmentation and that a countermovement for the unification of knowledge was the proper response. However, not all interdisciplinarians believe that the unification of existing knowledge is the answer.

There are many ways of differentiating between types of interdisciplinary approaches. One classification distinguishes between multidisciplinary, crossdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches. Multidisciplinary approaches involve the simple act of juxtaposing parts of several conventional disciplines in an effort to get a broader understanding of some common theme or problem. Crossdisciplinary approaches involve real interaction across the conventional disciplines, though the extent of communication; thus, combination, synthesis, or integration of concepts and/or methods vary considerably. Transdisciplinary approaches, meanwhile, involve articulated conceptual frameworks that seek to transcend the more limited world views of the specialized conventional disciplines. Even though many believe that interdisciplinary efforts can create innovative knowledge, the power structure of the disciplinary academy resists interdisciplinary inroads on its authority and resources.

• academic discipline
• area studies
• interdisciplinary approaches
• interdisciplinarity
• interdiscipline
• multidisciplinary
• cross-disciplinary
• transdisciplinary

Updated in this version

Updated references; major revisions throughout.

Introduction

As early as the 1920s, the US Social Science Research Council (SSRC) recognized that, in only several decades after its invention, the departmental/disciplinary structure of the university was becoming an obstacle to effectively addressing comprehensive social problems. Especially in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the Rockefeller Foundation and then the Ford Foundation worked with the SSRC to fund interdisciplinary research and teaching in US higher education. In the early Cold War era, area studies programs were major recipients of that funding. As a consequence, international studies during this period were often conceptualized as interdisciplinary (Calhoun, 2017 ). At the founding of the International Studies Association (ISA) in 1959 , its mission statement explicitly states that the ISA “promotes interdisciplinary approaches to problems that cannot fruitfully be examined from the confines of a single discipline” ( International Studies Perspectives , May, 2007 , back cover).

The first section of this essay is a historical survey of selected professional literature on interdisciplinary studies, beginning with the classic 1972 OECD Report on its Paris conference (Apostel, 1972 ). It was the first major book entitled Interdisciplinarity . To achieve some conceptual clarity on the many varieties of interdisciplinary activity in the academy, basic terms were defined and a typology proposed. The second major part of this essay is structured by that typology of multidisciplinary, crossdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches. Since all of these categories rely on disciplines as the core ingredient, discipline is also defined.

In recent years, the concept interdisciplinarity has become popular among scholars. Many books and articles have it in their titles. Books on interdisciplinary approaches vary from those promoting interdisciplinarity (Farrell, Lusatia, & Vanden Hove, 2013 ) to those denigrating it and praising the superior qualities of the disciplines (Jacobs, 2014 ). Furthermore, the widespread discussion of interdisciplinarity does not mean that it has politically succeeded in the academy. By and large the conventional disciplines have maintained their power over the university and funding bureaucracies. The last section of this essay discusses the varying fortunes of interdisciplinary approaches in the academy, especially in reference to international relations.

Historical Survey of Select Literature

The noun interdisciplinarity made its professional debut in a 1972 publication from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The report, entitled Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities (Apostel, 1972 ), was sponsored by OECD’s Parisian-based Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. The Report had chapters written by scholars from six different European countries: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Though there were many differences between them, they all shared the thought that the scientific enterprise had become less effective due to disciplinary fragmentation, and that a counter movement for the unification of knowledge was the proper response. The problem was “how to unify knowledge and what the many implications of such unity are for teaching and research in the universities …” (Apostel, 1972 , p. 11). Unification “means the integration of concepts and methods in these disciplines” (pp. 11–12). A number of unifying schemas were proposed, including mathematics, linguistic structuralism, Marxism and general systems. Although the authors had different “transdisciplinary” proposals, they all agreed that “interdisciplinarity is a way of life. It is basically a mental outlook which combines curiosity with open mindedness and a spirit of adventure and discovery. . . .” It is practiced collectively. . . . It teaches that there can be no discontinuity between education and research” (Apostel, p. 285).

In addition to a number of important theoretical articles, the OECD report had a major emphasis on the design and implementation of interdisciplinary universities. The authors of that section, Asa Briggs of Sussex University and Guy Michaud of the University of Paris, gave as their sample model an interdisciplinary university with a special emphasis on international relations. They believed that because the field of international relations had the most complex connections, it necessarily involved the study of many methods, disciplines, issues, languages, and geographical areas. All students of their proposed university were expected to be familiar with the basic approaches and concepts of anthropology, politics, economics, international law, ecology, geography, history, sociology, and ethno-psychology (Apostel, 1972 , pp. 253–257).

Chronologically, the next major book that addressed the general issue of interdisciplinarity in the university setting was entitled Interdisciplinarity and Higher Education . It was published in 1979 , and its editor was Joseph Kockelmans, the Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Pennsylvania State University. Possibly because he was European-educated, his orientation was similar to the authors of the OECD Report. He argued that only through “philosophical reflection” can the society’s intellectuals approach the “totality of meaning.” To overcome the fragmented worlds that they have created, they need to reach agreement not only on the position of the sciences, but also on “religion, morality, the arts and our sociopolitical praxis” (Kockelmans, 1979 , pp. 153–158). However, Kockelmans was opposed to using a pre-existing framework, such as the ones listed above in the OECD Report, or the logical positivism of the Unification of Science movement spearheaded by the Vienna Circle in the 1930s. None of them fulfilled the comprehensive vision that Kockelmans advocated.

In October of 1984 , OECD, in collaboration with the Swedish National Board of Universities and Colleges, decided to hold a conference to revisit the concept and experience of interdisciplinarity. More than half of the participants were from Sweden, and almost half of them were from one university, Linköping. Linköping University was especially interested in the topic because it had instituted a doctoral program based on four interdisciplinary themes (technology and social change, water in environment and society, health and society, and communication). The proceedings of the conference were published under the title Interdisciplinarity Revisited: Re-Assessing the Concept in the Light of Institutional Experience (Levin & Lind, 1985 ). Essentially the conferees agreed that the early enthusiasm for an interdisciplinary revolution was dampened by the realities of societal and institutional politics. Interdisciplinary research and teaching were still happening, but they were easier to accomplish if the participants did not boldly label them as such. The advisability of keeping a low profile was due to the fact that the “magical slot” from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s, in which interdisciplinary innovation had flourished, was replaced by a more conservative period in which disciplines reasserted their authority. George Papadopoulos of the OECD concluded that, “interdisciplinarity, even when it succeeds in unscrambling existing curricula, remains a hostage to the disciplines” (Levin & Lind, 1985 , p. 208).

The first major work on interdisciplinarity by an American-educated scholar was published in 1990 by Julie Thompson Klein, professor of humanities at Wayne State University. Her book is entitled Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory and Practice . Rather than making an argument for a particular approach, Klein provided a compilation of all the existing literature across all fields of knowledge. She concluded her extensive survey by observing:

Interdisciplinarity has been variously defined in this century: as a methodology, a concept, a process, a way of thinking, a philosophy, and a reflexive ideology. It has been linked with attempts to expose the dangers of fragmentation, to reestablish old connections, to explore emerging relationships, and to create new subjects adequate to handle our practical and conceptual needs. Cutting across all these theories is one recurring idea. Interdisciplinarity is a means of solving problems and answering questions that cannot be satisfactorily addressed using single methods or approaches. Whether the context is a short-range instrumentality or a long-range reconceptualization of epistemology, the concept represents an important attempt to define and establish common ground. (Klein, 1990 , p. 196)

Nowhere in Julie Klein’s extensive bibliography (97 pages long) is there mention of the term international relations or international studies , although she does have a section on area studies.

In 1997 , the Academia Europaea and the European Commission organized a conference in Cambridge, England around the topic “Interdisciplinarity and the Organisation of Knowledge in Europe.” The conference proceedings were published in 1999 under the same title (Cunningham, ed.). There were 24 contributors from 11 countries with most (9) coming from the United Kingdom. Several contributors referred back to the seminal article by Erich Jantsch in the 1972 OECD pioneering publication. Collectively they agreed that modern disciplines were a product of the scientific revolution of the 19th century . The specialized research entities of the University of Berlin seem to have been the origin of the disciplinary structure of knowledge. “Focusing scholarly attention on the essence or nucleus of the individual subject led inevitably to the putting-up of barriers” (Rüegg, 1999 , pp. 34–35). The division into insular, specialized disciplines was seen by sociologists as an almost inevitable outcome of the differentiation associated with the process of industrialization. John Ziman argued that the impetus toward greater and greater specialization had to do with the scholarly requirement for originality. It’s easier to be a “big frog in a small pond” (Ziman, 1999 , pp. 74–75). He concluded his essay by contending that “disciplines stand for stability and uniformity,” whereas “interdisciplinarity is a code word for diversity and adaptability” (pp. 81–82).

In the United States, some of the young scholars in international relations observed the disciplinary narrowing of the field and decided to publish a book in 2000 entitled Beyond Boundaries: Disciplines, Paradigms, and Theoretical Integration in International Studies (Sil & Doherty, 2000 ). A review (Miller, 2001 ) appearing in the newsletter of the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies observed that the book does not deliver on its promise to meaningfully discuss disciplines, paradigms, and theoretical integration; however, it does juxtapose different theoretical positions while calling for international relations scholars to be tolerant and willing to cross boundaries between disciplines and schools of thought.

In 2002 , an English academic, Joe Moran, published a book that he simply entitled Interdisciplinarity . Though broad in comprehension, it focuses on English and cultural studies. He argued that the institutional implications of openly pursuing interdisciplinary approaches are inevitably political, both in the hierarchy of knowledge and in the allocation of material resources (Moran, 2002 ). Oxford University Press decided to enter this academic realm by publishing the Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (Froderman, Klein, & Mitcham, 2010 ). None of the 37 chapters are primarily on international studies, though one of the chapters uses area studies as an example (Calhoun & Rhoten, 2010 ). In 2017 , the Handbook came out in a second edition (Froderman). Its 46 chapters address many issues, ranging from funding to pedagogy. However, there is still no chapter dedicated to international studies. The philosopher and editor Robert Froderman argued that “interdisciplinarity is the bridge between academic sophists (disciplinarians) and the rest of society” (p. 7).

In 2009 , Pami Aalto of Tampere University in Finland embarked on a major project to discuss and showcase interdisciplinary approaches in international studies. Two books emerged from the project. The first was International Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches (Aalto, Harle & Moisio, 2011 ), and the second, Global and Regional Problems: Towards an Interdisciplinary Study (Aalto, Harle, & Moisio, 2012 ). Aalto and his fellow editors argue, “We want to assert that International Studies—as a wider field of studies than International Relations—must necessarily be more interdisciplinary than International Relations ever was during its golden era from the 1950s onwards” (Aalto et al., 2011 , p. 3). They observed that, in the inter-war period, international studies was an interdisciplinary field with materials and perspectives drawn from many fields and disciplines. They noted that this sense of the field was spelled out in the 1939 League of Nations publication University Teaching of International Relations (Zimmern) as well as Quincy Wright’s magnum opus The Study of International Relations ( 1955 ). Despite Wright’s extraordinary effort to synthesize over 20 fields into the study of international relations, his influence over the subsequent development of the field has been minimal. International relations, especially in the United States from the 1950s on, has become more and more embedded in political science. A key reason for this evolution was the focus on the cold war power conflict. Ironically, a major intellectual force in this development was Quincy Wright’s colleague at the University of Chicago, Hans Morgenthau. However, with the end of the Cold War era, Aalto and his fellow editors were hoping for the emergence of a broader, more diverse, interdisciplinary approach to international studies (Aalto et al., 2011 , pp. 11–19).

In 2013 , two European-based scholars, Andrew Barry and Georgina Born, published a book in which they claimed to rethink what is meant by interdisciplinarity, entitled Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences . For instance, the authors challenge the conventional statement that interdisciplinary activity is about combining and integrating knowledge from existing disciplines. They believe that interdisciplinarity is about gathering knowledge from all available sources, not just disciplines. They point to community-based knowledge, local experience, and indigenous knowledge, among other sources. Also, they start with the premise that neither disciplinary nor interdisciplinary activities are monolithic or unchanging. Disciplines do have the political advantage in the academy because they usually control the curriculum and the budgets that include faculty hiring. Thus, the disciplines have considerable control over the conditions that determine the degree of receptivity to interdisciplinary research and teaching in any particular university setting. In Barry and Born’s opinion, truly interdisciplinary activities have qualities that differentiate them positively from the disciplines. These three qualities are accountability, innovation, and ontology. Accountability means being more responsive to societal needs. Innovation means being more practical about the problems that are addressed. And ontology means that interdisciplinary activities are more likely to be relational, holistic, and to view humans as being embedded in nature. Also, they respect the participation of the public in the discovery and application of knowledge. But interdisciplinary programs come and go. Some have staying power and become established interdisciplines, even new disciplines. Some get absorbed, whereas others disappear altogether. “The chapters in this book attest to the heterogeneity that characterises both disciplines and interdisciplines and the necessity of probing the genealogies of particular interdisciplinary problematics” (Barry & Born, 2013 , p. 41).

The American Political Science Association noted the increasing popularity of interdisciplinary rhetoric and practice, and in 2007 , they established a Task Force to study it. The report of the Task Force was published under the title Interdisciplinarity: Its Role in a Discipline-Based Academy (Aldrich, 2014 ). The report is interesting because of the obvious tension that permeates the document between proponents of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. The first chapter reiterates the value of disciplines. The Task Force Chair, John Aldrich, argued that disciplines are the foundation of knowledge and the academy. In his view, interdisciplinary efforts often lack valid and reliable measures for judging scholarship and teaching, and thus are inherently inferior. Nevertheless, in a subsequent chapter, four pioneers of interdisciplinary scholarship argued for the superior merits of interdisciplinary approaches. The four are David Easton (systems), R. Duncan Luce (cognitive science), and Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph (area studies). In fact, Easton stated, “I don’t see anything that can possibly be exciting and not be interdisciplinary. I think the disciplines have sort of exhausted their contributions to our understanding of politics” (Aldrich, 2014 , p. 55). Lloyd Rudolph concluded his interview by offering this reflection: “I realize that it is not only that I value interdisciplinarity but also that I value being allowed to think out of the box of disciplinary methods. New concepts reveal new realities” (Aldrich, 2014 , p. 72).

In 2013 and 2015 , two books were published that had both “interdisciplinary” and “international relations” in their titles. The first was Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International Law and International Relations: The State of the Art , edited by Jeffrey Dunoff and Mark Pollack ( 2013 ). A more accurate title would have been “interdisciplinary perspectives on the historical relationship between international law and international relations.” The authors noted that during the inter-war period, scholars in the two fields worked very closely together. However, with the advent of World War II and the rise of realism as the dominant theory in international relations, the study of law was considered irrelevant, as unenforceable international law does not affect the behavior of nation-states. Furthermore, normative law was considered too non-scientific for the post-World War II behavioralists/positivists political scientists. It’s worth noting that the editors consider international relations a discipline and that they seem to use it interchangeably with political science. With the rise of other theories in international relations that challenged the dominance of realism, international law became a more acceptable ingredient of international relations scholarship in the 1990s and thereafter. However, instead of a more equal relationship between two disciplines, international law was often considered a subject rather than a discipline. Or as the editors put it, “the intellectual terms of trade were asymmetrical” (Dunoff & Pollack, 2013 , p. 649). The interdisciplinary perspective of the editors and their fellow authors is reflected in their call for more pragmatic, eclectic theoretical approaches drawn from both international relations and international law. “Our call therefore is not for token inclusion of international law approaches, but rather for an interdisciplinary version of the pragmatic, analytically eclectic, tool-kit approach” (p. 653).

