Introductory description

In an increasingly complex and changing world, researchers inside and outside the academy are constantly facing challenges that require collaborating and thinking across and beyond disciplinary boundaries. Interdisciplinary skills are said to improve not only creativity and critical thinking but also academic performance and employability. But what is interdisciplinarity?

The module will combine an introduction to a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to interdisciplinary research with a critical evaluation of the challenges and advantages of working across and in-between disciplines and practices through the discussion of cases and examples.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Lecture themes:

Week 1: What is a discipline? What is interdisciplinarity? Histories of interdisciplinarity in theory and practice

Week 2: Changing knowledge infrastructures, the knowledge economy and the internalization of science by society. A critical consideration of problem spaces, wicked problems, the politics of openness, and the politics of collaborative research and the participatory condition.

Week 3: Inter-, multi-, cross-, trans–interdisciplinary research, and the politics of interdisciplinarity

Week 4: Questions of methodology, epistemology, ethics and practice – including geo-politics of methodology

Weeks 5-9 (Week 6 – reading week)
Explorations of key concepts or ‘ways of knowing’ in the Masters’ programmes in CIM as forms of interdisciplinary research. Examples might include: participation, the environment, mapping, sound, personalisation, complexity, AI, trust, interface design.

Week 10
Conclusion: What are the values of interdisciplinarity?

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Take initiative in their own learning.
• Design and develop a structured essay plan.
• Think critically about a particular area of study.
• Systematically evaluate and synthesise research in a particular area of study.
• Demonstrate their learning through a written and structured essay.

Indicative reading list

To be supplemented on a week by week basis.

Apostel, L., Berger, G., Briggs, A. and Michaud, G. (eds) (1972) Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities, Paris: OECD.
Barry, A., Born, G. and Weszkalnys, G. (2008) Logics of interdisciplinarity, Economy and Society, 37(1): 20-49.
Barry A and Born G (eds) (2013) Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences, Abingdon: Routledge.
Bhabdar, B. (2016) The Stern Review. LRB Blog: URL: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/08/02/brenna-bhandar/the-stern-review/.
Blackwell, A. F., Wilson, L., Street, A., Boulton, C. and Knell, J. (2009) Radical innovation: crossing
knowledge boundaries with interdisciplinary teams. University of Cambridge, Technical Report No. 760. URL: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-760.pdf.
Boix Mansilla, V., Lamont, M. and Sato, K. (2016) Shared cognitive-emotional-interactional platforms: markers and conditions for successful interdisciplinary collaborations’, Science, Technology & Human Values, 41(4): 571-612.
Bozhkova, E. (2016) Interdisciplinary proposals struggle to get funded. Nature News 29 June 2016. URL: http://www.nature.com/news/interdisciplinary-proposals-struggle-to-get-funded-1.20189.
British Academy (2016) Crossing Paths: Interdisciplinary Institutions, Careers, Education and Applications. July 2016. URL: http://www.britac.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Crossing%20Paths%20-%20Full%20Report.pdf.
Callard, F, Fitzgerald, D (2015a) Rethinking Interdisciplinarity Across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Callard, F, Fitzgerald, D (2015b) Why it’s time to get real about interdisciplinary research. The Guardian. 14 October 2015. URL: https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2015/oct/14/why-its-time-to-get-real-about-interdisciplinary-research.
Cazeaux, C. (2008). ‗Inherently interdisciplinary: four perspectives on practice-based research‘, Journal of Visual Arts Practice 7(2), 107-32
Cooke, B., Kothari, U. (2001) Participation – the new tyranny? London: Zed Books.
Deloria, V. (1991) Research, Redskins, and Reality. American Indian Quarterly 15(4) 457-468.
Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (2016) Building on success and learning from experience: an independent review of the Research Excellence Framework: July 2016.
Elsevier (2015) A Review of the UK's Interdisciplinary Research using a Citation-based Approach: Report to the UK HE Funding Bodies and MRC by Elsevier. URL: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/HEFCE,2014/Content/Pubs/Independentresearch/2015/Review,of,the,UKs,interdisciplinary,research/2015_interdisc.pdf.
Gad, C. and Bruun Jensen, C. (2016) Lateral concepts, Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 2: 3-12.
Global Research Council (2016) Statement of Principles on Interdisciplinarity. URL: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/GRC2016Interdisciplinarity-pdf/.
Griffin, G, Medhurst P and Green, T (2006) Interdisciplinarity in Interdisciplinary Research Programmes in the UK. University of Hull. URL: https://www.york.ac.uk/res/researchintegration/Interdisciplinarity_UK.pdf.
Joseph, A., (2015). Scholarly publishing in South Africa: the global south on the periphery. Insights. 28(3): 62–68.
Kelly, A. H. and McGoey, L. (2018) 'Facts, power and global evidence: a new empire of truth' Economy and Society, 47:1, 1-26.