The second book, edited by Patrick James and Steve Yetiv, was Advancing Interdisciplinary Approaches to International Relations (Yetiv & James, 2015 ). Their advancement illustration is the application of many perspectives from different disciplines and interdisciplines to the topic of conflict studies. These include history, political science, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, gender studies, technology studies, demography, and systems analysis (p. 324).

In 2016 , the British Academy published a report on its investigation of interdisciplinary research and teaching in higher education in the United Kingdom. It is entitled Crossing Paths: Interdisciplinary Institutions, Careers, Education and Applications . The working group was chaired by David Soskice of the London School of Economics. In his preface, he recognized the need to promote interdisciplinarity. According to him, this was necessary because the universities, the research councils, the journals and publishers were organized along disciplinary lines. “The incentive structures set up by the interplay of these institutions militates against interdisciplinarity” (p. 5). Then, paradoxically, Soskice went on to argue, as did the group report, that the best way to promote interdisciplinarity is the support of “strong disciplines” (Soskice, 2016 , p. 6). This seems like a strategy that would perpetuate the problem they have identified. The group recommended that junior faculty should first make their reputations in a home discipline. Only then would it be safe to venture into interdisciplinary territory (p. 9). However, once socialized in the discipline’s world view, it’s less likely that faculty will venture into interdisciplinary territory.

The British Academy report recognizes that getting a credible and fair evaluation of interdisciplinary research is very difficult in a discipline-controlled environment. Nevertheless, the working group recommended “evaluating the whole and not just disciplinary parts of any interdisciplinary output. The quality of interdisciplinary work lies in the way that it brings disciplines together” (Soskice, 2016 , p. 10). The evaluation chapter provides a set of guidance questions for research-review panels for evaluating interdisciplinary research proposals. One of the questions asks whether the proposal shows “an understanding of the challenges of interdisciplinary integration, including methodological integration, and the human side of fostering interactions and communication.” Therefore, it is not surprising that the chapter ends with the statement, “a focus on interdisciplinarity revives a sense of the academy as a holistic intellectual and social organism, integrated into the wider community, in which multiple flows and exchanges between all of its parts ensure its vitality” (Soskice, 2016 , p. 70).

In 2019 , Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies dedicated an entire issue to the work of the most prolific American scholar of interdisciplinarity, Julie Thompson-Klein (Augsburg, 2019 ). Her newest book is scheduled to be published in 2021 with the title Beyond Interdisciplinarity: Boundary Work, Communication, and Collaboration in the 21st Century . The book focuses on a full range of sector-crossing, including not only academic disciplines, but also occupational professions, interdisciplinary fields, public and private spheres, local communities, project stakeholders, and countries and cultures across the globe, wherever knowledge production is occurring. This new book is an update and extension of her earlier work, Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities (1996) .

Academic Discipline

Disciplines are the basic units in the structure of knowledge that have been “historically delineated by departmentalization. Within each discipline there are rational, accidental, and arbitrary factors responsible for the peculiar combination of subject matter, techniques of investigation, orienting thought models, principles of analysis, methods of explanation and aesthetic standards” (Miller, 1982 , p. 4). They constitute the bureaucratic subcultures of the modern university. The modern disciplinary system was established at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century .

Many scholars have tried their hand at the task of explicating the characteristics of an academic discipline, but the list provided by Arthur King and John Brownell ( 1966 ) in The Curriculum and the Disciplines of Knowledge still seems among the clearest and most comprehensive. Below is this author’s version of their original list:

Field of demarcated study (subject matter boundaries, inclusions and exclusions).

Shared set of underlying premises (basic assumptions about how the world works).

Shared set of concepts (jargon).

Shared set of organizing theories/models (explanatory frameworks).

Shared set of truth-determining methods (what counts as data—how to make sense of them—i.e. research protocols).

Shared set of values and norms (preferred approaches to the material field that is studied by the discipline—e.g. economists prefer the approach of the free market; also preferred conduct by the practitioners of the discipline).

These six qualities cumulatively come together as a unique perspective—a coherent world view—a disciplinary paradigm or matrix.

Community of scholars who share this world view (professional identity—academic tribes ).

Shared set of literature and great scholars in the discipline.

Agreement on what to teach (structure and content of the basic texts and curriculum from the introductory course to the advanced graduate seminars).

Means of reinforcing the professional standards (graduate training, hiring and tenure control, associations, conferences, peer-reviewed journals, and grant-making processes).

Departmental home in a college/university (bureaucratic recognition, resource allocation and territorial ownership).

Ideal-type conceptualizations of this nature have great heuristic value, but applying them in the “real world” becomes problematic. After all, every group of faculty organized around a defined academic interest that has aspirations for permanence, wish to be known, at least eventually, as a discipline. Recognition as a discipline means more prestige and the prospect of more dependable institutional support. A working solution to this definitional problem is to limit the designation of discipline to those departmental groupings that appeared at the beginning of the 20th century and have institutionally solidified their presence in the academy over the past 100 plus years. John Ziman called them the “Grand Old Disciplines” ( 1999 , p. 73). Thus, in the social sciences, the conventional and building-block disciplines would be Anthropology, Economics, Geography, History, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology. Without some kind of limitation on the use of the designation discipline, even the distinction between discipline and interdisciplinary can become meaningless. Nevertheless, the solution proposed is admittedly an arbitrary one, but the historical process that created these disciplinary conglomerates in the first place was also a relatively arbitrary process. Eric Wolf argued that the field of classical political economy was divided into the specialized disciplines of economics, political science, sociology and anthropology in a process that lost touch with the real world.

Ostensibly engaged in the study of human behavior, the various disciplines parcel out the subject among themselves. Each then proceeds to set up a model, seemingly a means to explain “hard,” observable facts, yet actually an ideologically loaded scheme geared to a narrow definition of subject matter. (Wolf, 1982 , p. 10)

The establishment of these specialized disciplines at the beginning of the 20th century has been called the “academic enclosure” process (Becher, 1989 ). In a few decades, these disciplines had enclosed themselves in departmental organizations that gave them long-term bureaucratic protection. Yet these disciplines, according to Weingart and Stehr, are “the eyes through which modern society sees and forms its images about the world, frames its experience, and learns, thus shaping its own future or reconstituting the past” (Weingart & Stehr, 1999 , p. xi). Stephen Turner argued that “disciplines are shotgun marriages . . . and are kept together by the reality of the market and the value of the protection of the market that has been created by employment requirements and expectations (Turner, 1999 , p. 55). Turner believed that the disciplines’ animosity toward interdisciplinary initiatives was primarily driven by protectionism (p. 50).

The seventh disciplinary characteristic notes that the first six qualities come together in a world view that is unique to each discipline. Comparing world view components is a useful method for both disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholars. The concept has German origins and has been productively utilized in many academic and non-academic venues for 150 years. This author was introduced into the way anthropologists use the world view method by Robert Redfield ( 1956 ). According to Redfield, every culture or sub-culture has a world view, its embedded “mental map.” It provides guidance on the nature of the world, how we know the truth about it, what is right and wrong behavior, and what emotionally matters the most. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff contended that “World views are complex neural circuits fixed in the brain. People can only understand what fits the neural circuitry in their brains. Real facts can be filtered out by world views” (Lakoff, 2017 ). Critical psychologist Michael Mascolo noted “the concept of world view is founded on the epistemological principle that observation of the physical and social world is a mediated rather than a direct process” (Mascolo, 2014 , p. 2086). He reaffirmed Redfield’s point that a complete world view has an ontology, an epistemology, and a normative belief system.

Table 1. Post-World War II Macro Social Sciences: Comparative Attributes

Source : Miller, R. C. ( 2018 ). International political economy: Contrasting world views (2nd ed., p. 17). London, UK: Routledge.

This author has used world view as the comparative method in understanding the different schools of thought in international political economy (Miller, 2018 ). One step in this process was identifying the comparative attributes of the basic contributing disciplines. A summary of that analysis is in Table 1 : Post World War II Macro Social Sciences: Comparative Attributes. Economics, political science, and sociology are compared in six fundamental dimensions: core subject matter, central concepts, explanatory strategies, normative orientation, data collection, and data analysis.

Interdisciplinary Approaches

Interdisciplinary approaches in the social sciences involve, at a minimum, the application of insights and perspectives from more than one conventional discipline to the understanding of social phenomena. Interdisciplinarity , on the other hand, is an analytically reflective study of the methodological, theoretical, and institutional implications of implementing interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and research. Strictly speaking, interdisciplinarians are those who engage in the scholarly field of interdisciplinarity, though there are many faculty and others who participate effectively in interdisciplinary projects without being reflexive about its methods, theories, and institutional arrangements. On the other hand, interdisciplinary participants are more likely to be aware of their underlying world views than disciplinarians.

There are many ways of differentiating between types of interdisciplinary approaches, and in fact, of defining the basic term, interdisciplinary. For instance, the National Academies of Science propose that:

“Interdisciplinary research is a mode of research by teams or individuals that integrates information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts, and/or theories from two or more disciplines or bodies of specialized knowledge to advance fundamental understanding or to solve problems whose solutions are beyond the scope of a single discipline or area of research practice.” (National Academy of Sciences, 2005 , p. 39)

This definition privileges the process of “integration” as well as identifying “disciplines” as the primary source of the ingredients to be integrated. Lisa Lattuca, in her faculty-interview study Creating Interdisciplinarity ( 2001 ) argued that post-structuralists, like herself and all the humanities professors and most of the social science professors in her study, reject both of these privileging assumptions. They argue that integration presumes harmonious order, whereas reality may be full of oppositions and contradictions, and that using disciplines as the basic raw material legitimizes their monopoly over knowledge. However, all of the natural scientists in her study were comfortable with the type of definition proposed by the National Academies (Lattuca, 2001 , p. 104). The Political Science Task Force Report also accepted it. Nevertheless, interdisciplinary approaches could be broadened to include the processes of juxtaposition, application, synthesis, and transcendence as well as integration.

By utilizing this broader definition of interdisciplinary approaches that includes processes other than integration, the logic of the original OECD typology retains its efficacy. That typology divided interdisciplinary approaches into multidisciplinary, crossdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary. What follows is this author’s version of that typology.

Multidisciplinary Approaches

Multidisciplinary approaches involve the simple act of juxtaposing parts of several conventional disciplines in an effort to get a broader understanding of some common theme or problem. No systematic effort is made to combine or integrate across these disciplines. This is the weakest interdisciplinary approach, and it actually enhances the stature of the participating disciplines because their identities and practices are not threatened. They do not need to change any of their protocols, yet they can claim their openness to interdisciplinary cooperation. Cafeteria-style curricula, team-taught courses, ad hoc research teams, and conference panels could be examples of this approach.

Crossdisciplinary Approaches

Crossdisciplinary approaches involve real interaction across the conventional disciplines, though the extent of communication and thus combination, synthesis or integration of concepts and/or methods varies considerably. Since the variety of crossdisciplinary approaches is so great, this author has created a further six-fold typology. The six sub-categories of crossdisciplinary approaches are: (a) topics of social interest, (b) professional preparation, (c) shared analytical methods, (d) shared concepts, (e) hybrids, and (f) shared life experiences (Miller, 1982 ). Hundreds of crossdisciplinary combinations have been created over the course of the last 100 years. Some of these combinations have been ephemeral, some long lasting, but poorly articulated, and some have developed an institutionalized coherence that rivals the conventional disciplines. The latter in this author’s taxonomy are the interdisciplines . David Long, one of the authors in Aalto’s first book called them “neodisciplines” (Long, 2011 , pp. 52–59).

Transdisciplinary Approaches

Transdisciplinary approaches, according to Jantsch’s classic essay ( 1972 ), involve articulated conceptual frameworks that seek to transcend the more limited world views of the specialized disciplines. These frameworks are holistic in intent. In the 1972 OECD volume, the transdisciplinary approaches mentioned were general systems, structuralism, Marxism, and mathematics. The 21st century transdisciplinary movement in Europe believes that the broader public should be involved in providing, testing, evaluating, and implementing knowledge across all fields. Academic disciplines, therefore, are only a part of the picture.

Social Topics

Important social topics frequently attract members from several disciplines. They start out as multidisciplinary groupings, but over time continuous communication creates a new crossdisciplinary field of study. Examples would include environmental studies, cognitive science, gerontology, labor studies, peace studies, and urban studies. The study of geographical regions, area studies, is an interesting topical example because of its close relationship to international relations.

Professional Preparation

Another organizing principle for crossdisciplinary combinations is relevant knowledge for professional preparation . Examples include business management, diplomatic studies, education, public administration, health services, and policy studies. There are undoubtedly more students, faculty, and practitioners in this professional category than in any of the other categories, but the self-conscious attention to their interdisciplinary nature is very limited. Nevertheless, there are exceptions; for instance, Donald Schön ( 1983 ) in his book The Reflective Practitioner observed that the professions are split between the rational technocratic view of the more theoretical and conventional perspective vs. the more particularistic uncertainty of the actual field situations. He tried to find a middle ground between these extremes by proposing a reflexive approach that combines theory and practice. He argued that professionals should be aware of the frames within which they operate so that they are open to critiquing the one they are using and even shift to another if the situation requires it. Schon’s proposed approach is similar to the interdisciplinary method of comparative world views or multi-perspective analysis (Miller, 1982 ).

Policy studies, a growing field in recent years, manifest this internal tension rather dramatically. In the early 1950s, Harold Lasswell expressed his belief that through a rational and scientific process the best policy options could be identified and implemented toward the betterment of democratic objectives. Some of the analytical methods he advocated, such as benefit/cost analysis, are still being applied today. However, his approach has been criticized as being undemocratic, that is, “scientists know better,” and incredibly unrealistic as the political decision-making process is anything but rational. Studying the “different perspectives that underlie conflict in public policy arenas . . . is more illuminating and ultimately more practical than quixotically tilting at scientific windmills” (Smith & Larimer, 2009 , p. 18).

Shared Analytical Methods

Similar research methods, especially the quantitative ones, are often shared across the disciplines. They provide a basis for bringing methods-oriented faculty members together in more permanent crossdisciplinary associations. These groups have conferences, journals, and even academic programs. Examples of these shared analytical methods include statistics, computer modeling, game theory, and information theory (Miller, 1982 ). However, despite the potential cost savings, conventional disciplinary departments are usually unwilling to replace their own methods courses with the more generic ones from these crossdisciplinary programs.

Shared Concepts

There are some major concepts that appear in many disciplines that have the potential for crossdisciplinary integration. Classic examples of shared concepts include energy, value, flows, role, evolution, development, and cycles (Abbey, 1976 ). George Homans, a sociologist in Harvard’s crossdisciplinary Social Relations Department in the 1960s and 70s used exchange as his main integrating concept. The source of his inspiration was rational exchange theory from the discipline of economics (today it would be called rational choice theory). He made an explicit effort to use benefit/cost exchange as the basis of a theory of human behavior that could integrate across disciplines. Homans argued that although the specifics of exchange relationships may vary across different types of human experience, their overall interactive form may be quite similar (Homans, 1974 ).

The concept of development was dominant in the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s under the crossdisciplinary umbrella of modernization theory. Modernization theory grew out of the need to achieve some degree of coherent coordination between the different and sometimes contradictory development strategies proposed by the separate social science disciplines. Economists argued that development would occur if sufficient amounts of capital investment are made and markets are developed. Political scientists argued that development requires modern bureaucracies, effective governance, and political participation. Sociologists argued that modern social institutions such as factories, schools, and mass media are key components in any development plan. Anthropologists argued that the residents of poor countries had to change their traditional cultural values into modern ones if development were to occur. Psychologists argued that individual personality development is the key, shifting the orientation from ascription to achievement. Modernization theory tried to bring all of these diverse perspectives together. It was the central organizing theory of the crossdisciplinary field of development studies.

The most widely recognized type of crossdisciplinary approach is undoubtedly the hybrids . Hybrids combine parts of two existing, related disciplines to form interstitial new crossdisciplines that attempt to bridge perceived gaps between disciplines (Miller, 1982 ). Well-known examples include social psychology, political economy, biogeography, and historical sociology. Sometimes the hybrid crossdisciplinary fields generate new theories whose promise is so great that they are borrowed back into their constituent disciplines. Social psychology’s symbolic interaction theory is a case in point. In fact, Dogan and Pahre ( 1990 ) argue that hybrid activity is the most likely source of innovative advances.

One of the most important hybrids in the interdisciplinary realm of international relations is political economy, especially in the form of international political economy (IPE). IPE uses the multi-perspective approach mentioned above. It juxtaposes the competing explanatory perspectives of the market model from economics, institutionalism from political science and sociology, and historical materialism from classical Marxist political economy (Miller, 2018 ). The differing perspectives provide a rich treasury of insights, understandings, critiques, and research strategies.

Shared Life Experiences

The basic premise in crossdisciplinary programs based on shared life experiences is that certain groups have shared a common experience of oppression that gives them a shared identity, a shared rejection of mainstream knowledge that reinforces this oppression, and a shared political agenda to replace the unjust social conditions with an egalitarian society. Three major examples of this category are women’s studies, ethnic studies, and post-colonial studies. These crossdisciplinary fields entered the academy as outgrowths of the social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They started out as multidisciplinary challengers to the disciplinary/departmental power structure of the university, yet over the past four decades women’s studies and ethnic studies have evolved increasingly into discipline-like programs, in other words, interdisciplines. According to some observers, one of the costs of this institutional acceptance was the loss of one of the early objectives of these movements, social change activism in the community (Messer-Davidow, 2002 ).

Virtually all of the over 700 women’s studies programs in the United States teach feminist theory, an integrating perspective that focuses on socially constructed gender systems and standpoint analysis. Standpoint theory contends that how one perceives any human condition depends on the position that one occupies in the society. Those who are being oppressed are going to see things very differently than those who are doing the oppressing.

According to Ann Tickner, feminism challenges the neo-positivist and state-centric orientation of international relations in the United States. The unequal relationships that pervade the world are socially constructed and vary from place to place, with women suffering universally from male-dominated exercises of power. Furthermore, dichotomies such as those that “separate the mind (rationality) from the body (nature) diminish the legitimacy of women as ‘knowers’” (Tickner, 2014 , p. 86). Knowledge should not be pursued for its own sake or for the benefit of the state but in order to facilitate the emancipation of the oppressed (Tickner, 2014 , pp. 176–77).

Theorists in African-American or Africana studies have made a deliberate effort to incorporate the perspective of women in their key concept, Afrocentricity . The meaning of Afrocentricity is somewhat contested within the interdiscipline, but there is no doubt about what it opposes, namely Eurocentrism. Among the specified features of Eurocentrism are reductionism, individualism, and domination over nature, whereas Afrocentricity is associated with holism, community, and harmony with nature (Azibo, 2001 , p. 424). Karanja Keita Carroll ( 2008 ) contended that the “Afrikan worldview” has embedded within it an African culture-specific axiology, epistemology, logic, cosmology, ontology, teleology, and ideology that necessitate a research methodology that is consistent with these components. Instead of the Eurocentric approach that emphasizes objective detachment, separation between the knower and the known, material reality as primary, either/or logic, and knowledge for knowledge’s sake, the Afrikan worldview emphasizes full engagement, the blending of knower and known, the spiritual essence of reality as primary, both/and logic, and knowledge for the betterment of African peoples. Africana research is about participation, relationships, interdependence, and the liberation of Africana people (Carroll, 2008 , pp. 4–27).

Advocates for transdisciplinary approaches often directly challenge the efficacy of conventional disciplines, claiming that they are part of the problem rather than the solution, especially when the objective is the mitigation of complex social problems. Proponents of transdisciplinary approaches frequently accuse the hegemonic conventional disciplines of protecting the status quo rather than promoting progressive change. The framers of some transdisciplinary approaches see them as providing alternatives to the world views of the conventional disciplines that they would replace. Examples of discipline-replacement transdisciplinary approaches would be general systems theory, Marxism, cultural studies and sustainability studies. Examples of transdisciplinary approaches that could supplement rather than replace conventional disciplines would be symbolic interactionism, rational choice theory, and gender theory (Miller, 1982 ).

General systems theory, the transdisciplinary approach that Jantsch favored, contends that nature is a hierarchy of similar structures up through the whole succession of physical, biological, and social systems. There are similar developmental patterns throughout nature, but there are different paths that can lead to the same destination. Through the organization of energy from the environment (negative entropy) and communication with the environment (negative feedback), systems seek to maintain dynamic equilibria. This theory conceives of nature as a holistic set of relationships that thrives on diversity.

David Easton introduced systems thinking to political science in the 1950s and 1960s because he felt the discipline was too narrow. “I am not a political scientist but rather a social scientist interested in political problems” (Aldrich, 2014 , pp. 52–53). Currently, Carolyn and Patrick James continue Easton’s systems approach with their application of “systemism” to foreign policy analysis. However, in their view, systemism moves away from Easton’s bias toward homeostatic proclivities and emphasis on the macro level. Systemism includes both the macro and the micro and all forms of interaction between them (James & James, 2015 ).

Since the 1960s, general systems theory has been the main transdisciplinary approach of environmental or ecological studies (Costanza, 1990 ). Today, this field is most likely to be called sustainability studies. In a major conference on transdisciplinarity held in Switzerland in 2000 , sustainability was put forward not only as the major reason for the necessity of transdisciplinarity, but also as a transdisciplinary approach in itself (Klein et al., 2001 ). However, Egon Becker argues that sustainability studies is a “transdisciplinary field” that is more of a “conceptual and heuristic framework” than a general theory ( 1999 , pp. 284–285).

The lack of an agreed-upon general theory for engaging in the intellectual process of integrating across disciplines led William Newell to search for the most comprehensive and functionally effective transdisciplinary theory. He decided on general systems. But the first difficulty that Newell faced was deciding on which version of general systems theory to embrace. He identified eight possibilities: chaos, complex systems, fractal geometry, nonlinear dynamics, second-order cybernetics, self-organizing criticality, neo-evolutionary biology, and quantum mechanics (Newell, 2001 ). After studying them all, he chose complex systems as the preferred approach. Newell ( 2001 , p. 7) explains: “Specifically, the theory of interdisciplinarity studies that I am advocating focuses on the form of complexity that is a feature of the structure as well as the behavior of a complex system, on complexity generated by nonlinear relationships among a large number of components, and on the influence of the components and relationships of the system on its overall pattern of behavior.” Newell presented his preferred theory to a panel of well-known interdisciplinarians for their reactions. None of the six respondents agreed with his suggestion, primarily because they did not believe that the range and diversity of interdisciplinary possibilities could be captured within one theoretical framework (Issues in Integrative Studies 19, 2001 , pp, 1–148)

One of the respondents to Newell’s proposal, Richard Carp ( 2001 ), took issue with his basic premise, namely that the knowledge to be integrated via complex systems theory comes exclusively from existing disciplines. Carp insisted on widening the knowledge sources. He stated that we should stop thinking of “the disciplines as unique sources or resources for knowledge and thought” (Carp, 2001 , p. 74). Carp argued that we should “learn from multiple knowledge formations” (p. 75). Disciplines should not be the “gatekeepers.” The universities are just one of the many institutions in society that not only possess knowledge but can also create it. We should not be talking about interdisciplinary studies but “knowledge formations” (p. 75).

In Europe, the transdisciplinary movement has taken several different directions. The Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences conference in 2000 promoted a process form of transdisciplinarity that transcended not only disciplinary boundaries, but also the boundary between the scientific establishment on the one hand and the users of the results of scientific research on the other hand. Users include government agencies, businesses, non-profit organizations, and members of the general public. Since all of these groups are stakeholders in the solution of the societal problems that science has an obligation to address, they should all be present at the table in the research process. In fact, the more stakeholders involved, the more “robust” the research. “We take the contributions to the informing and the rationalizing of actions in their societal context to be the main performance of problem-oriented research, and by implication, also of transdisciplinary research” (Zierhofer & Burger, 2007 , p. 57). In other words, according to the Swiss school, the purpose of transdisciplinary research is to seek and facilitate the implementation of solutions for societal problems, such as violence, poverty, and global warming, that serve the common good (Pohl & Hadorn, 2008 ). Norwegian professor Willy Ostreng, in his major book on interdisciplinary research, agrees and adds that as transdisciplinarity traverses the boundaries between science and stakeholder expertise it creates a new science, a “post-normal” science (Ostreng, 2010 , pp. 29–33).

Another European school of transdisciplinarity is centered around Basarab Nicolescu, a French academic. His group is organized around the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research. The movement’s objective is the achievement of the totality of meaning across all the sciences, art, religion, and cultural perspectives. That endeavor involves the search for relations and isomorphisms across all realms. The French school’s epistemology is explicitly non-Aristotelian in that it wishes to go beyond lineal and binary logic. They recognize different levels of reality in which different modes of understanding prevail. They start with the differences between classical physics and quantum physics, between reason and intuition, between information and consciousness, and between linear and non-linear logics. Non-linear logic is explained as the unity of oppositions, the inclusion of the excluded middle, and the evolutionary process of ever more comprehensive syntheses. Manfred Max-Neef calls this epistemology “strong transdisciplinarity.” He sees some of it in the natural sciences, especially in quantum physics and complexity theories. However, he does not see any of it in the social sciences. He sees economics as the most retrogressive and therefore one of the biggest obstacles to a unified, spiritually evolved, sustainable future (Max-Neef, 2005 , pp. 5–16).

There are some interesting analogies between “strong transdisciplinarity” and the field of cultural studies, for which many claim transdisciplinary status. Both approaches are strongly critical of the excessive reliance on rationality and analytic reductionism, as well as of the fragmented specialization of the structure of knowledge. The location of cultural studies at the interface of the humanities and the social sciences enables its practitioners to bring together their different concepts of culture and then to add the additional dimension of everyday meanings and practices present among the broader population (Moran, 2002 ).

It is generally agreed that the institutional origin of cultural studies was at Birmingham University in 1964 . The founders had an anti-establishment orientation informed by Italian neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci and French post-structuralist Michel Foucault. The Birmingham group wished to understand and challenge the power over the general population that the cultural elites exercised through the mass media and the power that the intellectual elites exercised through their control of the structure of knowledge, that is, the departmental/disciplinary structure of the academy. When cultural studies diffused to the United States, the field lost some of its political agenda; however, it retained its emphasis on popular culture. Numerous academic fields are identified as contributing to cultural studies, including cultural anthropology, textual criticism, art and social history, linguistics, sociology, aural and visual culture, philosophy of science, political economy, communication studies, psychology, and feminism. These multiple sources led Joe Moran ( 2002 , p. 50) to comment, “Cultural studies could be said to be synonymous with interdisciplinarity itself.” It is both ironic and instructive then that the founding enclave of cultural studies, the Birmingham Centre, was shut down by the higher education authorities of the United Kingdom in 2002 , presumably because of the “low quality of its research production” (Klein, 2005 , pp. 52–53).

Consequences

Advocating explicitly for interdisciplinary approaches in a discipline-controlled environment can be risky. It can be politically risky for administrative units and personally risky for faculty, especially for junior faculty. Interdisciplinary approaches do have implications for the structure and politics of knowledge. They have implications for International Relations, especially if the study of international relations is considered an interdisciplinary field. A 2002 publication assessing the field came to this conclusion:

While there seems to be little problem in designating international relations as a “field,” the symposium left unclear whether this field is most properly a subfield of political science, a subfield of several disciplines, an amalgam of the subfields of multiple disciplines or an academic discipline in its own right. (Puchala, 2002 , pp. xvi–xvii)

The dominant location for International Relations in the United States is as a subfield of Political Science (Aldrich, 2014 , p. 5). In the United Kingdom, however, the field of International Relations is more often treated as a separate discipline (Waever, 1998 ). How the field is conceptualized and institutionalized does have implications for its intellectual strategies, the identities of its practitioners, and its access to resources, both on and off-campus. David Long has argued that “it matters whether IR is considered a discipline in its own right or not. It matters in teaching and research not only by what is cut off, but what is encouraged” (Long, 2011 , pp. 59–60). Rudra Sil warned that “inflexible disciplinary structures may very well come to constitute a hindrance to whatever ‘progress’ is possible in our collective efforts to understand aspects of international life” (Sil & Doherty, 2000 , p. 6). Nevertheless, American political scientists are firmly committed to keeping international relations within their fold. A 2002 doctoral dissertation tells the tale of how, in 1986 , the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) successfully absorbed the multidisciplinary graduate program in International Relations. It is an interesting tale of money and powerful personalities, and it would probably be more accurately described as a hostile takeover (Plantan, 2002 ).

Even though the author of the dissertation, Frank Plantan, used the language of interdisciplinarity, he did not employ the conceptual distinctions presented above. That is partly because the graduate program of International Relations at Penn was just a multidisciplinary collection of volunteer faculty members from 10 different departments with no separate, dedicated financial support. By centering his analysis on the Penn case study, Plantan limited the operational meaning of interdisciplinary to this loose arrangement of multidisciplinary specialists, an unstable and vulnerable setup. Yet in his discussion of the intellectual development of the field he mentioned several integrating strategies that have crossdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary qualities. His examples included realism, functionalism, behavioralism, neoliberal institutionalism, rational choice, and constructivism. However, in his historical analysis Plantan saw these theoretical perspectives as ideas to fight over rather than as integrating strategies. In his experience, the competitive departmental environment triumphed over interdisciplinary cooperation. Plantan ( 2002 , pp. 374–375) concluded, “The hefty sunk costs of an existing tenured faculty and staff, and a historic mission (however dubious) in the colleges or university’s broader curriculum, accords them a staying power, an inertia, that no interdisciplinary program can hope to achieve whatever its intellectual merit.”

When Robert Axelrod, the President of the American Political Science Association, established a Task Force in 2007 on Interdisciplinarity, he argued that interdisciplinary research is borrowing across disciplinary boundaries, both importing and exporting, but especially exporting (Axelrod, 2008 ). The Task Force Report (Aldrich, 2014 ) argued that interdisciplinary work begins with faculty who are prepared with accumulated deep knowledge in a discipline. To insure that interdisciplinary teaching and research do not endanger the institutional power of the conventional disciplines, the Report placed a major emphasis on discipline-based peer review. They contended that peer review is the preeminent means by which “the value of scientific knowledge can be established,” and peer review is only credible if it comes from an established discipline (Aldrich, 2014 , pp. 13–23). They continued, “Disciplinarity has not yet been successfully transcended as a means to address key values of scholarship—particularly to resolve contested claims about knowledge, to anchor peer review and the authority it carries with it to protect academic freedom, or to manage the labor market” (p. 23).

Interdisciplinarians would find this reasoning self-serving at the very least. After all, one of the main reasons for engaging in truly innovative interdisciplinary activity is to break free of the narrow, restrictive and presumably inadequate contexts of the established disciplines. The National Academies Report ( 2005 ) argues that there are four “drivers” for interdisciplinary research: inherent complexity of nature and society, need to explore areas that are not confined to a single discipline, need to solve societal problems, and the power of new technologies (p. 40). This Report gives several examples, but the most comprehensive is the case of climate change. Research on this complex and vital issue involves 10,000 scientists in 80 countries from more than 20 disciplines, including agricultural scientists, archeologists, atmospheric chemists, biologists, climatologists, ecologists, economists, environmental historians, geographers, geologists, hydrologists, mathematicians, meteorologists, plant physiologists, political scientists, oceanographers, remote sensing scientists, and sociologists (p. 31).