Kimbell, L. (2015a) Rethinking design thinking, Part I, Design and Culture, 3(3): 285-306.
Kimbell, L. (2015b) Rethinking design thinking Part II, Design and Culture, 4(2): 129-148.
Kukutai, T., Taylor, J. (2016) Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an Agenda. Canberra: Australian National University Press.
Last, A. (2015) Notes on GIS & methods. Mutable Matter. https://mutablematter.wordpress.com/2015/06/15/notes-on-gis-methods/
Law, J., Lin, W-Y (2015) Provincialising STS: postcoloniality, symmetry and method. 2015 Denver Bernal Prize plenary.
Ledford, H. (2015) How to solve the world’s biggest problems. Nature 525 (7569)
Lezaun, J., Marres, N. and Tironi, M. (forthcoming) Experiments in participation, in C. Miller, E. Smitt-Doer, U. Felt and R. Fouche (eds.) Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Volume 4, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lury, C. and Wakeford, N. (eds.) Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social, London: Routledge.
Lury, C. et al eds. (2018) Routledge International Handbook of Interdisciplinary Methods, Routledge, London
Marres, N. et al. eds (2018) Inventing the Social, Mattering Press, Manchester.
Nagar, R. (2014) Muddying the Waters: Co-authoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism. Urbana, Chicago & Springfield: University of Illinois Press.
Messer, J. (2012) Practicing interdisciplinarity, Text (14) 1-11.
Nowotny, H., Scott, P. and Gibbons, M. (2001) Re-thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. October (1990) Issue 53.
Parker, M. and Kingori, P. (2016) Good and Bad Research Collaborations: Researchers’ Views on Science and Ethics in Global Health Research. PLoS ONE 11(10): e0163579. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0163579.
Pickering A (1993) ‘Antidisciplines or narratives of illusion’ in Messer-Davidow, E., Shumway, D. R. and Sylvan D. J. (eds) Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, pp. 103–23.
Pina Cabral, J. de (2018) Modes of participation, Anthropological Theory, 18 (4): 435-455.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, University of Minnesota Press.
Ricuarte, P. (2019) Data epistemologies, the coloniality of power, and resistance, Television & Society, 18 (4): 435-455.
Rittel, H. W. J. and Webber, M. M. (1973) Dilemmas in a general theory of planning, Policy Sciences 4: 155-169.
Robson, M., Woods, A. and Fernyhough, C. (2015) ‘Voice Club’ in Working Knowledge - Transferable Methodology for Interdisciplinary Research URL: http://www.workingknowledgeps.com/
Science Europe (2012) Position Statement Horizon 2020: Excellence Counts. URL: http://www.scienceeurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/SE_H2020_Excellence_Counts_FIN.pdf.
Smith, L. T. (2012) Decolonising Methodologies. London: Zed Books.
Stengers, I. (2010) Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tejaswini, N. (2013) Introduction to Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, https://www.academia.edu/14934670/Introduction_to_Genealogies_of_the_Asian_Present_Situating_Inter-Asia_Cultural_Studies
Thrift, N. (2006) Re-inventing invention: new tendencies in capitalist commodification. Economy and Society 35(2) 279-306.
Verran, H. (2014) Working with those who think otherwise. Common Knowledge 20(3): 527-539.
Warren, G., Katz, C. (2015) Gwendolyn Warren and Cindi Katz in Conversation. URL: https://vimeo.com/111159306.
Wilkinson, S. and Smailes, D. (2015) ‘An Interdisciplinary Dialogue’ in Working Knowledge - Transferable Methodology for Interdisciplinary Research URL: http://www.workingknowledgeps.com/
Won Yin Wong, W. (2017) Speculative authorship in the city of fakes, Current Anthropology, 58: S15, S103-S112
Woods, A. (2015) ‘Interdisciplinary Authorship’ in Working Knowledge - Transferable Methodology for Interdisciplinary Research URL: http://www.workingknowledgeps.com/

Research element

Students will need to conduct a literature search to complete the assessment. They will also need to develop an original analysis of this literature.

Interdisciplinary

The subject of the module is interdisciplinarity, and will provide students with knowledge about different (inter-)disciplinary approaches to interdisciplinarity.

International

The approaches to interdisciplinarity discussed will include those that situate interdisciplinarity in relation to different national cultures of research, as well as considering the challenge to conducting international research, including those relating to language, data protection and issues of epistemic authority.

Subject specific skills

An advanced understanding of the values and practice of interdisciplinary research that will enable students to evaluate different claims to knowledge.

Transferable skills

An advanced understanding of different approaches to interdisciplinary practice that students can apply to conducting research in diverse social, disciplinary and professional contexts.