The established disciplines have been attacked by the post-structuralists for being Eurocentric, sexist, racist, pseudo-objective, status quo-protective and structured in a way that is disconnected from reality. To this group of critics both the ontologies and epistemologies of the conventional structure of knowledge are unacceptable (Moran, 2002 ). Paradoxically, some of the academics who espouse these views have managed to find an institutionalized niche in the university in departments or centers of cultural studies, ethnic studies, post-colonial studies, and women’s studies. However, in the process of institutionalization, they seem to have followed the advice of the Political Science Task Force Report: if interdisciplinary projects want to be successful—that is, achieve bureaucratic recognition with regular budgets and assigned faculty positions—you need to behave like an established discipline (Messer-Davidow, 2002 ). Besides those interdisciplines that have successfully entered the university structure since the 1960s, there were many generic interdisciplinary programs that also evolved into departments even though they were founded as challengers to the disciplinary/departmental system. Evidently, the generic-interdisciplinary departments were perceived by the established departments as the most threatening as well as the most vulnerable. As a consequence, whenever conventional departments found sympathetic administrators they embarked on a campaign for their abolition. In the Politics of Interdisciplinary Studies the stories of several of these program eliminations are told. They include programs at Wayne State, Miami of Ohio, Appalachian State, and San Francisco State, among others. (Augsburg & Henry, 2009 ).

The Political Science Task Force Report also describes how the discipline-based peer-review process works in the federal grant-making process, the largest source of extramural funding in the United States. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is probably organized the most pervasively around the conventional or established disciplines. Therefore, disciplinary criteria are used to evaluate most grant proposals submitted to the NSF. There are small programs within NSF that seem to facilitate interdisciplinary projects: The Measurement, Methodology and Statistics Program and the Human and Social Dynamics Program.

Although the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is organized functionally, its reviewing process also relies largely on disciplinary faculty and their criteria for quality. Federal funding agencies reflect and respect disciplinary boundaries, though they do seek ways to attack new problems through interdisciplinary efforts (Aldrich, 2014 , pp. 101–111). However, the ostensibly integrative interdisciplinary projects they fund frequently end up as merely multidisciplinary.

A group that studied the grant-making experience of the Academy of Finland from 1997–2004 discovered, to their surprise, that almost half of the grants (42%) had some degree of interdisciplinarity despite the disciplinary orientations of the review boards. The solution of the study authors to the disciplinary/interdisciplinary divide is to consider all research interdisciplinary. They reason that since disciplinary boundaries are so amorphous and so frequently permeated that maintaining these distinctions is artificial and inhibitive of creativity in research (Bruun, Hukkinen, Huutoniemi, & Klein, 2005 , p. 169). However, ignoring disciplinary boundaries and their associated departmental bureaucracy seems not only unrealistic about the confining power of the disciplinary structure of knowledge, but also politically naive as well.

A further interesting dimension of the International Studies Association (ISA) is the relationship between its many crossdisciplinary sections and the dominant Political Science discipline. Of the 29 sections ( 2019 ), 22 seem crossdisciplinary in nature. Examples include interdisciplinary studies, human rights studies, environmental studies, peace studies, feminist theory and gender studies, and global development studies. For years the leadership of the ISA seemed merely to presume, despite the organization’s claim to interdisciplinarity, that all the section program chairs could gather at the annual Political Science Convention to review the draft program of the upcoming ISA Convention. The implicit assumption in this past ISA practice was that the section program chairs were most likely political scientists who would be attending the annual Political Science Convention. This assumption always struck this author as problematic, especially in light of the organization’s mission statement and its interdisciplinary membership. The greater efficiency of the Internet facilitated the discontinuance of this practice.

The history of the relationship of area studies to International Relations is a fascinating one in itself. The ISA section sponsoring this contribution, the Interdisciplinary Studies Section, was originally established by area studies scholars according to Fred Riggs, one of its founders. In the 1970s, area studies scholars were contemplating founding a separate umbrella organization for all area studies programs, but they were persuaded to stay within the ISA as an independent section. Area studies centers were established in elite universities after WWII as part of a national Cold War strategy. They were “among the most far-reaching interdisciplinary projects in American higher education” (Aldrich, 2014 , p. 89). Their responsibility was to provide information on the geographic regions of the world in support of the national interests of the United States. Participating faculty came mostly from language, literature, anthropology, history, and political science (international relations) departments. The centers, despite their holistic aspirations, were multidisciplinary in form and particularistic in methodology. Money and guidance ostensibly came from private sources, such as the Ford Foundation and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), but they actually came from the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency (Cumings, 2002 ).

In the first few decades after World War II, the study of international relations was significantly oriented to area studies because the money flowing into the universities supported area studies type of knowledge. The legacy of that emphasis is reflected in a 2006 Teagle Foundation survey that found in the responses of 109 Liberal Arts Colleges, half of the top ten interdisciplinary majors were in area and international studies. Since the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, extramural teaching and research support has dwindled significantly for area and international studies. Lloyd Rudolph comments, “after the close of the Cold War, the disciplines and the ‘methodists’ succeeded in attacking and defeating the area studies orientation of Ford and via Ford the SSRC” (Aldrich, 2014 , p. 70). Area studies programs have had to endure criticism from those who see them as a “colonial enterprise” (faculty in post-colonial and ethnic studies programs), while many in the disciplines see them as lacking any theoretical coherence and methodological rigor. From the perspective of conventional disciplinarians, their region-centric particularism and their multidisciplinary structures make them the poster examples of what ails interdisciplinary programs (Miyoshi & Harootunian, 2002 ; Szanton, 2004 ).

Nevertheless, despite the continuing identity crises in area studies, they have managed to survive. Their latest restoration positions them as part of the internationalization of the academy, presumably made necessary by the knowledge demands of globalization and regional hot spots such as the Middle East. However, the continuing viability of area studies remains uncertain. As one observer noted, the different area studies faculties are as separated from each other as the members of disciplines are from each other. “By and large, the world area studies tribes inhabit relatively watertight intellectual domains” (Lambert, 1991 , p. 184). This observation is consistent with the author’s experience. As an administrator in charge of curriculum development, he suggested that the area studies programs could share a core course in which the common methodological principles of area studies could be explored. The area studies faculty, however, were not interested. Nevertheless, David Szanton hopes that participation in area studies programs have helped to “deparochialize” disciplinary faculty, though it does not seem to have lowered the heights of the disciplinary walls. Maybe by being one of the first interdisciplinary programs to use identity as one of its key concepts, area studies may have prepared the way for ethnic studies, women’s studies and post-colonial studies (Szanton, 2004 ).

The case of international political economy (IPE) also raises a number of interesting interdisciplinary issues. In its reincarnation over the last four decades or so, it fits in the category of crossdisciplinary hybrids. IPE’s location in the structure of knowledge is as confused as International Relations. The disciplines of Economics, Political Science and Sociology all claim IPE as a subfield. However, Marxists, in the tradition of classical political economy, see political economy as an overarching, holistic frame in which cultural, economic, political, and social dimensions are inter-related subsets. According to Marxists, the establishment of the specialized disciplines around these dimensions is a part of the hegemonic strategy of capitalism to obfuscate the oppressive nature of the capitalist system.

The late British political economist Susan Strange, a non-Marxist, complained about the lack of knowledge sharing across disciplinary boundaries. She was especially critical of the way in which economists and political scientists ignored each other and their respective knowledge domains. She accused American scholars of International Relations of being too narrowly connected to state-centric political models that did not include serious economic analysis. In fact, she argued, “Far from being a subdiscipline of international relations, IPE should claim that international relations are a subdiscipline of IPE” (see Strange, in Lawton, Rosenau, & Verdun, 2000 , p. 412). Susan Strange is among the “Magnificent Seven” that Benjamin Cohen singled out in his intellectual history of international political economy (Cohen, 2008 , p. 8). She was the leader of the “British School,” which is more holistic, interdisciplinary, and explicitly normative in contrast to the “American School,” which is more positivistic in orientation. Cohen continued his geographic schools of thought analysis of IPE in a 2014 publication, Advanced Introduction to International Political Economy . In response to criticism of the limitations of his original dichotomy, he added schools of thought based in continental Europe, Latin America, and China. He also recognized “leftist” or “heterodox” schools in the United States and the British Commonwealth. However, his geographic schools of thought approach focused primarily on national/regional and cultural differences, rather than theoretical.

Members of all schools of international political economy would probably be comfortable having their field identified as an “interdiscipline” (Underhill, 2000 ). An interdiscipline is a crossdisciplinary field that approximates the characteristics of an academic discipline, but it does not qualify as a 20th century conventional discipline. In fact, maybe International Relations would also best be characterized as an “interdiscipline.” However, that identification still leaves unanswered where International Relations fits in the power hierarchy of knowledge.

According to Barry Buzan and Richard Little, members of the English or British School of International Relations, the widespread placement of International Relations in the United States as a subfield of Political Science has significantly limited its theoretical potential. Buzan and Little ( 2001 ) argued that American International Relations is dominated by an ahistorical, Eurocentric, Westphalian, political/military model. One of the consequences of this approach is the preference for “fragmentation into the anarchy of self-governing and paradigm-warring islands of theory rather than integration into the imperial or federative archipelago of theoretically pluralist grand theory” (Buzan & Little, 2001 , p. 31). Margaret Hermann, in her 1998 ISA presidential address, expressed seemingly similar sentiments about fragmentation: “The field has become an administrative holding company rather than an intellectually coherent area of inquiry or a community of scholars” (Hermann, 2002 , p. 16). However, her solution is a respectful dialogue that builds a “mosaic of multiple perspectives” around problems that are issues of “world politics” (pp. 31–33). She does not seem to be recommending “grand theory” nor going beyond Political Science. Thus, hers is an intra-disciplinary rather than an inter-disciplinary solution. On the other hand, Hermann does seem to embrace the “interdisciplinary mental outlook” advocated by the authors of the pioneering OECD Report (Apostel, 1972 ).

Understanding the different types of interdisciplinary approaches and their differentiation from disciplinary approaches gives one deeper insight into the knowledge production and transmission process. If International Relations is to be a truly independent, interdisciplinary field that can take full advantage of multiple perspectives and methodologies in order to deal more effectively with global problems, it needs to liberate itself from the embrace of confining disciplines, especially Political Science.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the following for helping to improve this article: Stanley Bailis, Felicia Krishna-Hensel, Renee Marlin-Bennett, Tina Mavrikos-Adamou, Anja K. Miller, and Julie Thompson-Klein.

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Different research markets: a disciplinary perspective

• Published: 04 February 2011
• Volume 62 , pages 721–740, ( 2011 )

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• Oili-Helena Ylijoki 1 ,
• Anu Lyytinen 2 &
• Liisa Marttila 3  

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Drawing upon the notions of academic capitalism and the transformation of academic research from traditional academic orientation into market orientation, the paper sets out to empirically scrutinize the changing nature of academic research, focusing especially on disciplinary differences. The paper is based on a survey of heads of departments and research units at Finnish universities representing all disciplinary groups ( n  = 255) and on in-depth interviews with Finnish academics ( n  = 31) in the fields of humanities, social sciences, technology and natural sciences. Based on the survey data, the funding, selection of research topics, collaboration partners, audiences and publication forums in research are analysed. Following this, five research markets are discerned: academic, corporate, policy, professional and public market, each characterized by its own values and rationality as to what is considered the reference group, basic objective and outcome of research. The paper concludes that the transformation thesis needs to be revisited and specified since on the one hand, academic orientation still remains crucially important in all disciplinary groups, and on the other hand, market orientation entails several kinds of markets, pointing to the versatility of the university–society relationship.

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Ylijoki, OH., Lyytinen, A. & Marttila, L. Different research markets: a disciplinary perspective. High Educ 62 , 721–740 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-011-9414-2

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Practical Strategies for Collaboration across Discipline-Based Education Research and the Learning Sciences

As the field of discipline-based education research continues to grow and enters into its “second generation,” this essay provides timely and useful advice for advancing life sciences education research and provides practical strategies for collaborations across the life and learning sciences.

Rather than pursue questions related to learning in biology from separate camps, recent calls highlight the necessity of interdisciplinary research agendas. Interdisciplinary collaborations allow for a complicated and expanded approach to questions about learning within specific science domains, such as biology. Despite its benefits, interdisciplinary work inevitably involves challenges. Some such challenges originate from differences in theoretical and methodological approaches across lines of work. Thus, aims at developing successful interdisciplinary research programs raise important considerations regarding methodologies for studying biology learning, strategies for approaching collaborations, and training of early-career scientists. Our goal here is to describe two fields important to understanding learning in biology, discipline-based education research and the learning sciences. We discuss differences between each discipline’s approach to biology education research and the benefits and challenges associated with incorporating these perspectives in a single research program. We then propose strategies for building productive interdisciplinary collaboration.

Following 20 years of work considering what and how students are learning in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classes, a robust database of evidence now underscores the necessity of reevaluating how we teach in STEM classrooms ( Freeman et al ., 2014 ; Dolan, 2015 ). Calls for a “second generation” of research on undergraduate STEM education ( Freeman et al ., 2014 ; Dolan, 2015 ) reflect great advancement in the field of discipline-based education research (DBER) but also point to a pivotal moment. We are not the first to suggest that this pivot should be away from distinct camps of related research and toward the interdisciplinary integration of these camps. In fact, Coley and Tanner (2012) point out that interdisciplinary collaborations between DBER and the learning sciences present a novel approach to understanding and improving STEM education. We extend this claim—touting the collaboration of these fields as providing not only novel but also crucial insight. Our aim here is to advance discussion surrounding the second generation of life sciences education research and provide practical strategies for collaboration across the life and learning sciences.

The notion of a necessary shift toward interdisciplinary approaches to DBER is reflected in the National Research Council ( NRC, 2012 ) report, Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering . According to the report, high-quality research programs in DBER require individuals who intimately understand what it means to be an expert in a domain and the challenges associated with developing such expertise and an understanding of work in the behavioral and social sciences that describes findings related to human cognition, motivation, and learning. Although the importance of interdisciplinary research is highly endorsed, few interdisciplinary studies exist ( NRC, 2012 ). As pointed out in the report, the corpus of DBER research lacks robustness because of the lack of studies incorporating cognitive and educational psychology perspectives. Consequently, the committee that produced the 2012 report recommends that future research in DBER draw on decades of knowledge and experience produced by educational and cognitive psychologists. They argue that drawing from the existing psychology knowledge base will facilitate future DBER that expands focus to the mechanisms underlying learning. Furthermore, current DBER is divided into distinct subfields with little collaboration among science domains and with the learning sciences ( Talanquer, 2014 ).

In this essay, we first attempt to operationalize DBER and the learning sciences as distinct disciplines in order to highlight the benefits of incorporating disciplinary knowledge from each into a single program of study. We introduce an analogy for synergy across these disciplines and describe how such synergy contributes to both theory refinement and classroom applications. We then identify challenges associated with interdisciplinary collaboration specific to DBER and the learning sciences. We close with suggested strategies for forming and maintaining productive interdisciplinary collaborations.

DISCIPLINE-BASED EDUCATION RESEARCH

DBER (pronounced “dee-burr”) is an approach to understanding learning, practices, and the development of expertise in a specific domain, typically in the sciences, by scholars within that domain. For example, DBER scholars can be found within domains such as astronomy, biology, chemistry, engineering, geology, and physics ( NRC, 2012 ). DBER requires disciplinary expertise, which allows for perspective on the specific challenges associated with teaching and learning within the discipline. Very generally, discipline-based education researchers often seek to ascertain how learning occurs within a discipline and what pedagogical strategies are most effective at promoting student learning ( NRC, 2012 ).

THE LEARNING SCIENCES

The broad aim of learning sciences research is to understand learning, cognition, and development in both laboratory and classroom settings ( Barab and Squire, 2004 ). Learning scientists’ foci run the gamut from basic research on learning processes to large-scale evaluation of education interventions ( Nathan and Wagner Alibali, 2010 ). Much like discipline-based education researchers, learning scientists often do work intended to inform evidence-based teaching practices. While the learning sciences field extends beyond psychology, learning sciences research draws on practices and principles originating in psychological science. Learning sciences research is not solely focused on theory development; instead, it extends to consider practical applications and refinement. In fact, some have described the field as “eduneering” because of its parallels with engineering research ( Nathan and Wagner Alibali, 2010 ). For example, learning science research often involves attention to design features and the iterative refinement of pedagogy and instructional tools. Along these lines, Nathan and Wagner Alibali (2010) highlight four main themes in learning sciences research. Learning sciences research 1) is driven by a translational approach in order to bridge research and instructional practice , 2) seeks to improve the relationship between theory and instructional practice , 3) assesses educational interventions through design-based research and experimental studies , and 4) includes consideration of the sociocultural context in which learning occurs.

A few considerations are noteworthy with regard to our descriptions of DBER and learning sciences research. First, unlike discipline-based education researchers, learning sciences researchers do not necessarily narrow focus to particular domains or disciplinary content (e.g., biology) but rather focus on some component of learning (e.g., coordination of theory and evidence) that may be studied across domains and disciplines. Consequently, although some parallels can be seen between the learning sciences and DBER (e.g., bridging research and the practice of teaching), learning scientists typically approach research from different, albeit complementary, perspectives and practices than discipline-based education researchers, which we discuss in further detail below. It also is important to note that both DBER and the learning sciences, as we have conceptualized them here, are inherently multidisciplinary fields. That is, within each of these fields, multiple disciplines (e.g., biology and physics in DBER; cognitive science and educational psychology in learning sciences) provide different perspectives on the same issue ( Stember, 1991 ). We distinguish this use of the term “multidisciplinary” from our use of the term “interdisciplinary” by defining interdisciplinary research later in this essay. Because a detailed discussion of this distinction is outside the scope of this paper, we also direct readers to Huutoniemi et al . (2010) for an in-depth review of interdisciplinarity.

EXAMPLES OF COMPLEMENTARY WORK FROM DBER AND LEARNING SCIENCES

We further differentiate DBER and the learning sciences by providing examples of recent work from each discipline that approach similar questions of interest to life sciences education research ( Table 1 ). We have chosen to highlight articles from each discipline that investigate model-based learning and concept mapping in life sciences education. Four papers were chosen based on publication date (specifically, those published within the past year), prestige of the journal, and focus on principles related to life sciences education. Note that the following section is not meant as a critique of these articles, nor is it intended to be an exhaustive literature review. Rather, each of the highlighted papers was chosen to distinguish practices in each field on related subject areas.

Examples of complementary life sciences education research

The first pair of papers chosen investigates model-based learning. The DBER paper ( Reinagel and Speth, 2016 ) examines models related to the central dogma produced by students during class exams. The learning sciences paper ( Mulder et al ., 2016 ) examines the utility of partially completed models for supporting student learning in a unit exploring the glucose–insulin regulatory system. The second pair of papers investigates the relationship between concept mapping and quality of writing (DBER; Dowd et al ., 2015 ) and a specific type of concept map, the knowledge integration map, as an output of student understanding of principles of evolution (learning sciences; Schwendimann and Linn, 2016 ). The latter study also investigates the role of critique on knowledge integration.

Given that each of the studies mentioned above has related but separate research questions and that each represents only a small percentage of a larger corpus of work, we will focus on broad distinguishing features of each that best characterize each discipline. One major area of differentiation between DBER and learning sciences literature is the population of interest. In both DBER papers mentioned above, as well as the majority of DBER papers, research is conducted with undergraduate students. The two learning sciences papers focus on high school samples, but the learning sciences literature spans ages from childhood to adulthood and also encompasses both formal and informal learning environments. Furthermore, in both DBER papers discussed here, the investigator also served a role as instructor for the course. While this is often the case in the DBER literature, it is not the norm in the learning sciences literature. As stated above, an important distinction between DBER and the learning sciences is that discipline-based education researchers are discipline experts and subsequently are often instructors in their field.

A difference in disciplinary perspective also is reflected in the central focus of each article. For example, in the papers examining model-based learning, the DBER paper ( Reinagel and Speth, 2016 ) spends significant time in the introduction discussing pedagogical challenges associated with molecular genetics and in the methods section, very specific details are included about the course context and method of instruction as an active learner-centered pedagogy. This is in contrast to the learning sciences article ( Mulder et al ., 2016 ), which includes few details about instruction or pedagogical challenges in life sciences education, other than what is necessary to set the context for the study. In their introduction, Mulder et al . (2016) do not discuss life sciences education and instead focus solely on the theoretical framework and previous research on model building. The learning sciences paper that examines concept mapping ( Schwendimann and Linn, 2016 ) includes some discussion of the teaching of evolution, but the majority of the introduction focuses instead on theory and prior work. We see differences in the use of theoretical framing in the DBER papers, as Reinagel and Speth (2016) provide some theoretical framing for their article, whereas Dowd et al . (2015) provide very little.

A MODEL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION: THE SECOND GENERATION OF LIFE SCIENCES EDUCATION RESEARCH

Both DBER and learning sciences research are relevant to life sciences education. Research in the learning sciences is based on robust methodology and decades of empirically driven theory refinement. Researchers within DBER have experience that yields insight into the specific learning demands of a given domain. The combination of these perspectives to create an interdisciplinary approach will be an essential component of the second generation of life sciences education research. But like most widely used terminology, the phrase “interdisciplinary research” has been operationalized in various, inconsistent ways. For clarity, we define interdisciplinary research as the integration of the contributions and perspectives of at least two disciplines to address some problem or issue (cf., Stember, 1991 ; Nissani, 1997 ). Interdisciplinary research requires each person contribute his or her expertise to accomplish the group’s collective goals ( Haythornthwaite et al ., 2006 ). The key distinction between interdisciplinary collaboration and other forms of collaboration (e.g., cross-disciplinary or multidisciplinary) is the former’s emphasis on the meaningful, goal-oriented synthesis of ideas. Only when multiple fields are brought together in such a meaningful and synergistic manner, does innovative and novel interdisciplinary research result ( Bronstein, 2003 ).

We illustrate interdisciplinary synergy with a three-dimensional triangular prism ( Figure 1 ). Our prism consists of three major stakeholders in life sciences education—discipline experts, learning scientists, and educators. 1 Each stakeholder is represented as a distinct rectangular face of the prism. For the purposes of this paper, we are focusing on two stakeholders (represented by the textured faces in Figure 1, B and C ), discipline-based education researchers and learning scientists. When the disciplines are connected, two triangular ends of the prism are formed (represented as the textured faces of the prism, Figure 1A ). These ends represent two putative aims (and eventual outcomes) of a meaningful combination of different perspectives to address a common goal. For our purposes of addressing life sciences education research, the aims are theory development and classroom applications. Although we only discuss these two aims here, others may also be possible.

A three-dimensional interdisciplinary prism illustrates the roles of educators, discipline-based education researchers, and learning scientists in interdisciplinary biology education research (A). We highlight two faces of the prism (B and C) to distinguish the two stakeholders we focus on in this paper—discipline-based education researchers and learning scientists—and the unique perspectives from each group. As we argue in this paper, varied expertise and theoretical and methodological approaches do not have to converge but, if stitched together in a meaningful way, can yield novel theory and new classroom applications.

Our illustration does not necessarily represent the current state, but a metaphor that we contend is a useful analogy for how interdisciplinary collaboration should function. Figure 1 is intended to clarify that, although researchers in the learning sciences and DBER typically have common research aims, they approach these with their own expertise, theories, methods, and interpretations of findings. Interdisciplinary collaboration requires an understanding and, often missing, appreciation of the perspective and unique contribution collaborators offer each other. The goal is for the two fields to be stitched together in a meaningful way that strengthens our collective understanding.

DIFFERENTIATING DBER AND LEARNING SCIENCES PERSPECTIVES

According to our model, successful interdisciplinary work requires a combination of unique perspectives. These unique perspectives, although an integral part of the utility and value of an interdisciplinary approach, may also present challenges. Now that we have outlined some broad differences between the two fields, we move to a discussion of differences between the two fields that can also be barriers to successful collaboration. Successful interdisciplinary collaboration, as shown in the social psychology literature, relies on collaborators recognizing and attending to discipline-specific differences ( Bronstein, 2003 ; Gooch, 2005 ).

We begin with a discussion of DBER and the learning sciences stemming from different scholarly traditions. We start here, because differences in traditions of scholarship highlight a substantial barrier to collaboration due to a history of strife between the “hard” and “soft” sciences. We draw from research on nature of science (NOS) to describe how the practice of science most likely differs for discipline-based education researchers and learning scientists. We hope that our highlighting of differences in the so-called soft and hard sciences in relation to NOS understanding will better prepare researchers to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue with colleagues with diverse scientific training. We also discuss differences in research practices, including the use of theory and distinct research paradigms. Although methodologies in the two fields are beginning to converge, distinctions remain.

Scholarly Traditions

The dismissive attitudes scientists have toward psychologists isn’t rooted in snobbery; it’s rooted in intellectual frustration. It’s rooted in the failure of psychologists to acknowledge that they don’t have the same claim on secular truth that the hard sciences do. It’s rooted in the tired exasperation that scientists feel when non-scientists try to pretend they are scientists. Alex B. Berezow (2012)

In science, when human behavior enters the equation, things go nonlinear. That’s why Physics is easy and Sociology is hard. Neil deGrasse Tyson (2016)

The first quote above appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 2012 in response to an op-ed piece titled “Stop Bullying the ‘Soft’ Sciences,” in which a psychologist describes frustration at the lack of respect shown to the social sciences by those in the hard sciences ( Wilson, 2012 ). The claim that the social sciences are somehow inferior to other science disciplines is not new; a 1912 paper describing the history and status of psychology in the United States claims that psychology is “not very high on the honor roll among other academic subjects” ( Ruckmich, 1912 , p. 530). What is the root of such intellectual snobbery and why has it persisted? Such lack of understanding and appreciation for science practices across disciplines is a major barrier to interdisciplinary collaboration, especially of the type we propose in this essay, which involves researchers from “soft” sciences traditions (which arguably encompass several branches of psychology and stems from psychology traditions; here, the learning sciences) and the “hard” sciences (DBER).

Paul Feyerabend’s provocative work challenges the sanctity with which some scientists perceive the practice of science. Feyerabend, a science philosopher, compares science with religion, going so far as to state that “science is a religion” ( 1975 , p. 54). He suggests that viewing science too ideologically and becoming dogmatic impairs the overall progress of science. By strictly adhering to certain principles of what science is (which is influenced by social and cultural perspectives), we limit our ability to solve problems in a creative and innovative manner. Science knowledge is thought to be theory laden, meaning that how a scientist interprets and produces knowledge is a function of his or her prior knowledge, personal epistemology, training, experience, and discipline ( Lederman et al ., 2002 ). A single unifying scientific method does not exist, and methodologies within disciplines are a factor of the types of research questions proposed and the phenomena of interest.

What makes a science “hard” is up to interpretation. There are no firm rules delineating the two, but a fundamental issue for differentiating hard and soft sciences lies in replicability and predictability ( Howard, 1993 ). Can data produced in one part of the world be repeated in a different location? Do these data allow for accurate predictions to be made? A major challenge of any research interested in studying living entities, whether students in a classroom or mice in a lab, is that the subjects are not identical. Although efforts are made in biological research to use inbred mouse strains to reduce variability, this is not possible with human participants. Too many factors influence how students learn, which leads to issues with replicability and predictability. As Howard (1993) points out, if the definition of a hard science is based on a near-perfect ability to predict phenomena, then the social sciences can never be considered “hard” science because of the variability of human behavior. To suggest that one is more or less scientific than the other is to risk sacrificing scientific rigor for ideology. As Feyerabend warns, focusing on ideology rather than rigor leads to the suppression of innovation. One discipline is not “more scientific” than the other—each discipline concerns itself with different phenomena, which consequently necessitates different approaches and traditions. These discipline-specific approaches and traditions are reflected in their different practices, which we describe next.

Differences in Practices

Use of theoretical frameworks..

Theoretical frameworks can be difficult to conceptualize across disciplinary lines, because “theory” has different meanings in biology research and in learning sciences research. Consequently, when pursuing interdisciplinary research, how and why to ground research in a theoretical framework can be challenging for those outside the learning sciences. We will now describe how the usage of the word “theory” differs between disciplines.

A theory is an explanation for a series of seemingly unrelated phenomena that is well-supported and used to guide scientific investigation. Because scientific theory may often be based on unobservable phenomena, we rely on indirect evidence to support or refute a given theory ( Lederman et al ., 2002 ). The most commonly used and taught theories in biology, such as evolutionary theory or cell theory, are supported by a large body of data and are typically accepted throughout the scientific community. This is different from research in the learning sciences. For example, in educational psychology, one discipline under the umbrella of the learning sciences, multiple theories exist for explaining learning. Theories in educational psychology explain mechanisms of learning from one of a variety of camps and subcamps, such as behaviorist, information processing, or developmental, and are ever evolving from classic foundations such as those laid by Jean Piaget’s work on cognitive development or Lev Vygotsky’s theories of social cognition. Unlike evolutionary theory, which crosses multiple subdomains within biology, there is no single theory of learning that generalizes across all subdomains within the learning sciences. Historically, psychologists have been trained in a given theoretical camp. Consequently, in learning sciences research papers, authors typically designate a specific theoretical framework as the basis for a given study and then situate study findings within the contexts of existing theory.

Research Methodologies.

In addition to differences in the use of theory, differences in research methodologies may also pose potential barriers for interdisciplinary collaboration. We focus on three methodological approaches useful for education-relevant research: design-based research, psychology lab-to-classroom studies, and microgenetic research. We have chosen to highlight these approaches, because, in our experience with interdisciplinary collaborations, we have found these to be useful paradigms but most likely to be misunderstood across discipline lines. Such misunderstanding may stem from issues with terminology or with larger issues related to the conceptual underpinnings of approaching research a certain way. This is not an exclusive list, but the methodologies discussed here serve as valuable illustrations of possible methodological barriers to collaboration.

Design-Based Research.

Although lab-based psychology experiments (discussed below) are useful for identifying mechanisms of learning in a controlled setting, learning is often assessed solely in the context of real-world classrooms. Executing research within classrooms is inherently difficult due to the inevitable noise and variability found within classrooms. Design-based research integrates a series of approaches intended to understand learning in the context and noise of classrooms ( Barab and Squire, 2004 ).

Design-based research methodology is based on research in engineering fields and focuses on iterative changes based on shifts in understanding. This focus on iterative design helps account for the noisiness inherent in classrooms, because it provides the researchers with a method for adjusting ongoing research in response to unanticipated events or considerations that may occur as the study progresses ( Nathan and Wagner Alibali, 2010 ). In the literature, design-based research can be found as a description of an initial study that will later be iteratively refined (such as Mega Subramaniam et al ., 2015 ) or of a series of studies described in one artcle, each with a refinement over the last (such as Hickey et al ., 2012 ).

In some ways, design-based research is more similar to biology research than psychological lab research. For example, in the course of addressing how a drug treatment will impact a population of stem cells, a biologist iteratively adjusts research questions and approach based on current findings. Even with a hypothesis-driven approach, it is not always possible to foresee all possible outcomes and necessary refinements. Furthermore, iterative refinement can span multiple publications from a variety of labs that all contribute to a larger understanding of a certain research question. Although these multiyear studies are common in biology and medical research, they are still uncommon in education research and provide an opportunity for expansion of design-based research.

In the context of education, rather than solely demonstrating that an intervention works, design-based research emphasizes the testing and generation of theory within an authentic natural context for learning, such as the classroom ( Barab and Squire, 2004 ). For example, design-based research connects education interventions with existing theory and may also generate new theories about how people think and learn ( Barab and Squire, 2004 ). The larger goal of design-based research is to create a research approach that is more likely to result in translation of education research into practice ( Anderson and Shattuck, 2012 ). Results of design-based research inform our understanding of the optimal context for learning, often by describing the environment that produced certain learning outcomes ( Anderson and Shattuck, 2012 ).

Psychology Lab-to-Classroom.

Much like the bench-to-bedside model in medical research, learning sciences research sometimes follows a translational, psychology lab-to-classroom approach. Klahr and Li (2005) describe this model for research as motivated by two aims, originally described by Stokes (1997) . According to Stokes, research motivation can be described in terms of two dimensions. In the first dimension, research is aimed at advancing basic understanding. In the second dimension, research is aimed at developing practical applications to the real world. Stokes then goes on to characterize research strategies represented in each quadrant by giving examples of prominent scientists. Research that aims to advance basic understanding with no emphasis on applications falls squarely in Bohr’s quadrant (see Figure 2 ). Klahr and Li (2005) describe Klahr and colleagues’ line of cognitive science research on understanding the development of scientific reasoning skills—particularly control of variables strategy (CVS)—as falling in this quadrant. This early line of work occurred in traditional experimental psychology lab settings and used straightforward experimental design with the solitary aim of understanding how a set of cognitive mechanisms and processes develop.

Quadrants of research based on aims related to advancing knowledge or applied use. DBER and learning sciences research is often housed in Pasteur’s quadrant. Illustration adapted from Stokes (1997) and National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine (2010) .

Research that centers on use in applied settings without consideration of advancement of basic understanding falls in Edison’s quadrant. Research in Edison’s quadrant aligns with engineering, emphasizing what works rather than how it works. This approach is appealing in science education research, because it removes the hypothetical nature of much psychology lab research and yields instructional approaches that can be applied and assessed practically, despite the many confounds and challenges posed in the classroom.

Klahr and Li (2005) go on to argue that work that falls in a third quadrant, Pasteur’s—with focus on both use and understanding—is most beneficial in its reconciliation of the challenges associated with pure basic research (e.g., utility in the real world) and pure applied research (e.g., replicability, ability to translate to real-world settings). For example, following psychology lab–based work examining the development of CVS, Klahr and colleagues extended work to examine the impact of instruction on CVS. A lab-to-classroom approach requires meaningful and intentional shifts from carefully controlled experimental work aimed at understanding foundational learning principles to classroom-based studies of how prescribed learning mechanisms function, change, and respond to instruction, curriculum, and technology. Oftentimes, the latter classroom-based research raises additional questions that are not easily answered in the relative experimental chaos of the classroom. An important aspect of psychology lab-to-classroom research is the effortful shift back to careful, lab-based experimentation once such questions arise in the classroom. This feedback loop allows researchers to contribute to both understanding and use through careful methodological design that relies on psychology and science education research perspectives. Almost a decade ago, in a brief report on the impact of such an approach, Linn and Bjork (2006) , point to the intricacies and complexities raised by comparing consistencies and inconsistencies in psychology lab– and classroom-based research. Much like what has been said earlier regarding design-based research, Linn and Bjork (2006) purport that findings stemming from lab-to-classroom research may provide valuable design principles for optimizing science instruction.

Microgenetic Research.

The etymology of “microgenetic” refers not to the study of genetics but reflects an archaic use of the term “genetic.” The “genetic method” refers to a methodology in which an extended investigation is used to study developmental sequences ( Kai, 1939 ). The first microgenetic experiments are traced to Heinz Warner, who performed so-called “genetic experiments” to describe the sequence of states that occurred during a psychological event ( Siegler, 2006 ). Developmental psychologists first used microgenetic methods as a means for determining how cognitive processes change while an individual is developing. Rather than assessing the cognitive growth that an individual may have after a year of school, microgenetic studies assess real-time change and growth on a continuous basis. Microgenetic methods have three key features: 1) observations span a time in which an individual is rapidly growing in ability; 2) many separate observations are made, and the total number of observations made is dependent on the expected rate of change of the phenomena of interest; and 3) observations inform theories about the processes that underlie observed changes ( Siegler, 2006 ; Siegler and Crowley, 1991 ).

Microgenetic studies are not the same as cross-sectional or longitudinal studies that seek to determine when, or whether, certain abilities develop over time; instead, the emphasis of a microgenetic approach is to provide detailed information about why and how a certain ability develops ( Siegler, 2006 ). Microgenetic methodology is versatile and appropriate to use throughout the lifespan to study a wide variety of processes, including learning; can be used in laboratory or classroom settings; and has a track record for utility in testing the predictions of major theories of cognitive development ( Siegler, 2006 ). In the context of educational research, microgenetic studies provide detailed insight into how a student is learning over the course of an intervention. For example, Disessa (2014) used a microgenetic method for studying adolescents’ physics learning. Laski and Siegler (2014) used a microgenetic method to examine how kindergartners learn basic math skills through game play.

BARRIERS TO INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION

Although the learning sciences and DBER clearly have overlapping interests, and the distinctions between the two are important for interdisciplinary collaboration, these differences also lead to barriers. We first highlighted differences in traditions of scholarship and the lack of understanding and respect that exists between the hard and soft sciences. This lack of understanding and respect between the fields is a serious barrier toward interdisciplinary collaboration. This intellectual snobbery leads to a strong adherence to one’s perspective at the expense of understanding the methods and practices of another discipline. As we have stated throughout the essay, and as echoed in social psychology literature, successful and innovative interdisciplinary collaboration requires a synergistic, meaningful combination of two different perspectives. Consequently, if underlying tensions exist because of “my science” versus “your science” or arrogance about being from a “superior” discipline, it is extremely difficult if not impossible to attain synergy.

In our discussion of what distinguishes DBER and the learning sciences, we focused extensively on the differences of practices, particularly the use of theory and methods. For example, different understandings of how theory is used in research between discipline-based education researchers (who trained in disciplines outside the social sciences) and learning scientists may contribute to the lack of theoretical framing in a great deal of the DBER literature. This leads to problems communicating to a wider community, because failure to properly situate findings within existing theoretical frameworks and literature makes it difficult for those outside DBER to understand and appreciate the relevance and importance of DBER work. Application of theory to teaching and research is not a topic to take lightly. Disregard for theory building with respect to existing theory only works to move the field further from functioning as a cumulative science. In fact, the existence and impact of a field flooded with multiple theoretical explanations for the same phenomenon has led to its description as the “toothbrush problem” (i.e., everyone has one and no one wants to use someone else’s; Mischel, 2008 ). Mischel (2008) recommended that, instead of engaging in parallel play around related problems, researchers make it the norm to connect closely related work, regardless of disciplinary boundaries.

We and others (e.g., Coley and Tanner, 2012 ) note that research topics in life sciences education research are missing the connection of their findings to new or existing theoretical frameworks. Although theories are approximations of learning and subject to revision in response to new research, they serve a valuable function in situating educational design. Teaching based on intuitions, how a topic is typically taught within a domain, or bandwagon teaching based on the newest educational technology risks sacrificing quality, research-driven teaching ( Nathan and Wagner Alibali, 2010 ). Situating teaching and research within a theoretical framework provides the best chance at success, because empirically tested theories should serve as reliable starting points for developing learning experiences and research questions.

In addition to challenges associated with different understandings of theory, methodological differences may interfere with the interpretation of results and application of conclusions across the two fields. But perhaps more problematically, we also see such differences as a hindrance to successful interdisciplinary collaborations. In the preceding section, we discussed three methodologies that are generally characteristic of learning sciences research—design-based research, lab-to-classroom studies, and microgenetic methodologies. Although it may be possible that some DBER studies use a methodology similar to design-based research, they are not framed as such and may also not be perfectly aligned with how learning scientists operationalize design-based research practices. In the examples of design-based research that we cite in this article, both specifically state the use of a design-based research approach and situate the article as either the first iteration ( Mega Subramaniam et al ., 2015 ) or as a series of small studies that build on each other ( Hickey et al ., 2012 ). If DBER practitioners are using a design-based research approach that is typical of the learning sciences, the lack of following learning sciences practices in their reporting of research leads to a disconnect between the two disciplines, even though the research questions are of interest to a broad audience. This, much like discipline-specific use of “theory,” underscores how not attending to differences in disciplinary practices impairs the progress of research by impairing communication across disciplinary lines and resulting in less interdisciplinary and more siloed research programs.

Furthermore, microgenetic and psychology lab–based studies are not common in the DBER literature but may be useful methodologies for DBER researchers. In our own experience, while resources for exploring the motivations underlying methodological approaches are available, synthesizing these approaches (e.g., understanding their similarities and differences, identifying what aspects apply to one’s own work and how to apply them) is often daunting and cumbersome. The difficulty of this task lies not only in the size of the task but in first being motivated to look outside one’s own paradigm, then knowing where to look, and finally deciphering similar constructs shrouded in different terminology across approaches.

PRACTICAL STRATEGIES FOR COLLABORATION

Having pointed to areas of convergence (e.g., with regard to aims) and divergence (e.g., with regard to the use of theory) across DBER and learning sciences, we now shift to delineating clear strategies for forming, fostering, and benefiting from interdisciplinary collaborations. We reiterate our point in the design of Figure 1 , that there is strength in varied methodological and theoretical frames for understanding learning principles and classroom applications. Our intent is not to suggest that DBER and learning sciences researchers aim toward overlapping work but instead identify meaningful synergies to advance science learning and education.

Thoughtfully Consider Your and Your Colleagues’ NOS Understanding

There is no single way to approach science, and practices vary widely both across and within disciplines. We suggest exploring literature on NOS and NOS inquiry (such as Lederman et al ., 2002 ; Lederman, 2007 ; Lederman and Lederman, 2014 ; Deng et al ., 2011 ) as well as classics such as Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2012) and Alan Chalmers’ What Is This Thing Called Science? (2013) and the modern Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein (2012) . We suggest that thoughtful consideration of what the practice of science means to us individually is an important first step to engaging in dialogue with others who may practice science differently.

Engage in Effortful Discussion across Disciplinary Lines to Identify and Clarify Differences

An appreciation for each discipline is the power and benefit of interdisciplinary work, and we encourage those interested in interdisciplinary collaboration to discuss with colleagues from different disciplines how the practice of science varies. Building successful interdisciplinary collaborations starts by forming relationships with experts from a different field and seeking to understand one another’s disciplines ( Gooch, 2005 ; Powell et al ., 1999 ). Although we point to differences in methods and theory that we have observed working across disciplinary lines, each collaboration is different. Consequently, the challenges we observed may or may not align with all interdisciplinary collaborations. Therefore, for interdisciplinary collaborations to succeed, researchers must engage in a concerted effort to understand the disciplinary practices of their collaborators without sacrificing their own perspectives.

As a first step, you may wish to find someone in a discipline different from yours and discuss different practices. We recommend reviewing the list of universities that belong to the Network of Academic Programs in the Learning Sciences (NAPLeS). The NAPLeS website ( http://isls-naples.psy.lmu.de ) includes a comprehensive list of learning sciences faculty and participating universities along with contact information. 2 The NAPLeS network was formed as part of the educational mission of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS). Another way to meet collaborators is to attend either of the conferences organized by ISLS. The International Conference for the Learning Sciences and the Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Conference occur biennially. ISLS also publishes two journals of interest, Journal of the Learning Sciences and International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. Other organizations with useful resources and conferences include EARLI, the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction, which includes such special interest groups as higher education, quantitative and qualitative approaches to learning, instruction and learning, and teaching in culturally diverse settings. As of the writing of this article, EARLI includes researchers from 61 different countries and meets biennially. The Cognitive Development Society (CDS) meets annually and is a group of individuals who are interested in cognitive process and cognitive development, including cognitive processes that underlie human comprehension of biology. CDS publishes the Journal of Cognition and Development , which includes not only research articles but also articles describing methodological techniques. Division 15 of the American Psychological Association (APA), educational psychology, is a venue for anyone with an interest in research, teaching, and/or practice within educational settings. Division 15 of the APA also publishes Educational Psychologist . For those who are coming from a learning sciences perspective and are interested in collaborating with a DBER researcher, the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Researcher meets annually and lists universities with biology education research graduate programs on its website.

Become Familiar with Various Methodologies

Although we are not suggesting that everyone become experts in all methodologies (which defeats the purpose of interdisciplinary collaboration), we do suggest that those interested in interdisciplinary collaboration learn the basics of other methodologies. We hope that our brief review of methodologies in this essay may serve as a useful resource and starting point for those interested in growing and diversifying their methodological tool kits in order to bridge cross-disciplinary gaps. This diversified methodological tool kit allows researchers to strengthen their own research—for instance, in times when phenomena remain unexplained. Furthermore, a diversified methodological tool kit also allows researchers to broaden and complement their own perspectives through accurate interpretation of others’ results. We expect that, through expanded, diversified methodological tool kits, collaborative teams of researchers will be better equipped to ask, and subsequently answer, different kinds of questions. We do not intend to suggest that methodology should blindly and wholly converge across disciplines. To do so would dilute the power of bringing together multiple research paradigms, perspectives, and strengths.

Identifying methodologies of interest may also help with the identification of possible collaborators who specialize in certain methods. As discussed above, there may be overlap in the methodologies within disciplines, but the lack of common language to discuss these methods may serve as a barrier. By understanding and appreciating the language surrounding methodologies used by each discipline, researchers can be better prepared for engaging in discussions across disciplinary lines.

When Planning Interdisciplinary Work, Create Well-Defined Roles in Which Each Person Utilizes His or Her Skill Set and Perspectives to Achieve Group Goals

“Interdisciplinary” is often used solely as a buzzword without consideration for what it means and whether or not the research proposed is in fact interdisciplinary. If you are considering an interdisciplinary approach, thoughtfully consider and discuss with your colleagues what you hope to accomplish and why. How does each individual’s perspective, expertise, and skills contribute to the overall goal? Although this may not be clear at the onset of a relationship, a clear understanding of the distinction between each party and how each party will contribute to project goals are important considerations ( Bronstein, 2003 ).

Incorporate Interdisciplinary Training in Doctoral Programs

As part of ongoing educational reform, there have been calls to create graduate and postdoctoral programs that train individuals in teaching and learning ( Handelsman et al ., 2004 ; NRC, 2012 ). How should these programs be structured so as to best train the next generation of scientists for collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of the “second generation” of DBER? What is the best way to balance creating a cohort of young scientists who can function as discipline experts and are able to engage in educational research methodology? How do we train students in both DBER and the learning sciences for successful interdisciplinary collaboration? As we have mentioned previously in this essay, the value of interdisciplinary collaborations lies in the meaningful combination of different expertise. Some have suggested that graduate programs for training science education researchers should include a “broad span of disciplinary and methodological approaches [to enable students to] become comfortable working in collaborations with experts in other disciplines” ( Eisenhart and DeHaan, 2005 , p. 8). Although we agree that it is valuable for students to be exposed to a variety of traditions and disciplines, this must be balanced with attaining disciplinary expertise.

Rather than expose graduate students to as many different disciplines and methodologies as possible, we suggest that graduate programs train students to become experts in specific disciplines while concurrently promoting the development of the skills necessary to engage in interdisciplinary collaboration. For example, previous work has indicated that individuals with experience in successful interdisciplinary work tend to have future success in similar collaborations ( Bronstein, 2003 ). Therefore, students could be required to interview with or interact with someone from a completely different discipline and then metacognitively reflect on that experience, potentially with additional NOS instruction, such as that proposed in the first strategy discussed here. This interaction could be framed around the student’s career goals; in the case of biology education research, a student in biology could interact with learning scientists within his or her university. This strategy allows students to experience dialogue across disciplinary lines and to reflect on different practices without sacrificing their attainment of a specific expertise. This experience can be done alongside course work in NOS. Discussions of what it means to do science causes students to metacognitively reflect on and consider their own practices and compare those practices with their experience exploring the practices of others in different disciplines. As we have stated previously in this essay, thoughtful consideration and dialogue about different practices is an essential component of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Another possible solution is to allow students to pursue a certificate in a specialized area related to their research interests. For example, if a student is specifically interested in biology pedagogy, he or she could take specialized course work within the college of education or in his or her respective department about teaching to students of various ages or backgrounds. Maybe the student could do a field experience in a K–12 or informal setting such as a museum as part of this certificate. Another option would be for a quantitative methods certificate, which would allow biology education graduate students to take the same advanced statistical methods courses that educational psychology graduate students take, such as item response theory or hierarchical linear modeling. Certificate programs allow students to become discipline experts in their fields of interest while gaining complementary interdisciplinary experience and experience working with others from disparate disciplines.

CONCLUSIONS

Our goal in this essay was to provide some background for understanding the benefits and challenges related to interdisciplinary collaborations and some practical strategies for forming them. We discussed the utility and value in synergistic approaches to understanding learning in biology ( Figure 1 ); as the second-generation of DBER unfolds, we are excited for the potential for advancing our collective understanding of how students learn science. Although DBER and the learning sciences have some fundamental differences in traditions of scholarship and research practices, both fields have similar goals and interests. The meaningful connection of these different perspectives leads to both the power and challenge for forming productive interdisciplinary collaborations. It is the meaningful combination of these perspectives that leads to novel research. We also wish to note that, although interdisciplinary research has significant benefits, each field uniquely contributes to life sciences education research. We are not suggesting that all life sciences education research hinges on interdisciplinary approaches or that the two fields completely converge, but we hope the reader will recognize the possible benefits of interdisciplinary research and the opportunities and challenges of disciplinary distinctions.

We outlined possible barriers to collaboration and also some suggested strategies for overcoming these challenges. We suggest that anyone interested in engaging in interdisciplinary research in biology education research should not only understand and appreciate the differences between fields but should pay attention to the balance between having a distinct knowledge base and allowing for interdisciplinary discussion. This essay was framed around our experience engaging in interdisciplinary research in biology education, with support from the social sciences literature. Because each collaboration is different, it may be the case that our challenges and suggested strategies are not generalizable to all cases. We hope that this essay, even if not perfectly applicable in all cases, will serve as a springboard for discussion as DBER moves into its second generation.

1 Although DBER researchers are often educators within the discipline as well, for our purposes here, we are referring to K–12 educators. Although the perspective of educators is an important part of the interdisciplinary prism, we have chosen to focus this essay around the perspectives of the discipline-based education researcher and learning scientists. We do not mean to downplay the role of this component in understanding learning principles and classroom applications, but we limit our discussion of the topic, since it outside the scope of our current aims. We hope researchers will pick up on this component for further development in future work.

2 We also recommend reviewing the NAPLeS website not only to identify possible collaborators but for the wealth of information available through their webinars, including those on learning and methodologies within the learning sciences.

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Transdisciplinary Field Guide

What is transdisciplinary research, engaging stakeholders as co-producers of knowledge, the place of tdr in the university.

• A paradigm shift in knowledge production: related concepts

Problem-solving transdisciplinary research

Comparing transdisciplinary, valorisation and societal impact terms.

This field guide defines transdisciplinary research as research that integrates knowledge across academic disciplines and with non-academic stakeholders to address societal challenges. It is guided by the principle that ‘scientific rigor meets societal relevance’.

The mission of Pathways to Sustainability is to create a vibrant community fostering new research collaborations to explore pathways to sustainability, guided by the principle that scientific rigor meets societal relevance.

Like interdisciplinary research, transdisciplinary research produces knowledge that goes beyond the existing disciplines (e.g. Morton et al. 2015 and Tress et al. 2004 ). Often, it draws from and contributes to what can be called 'interdisciplines', which are hybrid fields that emerge around particular issues (see Klein 2017 ), such as sustainability science. How transdisciplinary research is defined and how it relates to other concepts remains a heavily debated issue. However, there is broad consensus around seeking to value and integrate the knowledge from non-academic stakeholders. This implies ‘processes of mutual learning between science and society, (...) which embodies a mission of science with society rather than for society’ ( Seidl et al. 2013 ). For that, it builds on established methods to produce ‘reliable knowledge’, but goes beyond that to generate ‘socially-robust knowledge’ ( Nowotny et al. 2003 ). This double accountability makes transdisciplinary research both exciting and challenging!

How does transdisciplinary research relate to other concepts?

See the Research Support Officers page for more on their distinctions and overlaps with

• Societal impact
• Valorisation
• Open science

Caution 1 : These definitions are contested, and you may encounter different perspectives. For instance, another definition for transdisciplinarity aims to identify a higher level synthesis or convergence of knowledge beyond disciplinary perspectives (e.g. National Research Council 2014 ). We do not cover this definition here (Covered in Pohl 2011 and Klein 2013 ). To know more about the history of transdisciplinarity, check Vermeulen and Witjes (2020) .

Caution 2: These drawings are a simplification. In practice, there is considerable collaboration and cross-fertilisation already happening between disciplines (see Jacobs 2013 ).

Caution 3: Don’t overemphasise consensus! Disagreements and disensus about values, goals, and facts need not be eliminated - quite the opposite. Pluralistic approaches to transdisciplinarity and co-creation can produce much more socially robust outcomes than those that try to eliminate disagreements.

Engaging stakeholders is often critical for addressing problems because we can’t understand or solve societal challenges without their knowledge and action. It is also more likely that research ideas are adopted by stakeholders when we engage with them directly and build trust over time. There is a long history of participatory practice and extensive academic literature that lends rigor to this approach. Prof. dr. John Robinson, Transdisciplinary Visiting Professor

Transdisciplinary research means engaging stakeholders in significant ways throughout the research process, rather than collecting data, informing stakeholders or valorising knowledge afterwards.

• It is not just communication and outreach – It is not telling people about your research in one-way communication such as through media articles, interviews or presentations, nor is it simply providing advice as an expert.
• It is not just extractive research – It is not the process of gathering data about societal actors through surveys, interviews, observation and other methods.

Both communication and data collection can be a part of a more interactive transdisciplinary process; however, a transdisciplinary process as a whole is about co-producing knowledge with external actors in ways that enable them to shape the research and that value their knowledge.

Experts must now extend their knowledge, not simply to be an extension of what they know in their specialised field, but to consist of building links and trying to integrate what they know with what others want to, or should, know and do. Bringing together the many different knowledge dimensions involved constitutes specific mixes with other kinds of knowledge, experience and expertise. Helga Nowotny (2003)

Caution 2 : Both academic and non-academic stakeholders have very distinct understandings of what working collaboratively requires and provides. Clarifying those expectations, negotiating disagreements and building trust are crucial for building successful collaborations.

With growing pressures for the university to pursue impactful and socially relevant research, it may seem as if transdisciplinary research is in competition with traditional, curiosity-driven or disciplinary approaches (Figure 1, a). In effect, funding of research has increasingly prioritised  However, as prof. dr. John Robinson notes, transdisciplinary research does not have to be a threat to scientific core values (b) - there is an opportunity for it  to act as a buffer zone which protects those core values while also addressing societal demands (c). We should remember, as Nowotny writes, “Reliable knowledge remains the in-dispensable conditio sine qua non of the fact that ‘science works’” ( 2003, p. 155 ).  In our understanding, transdisciplinary research builds on a rich set of reliable, disciplinary knowledge, and helps to mediate between these disciplines and societal demands, expanding the scope of the University.

A Paradigm Shift in Knowledge Production: Related Concepts

Transdisciplinary research is part of a wider shift in the ‘knowledge landscape’ of society, in which the role of science and the assumptions held about how knowledge is produced and put to use are changing.

A transdisciplinary orientation is an important aspect of distinct paradigms of knowledge production. Consider this definition: “Transdisciplinary refers to different types of knowledge production for social change which are based not only on the integration of knowledge from different disciplines (interdisciplinary), but also on the inclusion of values, knowledge, know-how and expertise from non-academic sources” ( Klein, 2010 ).

These characteristics – interdisciplinary, integrative, reflexive, problem-focused, interactive and emergent, collaborative beyond academia ( Robinson, 2008 )–  also overlap with other concepts you may be familiar with.

Other terms that relate to problem-solving transdisciplinary approaches include:

• participatory research,
• interface management,
• issue-driven interdisciplinarity,
• interactive social research,
• transformative or participatory sustainability science.

Related concepts also include post-normal science ( Funtowitz and Ravetz 1993 ); mode-2 knowledge production ( Gibbons 1994 , Nowotny et al. 2001 ). There is overlap with concepts including triple-, quadruple- and quintuple helix and ‘ joint knowledge production ’, which speak of the ways in which academia can collaborate with other societal actors in innovation. Furthermore, transdisciplinarity can be seen as one of many approaches operating at the science-policy interface.

More recently, the term ‘co-production’ has been gaining traction in the domain of sustainability and global change research ( Van der Hel, 2016 ). It can be defined as “Iterative and collaborative processes involving diverse types of expertise, knowledge and actors to produce context-specific knowledge and pathways towards a sustainable future.” ( Norström et al. 2020 ). 'This emerging discourse emphasises context-based, pluralistic, goal-oriented and interactive as key characteristics. That term, however, is also used to refer to how science and society co-produce social orders ( Jasanoff, 2004 ).

Transdisciplinary research, as a field, draws from and contributes to these different notions, while trying to make these processes more intentional and explicit. Such different perspectives provide a rich substrate in which we can ground transdisciplinary research.

In the context of sustainability,  problem-solving transdisciplinary research is particularly relevant. This concerns research that directly addresses societal issues including sustainability.  As Prof. Arnim Wiek notes, this requires a different perspective on the purposes of knowledge we co-produce. We are seeking to produce knowledge for different purposes (see also Hirsch-Hadorn et al. 2008 ) :

• Enhancing our understanding (what is/will be) - system knowledge
• Providing us with direction (what is sustainable) - target knowledge
• Guiding action (how do we get there) - transformation knowledge 

 What a problem-solving orientation means for practice:

• Facing the complexity of these problems
• Considering the diversity of scientific and societal views about the problems
• Producing actionable knowledge
• Bridging scientific and societal understanding of an issue
• Developing outputs that are both academic and functional

For more: In Practice: Transdisciplinary Research , Methods & Resources

A variety of experimental approaches play a central role in this kind of transdisciplinary research. This includes both experiments on sustainability problems (usually analytical, descriptive and explanatory) and experiments on sustainability solutions (usually synthetical, prescriptive and procedural) (see Caniglia et al. 2017 ).

Caution 4 : Transdisciplinary researchers need to be humble when approaching issues, and not assume they ‘know exactly what the problem is’, which shuts down the discovery of other perspectives [see Mindset & Skills ].

Caution 5: Transdisciplinary research, as presented here, draws heavily on theories developed in and for the context of wealthy, western European nations. Van Breda and Swilling ( 2019 ) have argued that these methodologies ‘cannot merely be replicated and transferred’ to developing world contexts’. Instead, they propose an ‘Emergent Transdisciplinary Research Design’.

How do the terms ‘valorisation’ or ‘societal impact’ compare with transdisciplinarity?

Valorisation includes any process of creating value from knowledge that makes that knowledge suitable for societal use. This includes many different forms including science communication and indirect contact with ‘end-users’ [see Valorisation review & Societal Impact Report ]

Transdisciplinary research is part of valorisation but it is specifically a form of research that directly engages external stakeholders.

Societal impact is the end goal of transdisciplinary research to contribute to the development of society and the challenges facing society. [See the Societal Impact Report ]

• Creating and applying knowledge together with stakeholders and collaborating can lead to innovative solutions with more robust and socially desirable outcomes.

There are also increasing opportunities for pursuing high-quality research through engaging with those outside of academia who hold key knowledge about societal challenges. 

• Addressing society’s problems and needs through research benefits from insights from external stakeholders holding valuable knowledge and implementation capacities.
• Learning from stakeholders about their understanding and knowledge of an issue can enrich research and lead it into unexplored territories
• Increasingly funding agencies are requesting that research projects engage social actors as partners in research proposals [See the Horizon 2020 call for proposals ]
• The Standard Evaluation Protocol for evaluating research also emphasizes societal impact [See the Societal Impact Report ]

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QuickTips: The Blog @ Evidence Explained

• Disciplined research

“Help!” said the email. "I’m stuck on this one line of research. I’m not a newbie. I’ve done research for years. I spend hours every day online, doing research. I’d appreciate a suggestion from an expert."

O.K. This is it: 

Success depends upon how we define the word research. Most roadblocks happen because we are doing searches —not research.

Most roadblocks result from the strategies we use—or don’t use. If our main strategy is to (a) identify records; (b) look up the name of interest, and (c) look for direct evidence an explicit answer to our research question), then roadblocks are very likely to happen and can last forever. Once we shift our mindset from sources and names to strategies and then train ourselves to recognize and correlate indirect evidence, most problems can be solved. Our success rate as genealogists also changes once we adopt a disciplined approach to research.

There’s so much available online that we could wander the web forever and not solve our problem. We need planned expeditions. That usually means four steps, which we repeat over and again until the problem is solved.

• Analyze the research problem—every detail now known and the strength of the evidence that supports each detail.
• Develop a research plan that identifies every known source of data for the place and time and prioritizes them.
• Work that plan systematically—which usually means several segments of work in groups of related records before a tough problem is solved.
• Create analytical research reports for each segment. Real research reports. Reports that enable us to evaluate our findings in context—to study the whole mass of data we have gathered—as opposed to the typical habit of finding a document, making a copy, and extracting bits and pieces of information into pigeon holes within our software.

So: how do you conduct “research”?

Are your hours allocated to problem analysis, project planning, systematic research, and analytical reporting? Or do you log onto your favorite website, type a name into the search box, get 137 hits for the name, spend hours wading through them, find one record that looks like it “might be her,” and then type that data into your relational database program?

Our QuickLesson 20 offers a full tutorial. Check it out!

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HOW TO CITE: Elizabeth Shown Mills, "Disciplined Research," blog post, QuickTips: The Blog @ Evidence Explained ( https://www.evidenceexplained.org/quicktips/disciplined-research : posted 13 November 2018).

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• Problem solving
• Research plans
• Research reports
• Search vs. research
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Assessing Risks and Benefits

The IRB is responsible for evaluating the potential risks and weighing the probability of the risk occurring and the magnitude of harm that may result. It must then judge whether the anticipated benefit, either of new knowledge or of improved health for the research subjects, justifies inviting any person to undertake the risks.

Per DHHS and FDA regulations ( 45 CFR 46.111 and 21 CFR 56.111 ) two of the required criteria for granting IRB approval of research are:

• Risks to subjects are minimized by using procedures which are consistent with sound research design and which do not unnecessarily expose subjects to risk, and whenever appropriate, by using procedures already being performed on the subjects for diagnostic or treatment purposes.
• Risks to subjects are reasonable in relation to anticipated benefits, if any, to subjects, and the importance of the knowledge that may reasonably be expected to result. In evaluating risks and benefits, the IRB Committee will consider only those risks and benefits that may result from the research, as distinguished from risks and benefits of therapies subjects would receive even if not participating in the research.
• Benefit A valued or desired outcome; an advantage.
• Risk The probability of harm or injury (physical, psychological, social, or economic) occurring as a result of participation in a research study. Both the probability and magnitude of possible harm may vary from minimal to significant. Federal regulations define only "minimal risk."
• Minimal Risk A risk is minimal where the probability and magnitude of harm or discomfort anticipated in the proposed research are not greater, in and of themselves, than those ordinarily encountered in daily lives of the general population or during the performance of routine physical or psychological examinations or tests.
• Minimal Risk for Research involving Prisoners The definition of minimal risk for research involving prisoners differs somewhat from that given for non-institutionalized adults. Minimal risk is in this case is defined as, "the probability and magnitude of physical or psychological harm that is normally encountered in the daily lives, or in the routine medical, dental or psychological examinations of healthy persons."

There are two sources of confusion in the assessment of risks and benefits. One arises from the language employed in the discussion:

• "Risk" is a word expressing probabilities;
• "Benefits" is a word expressing a fact or state of affairs.

It is more accurate to speak as if both were in the realm of probability: i.e., risks and expected or anticipated benefits. Confusion also may arise because "risks" can refer to two quite different things:

• those chances that specific individuals are willing to undertake for some desired goal; or
• the conditions that make a situation harmful to a subject.

Researchers should provide detailed information in the IRB application about potential risks and benefits associated with the research, and provide information about the probability, magnitude and potential harms associated with each risk.

The IRB cannot approve research in which the risks are judged unreasonable in relation to the anticipated benefits. The IRB must:

• As applicable, evaluate the available clinical and nonclinical information on an investigational product to determine if the data is adequate to support the proposed clinical trial;
• Determine that the risks will be minimized to the extent possible [see below];
• Identify the probable benefits to be derived from the research;
• Determine that the risks are reasonable in relation to be benefits to subjects , if any, and the importance of the knowledge to be gained; and
• Assure that potential subjects will be provided with an accurate and fair description (during consent) of the risks or discomforts and the anticipated benefits.

The risks to which research subjects may be exposed have been classified as physical, psychological, social, and economic .

• Physical Harms Medical research often involves exposure to minor pain, discomfort, or injury from invasive medical procedures, or harm from possible side effects of drugs. All of these should be considered "risks" for purposes of IRB review. Some of the adverse effects that result from medical procedures or drugs can be permanent, but most are transient. Procedures commonly used in medical research usually result in no more than minor discomfort (e.g., temporary dizziness, the pain associated with venipuncture).Some medical research is designed only to measure more carefully the effects of therapeutic or diagnostic procedures applied in the course of caring for an illness. Such research may not entail any significant risks beyond those presented by medically indicated interventions. On the other hand, research designed to evaluate new drugs or procedures may present more than minimal risk, and, on occasion, can cause serious or disabling injuries.
• Psychological Harms Participation in research may result in undesired changes in thought processes and emotion (e.g., episodes of depression, confusion, or hallucination resulting from drugs, feelings of stress, guilt, and loss of self-esteem). These changes may be transitory, recurrent, or permanent. Most psychological risks are minimal or transitory, but some research has the potential for causing serious psychological harm.Stress and feelings of guilt or embarrassment may arise simply from thinking or talking about one's own behavior or attitudes on sensitive topics such as drug use, sexual preferences, selfishness, and violence. These feelings may be aroused when the subject is being interviewed or filling out a questionnaire. Stress may also be induced when the researchers manipulate the subjects' environment - as when "emergencies" or fake "assaults" are staged to observe how passersby respond. More frequently, however, is the possibility of psychological harm when behavioral research involves an element of deception.
• Is the invasion of privacy involved acceptable in light of the subjects' reasonable expectations of privacy in the situation under study;
• Is the research question of sufficient importance to justify the intrusion?
• The IRB must also consider whether the research design could be modified so that the study can be conducted without invading the privacy of the subjects.
• Note: Breach of confidentiality is sometimes confused with invasion of privacy, but it is really a different risk. Invasion of privacy concerns access to a person's body or behavior without consent; confidentiality of data concerns safeguarding information that has been given voluntarily by one person to another.
• Some research requires the use of a subject's hospital, school, or employment records. Access to such records for legitimate research purposes is generally acceptable, as long as the researcher protects the confidentiality of that information. However, it is important to recognize that a breach of confidentiality may result in psychological harm to individuals (in the form of embarrassment, guilt, stress, and so forth) or in social harm (see below).
• Social and Economic Harms Some invasions of privacy and breaches of confidentiality may result in embarrassment within one's business or social group, loss of employment, or criminal prosecution. Areas of particular sensitivity are information regarding alcohol or drug abuse, mental illness, illegal activities, and sexual behavior. Some social and behavioral research may yield information about individuals that could "label" or "stigmatize" the subjects. (e.g., as actual or potential delinquents or schizophrenics). Confidentiality safeguards must be strong in these instances. Participation in research may result in additional actual costs to individuals. Any anticipated costs to research participants should be described to prospective subjects during the consent process.
• Provide complete information in the protocol regarding the experimental design and the scientific rationale underlying the proposed research, including the results of previous animal and human studies.
• Assemble a research team with sufficient expertise and experience to conduct the research.
• Ensure that the projected sample size is sufficient to yield useful results.
• Collect data from standard-of-care procedures to avoid unnecessary risk, particularly for invasive or risky procedures (e.g., spinal taps, cardiac catheterization).
• Incorporate adequate safeguards into the research design such as an appropriate data safety monitoring plan, the presence of trained personnel who can respond to emergencies, and procedures to protect the confidentiality of the data (e.g., encryption, codes, and passwords).

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Types of Research Training and Career Development Funding Opportunities

The NIDCD’s research training and career development opportunities fall into two broad categories:

• Jaclyn Schurman, Au.D., Ph.D. , Extramural Research Training Officer for Fellowship Programs (F Programs)
• Alberto Rivera-Rentas, Ph.D. , Extramural Research Training Officer (all other extramural programs)
• Intramural opportunities at NIDCD labs on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. Contact: Elyssa Monzack, Ph.D. , NIDCD Deputy Scientific Director.

Extramural fellowship (F program) applicants should email Jaclyn Schurman, Au.D., Ph.D. , Extramural Research Training Officer for Fellowship Programs, with any questions. You are strongly encouraged to contact Dr. Schurman before preparing an application. Include a biosketch in NIH format ; a brief description of the project, including the aims (1 page), the population to be studied (as applicable), and the name of your mentor(s); and a statement on how the proposed project fits our strategic plan and our research areas and contributes to our mission . You will be informed if the project fits NIDCD requirements and will be accepted through the funding application process.

Extramural applicants for all other programs (R25, T, and K programs; NIH Loan Repayment Program; training-related administrative supplements) should email Alberto Rivera-Rentas, Ph.D. , Extramural Research Training Officer, with any questions. You are strongly encouraged to contact Dr. Rivera-Rentas before preparing an application. Include a brief description of the project, including the aims (1 page) and a statement on how the proposed project fits our strategic plan and research areas and contributes to our mission . You will be informed if the project fits NIDCD requirements and will be accepted through the funding application process.

Intramural applicants (those interested in working on the NIH campus) should email Elyssa Monzack, Ph.D. , NIDCD Deputy Scientific Director, with any questions.

Eligibility by Education Level

• Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research Administrative supplements to improve participation from underrepresented groups, including individuals who have disabilities, are from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups, or come from disadvantaged backgrounds.
• BRAIN Initiative: Research Supplements to Promote Diversity
• Administrative Supplements to Promote Diversity in Research and Development: Small Businesses-SBIR/STTR

Graduate/Predoctoral

• F31: Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards (NRSA) for Individual Predoctoral Fellows to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research (Parent F31-Diversity)
• NIH Blueprint D-SPAN Award (F99/K00)

Postdoctoral

• K99/R00 MOSAIC Award: Maximizing Opportunities for Scientific and Academic Independent Careers (MOSAIC) Postdoctoral Career Transition Award to Promote Diversity (Independent Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
• BRAIN Initiative: Advanced Postdoctoral Career Transition Award to Promote Diversity (K99/R00)

New and Junior Investigators

• Support for Research Excellence (SuRE) Program (R16 ) The SuRE program, which replaces the Support of Competitive Research (SCORE) program, offers two funding opportunities for research projects in all NIH mission areas. Open to faculty at institutions that receive limited NIH research support and serve students from groups underrepresented in biomedical research.
• Support for Research Excellence – First Independent Research (SuRE-First) Award
• Extramural Loan Repayment Program for Health Disparities Research (LRP-HDR)
• Extramural Loan Repayment Program for Research in Emerging Areas Critical to Human Health (LRP-REACH)
• NIDCD Research Opportunities for New Investigators to Promote Workforce Diversity
• Extramural Clinical Research Loan Repayment Program for Individuals from Disadvantaged Backgrounds (LRP-IDB)

Established Investigators

Institutions.

• R25: Enhancing NIDCD's Extramural Workforce Diversity through Research Experiences (R25 - Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
• R25: Mentoring Networks to Enhance Diversity in NIDCD's Extramural Research Workforce (R25 - Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
• R25 Diversity Awards - for Institutions (Video)

NIDCD Fellowships: Frequently Asked Questions

An Overview of Predoctoral Fellowships at the NIDCD (video)

Individual Predoctoral Research Fellowships

• F30: Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards (NRSA) for Students at Institutions Without NIH-Funded Institutional Predoctoral Dual-Degree Training Programs (Parent F30)
• F30: Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards (NRSA) for Students at Institutions With NIH-Funded Institutional Predoctoral Dual-Degree Training Programs (Parent F30)
• F31: Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards (NRSA) for Individual Predoctoral Fellows (Parent F31)
• FM1: NIH Medical Scientist Partnership Program (FM1 - Clinical Trial Not Allowed)

Individual Predoctoral Research Fellowships to Promote Diversity

Individual research fellowships for au.d. audiologists pursuing ph.d. dissertation research.

• F32: NIDCD Research Dissertation Fellowships for Au.D. Audiologists

Individual Postdoctoral Research Fellowships

• F32: Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards (NRSA) for Individual Postdoctoral Fellows (Parent F32)
• R25: NIDCD's Mentoring Networks to Enhance Clinician-Scientists' Participation in Research (R25 - Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
• R25: Research Experiences to Enhance Clinician-Scientists' Participation in NIDCD's Research (R25 - Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
• R25: NIDCD's Mentored Research Pathway for Otolaryngology Residents and Medical Students (R25 - Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
• T32: Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards (NRSA) Institutional Research Training Grants (Parent T32)
• T35: Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards (NRSA) Short-Term Institutional Research Training Grants (Parent T35)

Diversity-Related Opportunities

• R25 Diversity Awards - for Institutions (video)

Research Career Development Opportunities for Postdoctoral Students

• K99/R00 Award: NIH Pathway to Independence (PI) Award (Parent K99/R00)

Research Career Development Opportunities for Postdoctoral Students Holding Au.D./Ph.D. Degrees

• K01 Award: NIDCD Mentored Career Development Award for Postdoctorate Au.D./Ph.D. Audiologists

Research Career Development Opportunities for New and Junior Investigators

• K01 Award: International Research Scientist Development Award (IRSDA)
• K08 Award: Mentored Clinical Scientist Development Award (MCSDA)
• K23 Award: Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award
• K25 Award: Mentored Quantitative Research Career Development Award
• K43 Award: Emerging Global Leader Award
• Lasker Clinical Research Scholars Program (Si2/R00 Clinical Trial Optional)
• Funding Opportunities for Junior Faculty from the NIDCD (video)

Research Career Development Opportunities for Established Investigators

• K18 Award: NIDCD Research Career Enhancement Award for Established Investigators
• K24 Award: Midcareer Investigator Award in Patient-Oriented Research
• NIH Loan Repayment Programs
• Notice of Special Interest (NOSI): NIDCD National Research Service Award (NRSA) T32 and T35 Diversity Administrative Supplement
• Guidance Regarding Administrative Supplements
• Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research
• Supplements to Promote Re-Entry, Re-Integration Into, and Re-Training in Health-Related Research Careers
• Supplements to Promote Research Continuity and Retention of NIH Mentored Career Development (K) Award Recipients and Scholars
• Administrative Supplements for Continuity of Biomedical and Behavioral Research Among First-Time Recipients of NIH Research Project Grant Awards

Research Training and Career Development at the NIDCD (Intramural)

Reference Examples

More than 100 reference examples and their corresponding in-text citations are presented in the seventh edition Publication Manual . Examples of the most common works that writers cite are provided on this page; additional examples are available in the Publication Manual .

To find the reference example you need, first select a category (e.g., periodicals) and then choose the appropriate type of work (e.g., journal article ) and follow the relevant example.

When selecting a category, use the webpages and websites category only when a work does not fit better within another category. For example, a report from a government website would use the reports category, whereas a page on a government website that is not a report or other work would use the webpages and websites category.

Also note that print and electronic references are largely the same. For example, to cite both print books and ebooks, use the books and reference works category and then choose the appropriate type of work (i.e., book ) and follow the relevant example (e.g., whole authored book ).

Examples on these pages illustrate the details of reference formats. We make every attempt to show examples that are in keeping with APA Style’s guiding principles of inclusivity and bias-free language. These examples are presented out of context only to demonstrate formatting issues (e.g., which elements to italicize, where punctuation is needed, placement of parentheses). References, including these examples, are not inherently endorsements for the ideas or content of the works themselves. An author may cite a work to support a statement or an idea, to critique that work, or for many other reasons. For more examples, see our sample papers .

Reference examples are covered in the seventh edition APA Style manuals in the Publication Manual Chapter 10 and the Concise Guide Chapter 10

Related handouts

• Common Reference Examples Guide (PDF, 147KB)
• Reference Quick Guide (PDF, 225KB)

Textual Works

Textual works are covered in Sections 10.1–10.8 of the Publication Manual . The most common categories and examples are presented here. For the reviews of other works category, see Section 10.7.

• Journal Article References
• Magazine Article References
• Newspaper Article References
• Blog Post and Blog Comment References
• UpToDate Article References
• Book/Ebook References
• Diagnostic Manual References
• Children’s Book or Other Illustrated Book References
• Classroom Course Pack Material References
• Religious Work References
• Chapter in an Edited Book/Ebook References
• Dictionary Entry References
• Wikipedia Entry References
• Report by a Government Agency References
• Report with Individual Authors References
• Brochure References
• Ethics Code References
• Fact Sheet References
• ISO Standard References
• Press Release References
• White Paper References
• Conference Presentation References
• Conference Proceeding References
• Published Dissertation or Thesis References
• Unpublished Dissertation or Thesis References
• ERIC Database References
• Preprint Article References

Data and Assessments

Data sets are covered in Section 10.9 of the Publication Manual . For the software and tests categories, see Sections 10.10 and 10.11.

• Data Set References
• Toolbox References

Audiovisual Media

Audiovisual media are covered in Sections 10.12–10.14 of the Publication Manual . The most common examples are presented together here. In the manual, these examples and more are separated into categories for audiovisual, audio, and visual media.

• Artwork References
• Clip Art or Stock Image References
• Film and Television References
• Musical Score References
• Online Course or MOOC References
• Podcast References
• PowerPoint Slide or Lecture Note References
• Radio Broadcast References
• TED Talk References
• Transcript of an Audiovisual Work References
• YouTube Video References

Online Media

Online media are covered in Sections 10.15 and 10.16 of the Publication Manual . Please note that blog posts are part of the periodicals category.

• Facebook References
• Instagram References
• LinkedIn References
• Online Forum (e.g., Reddit) References
• TikTok References
• X References
• Webpage on a Website References
• Clinical Practice References
• Open Educational Resource References
• Whole Website References