Photocredit: Steps Centre.
In today’s political science blog on the Guardian, Professor Andy Stirling from the Nexus Network talks about what it means to work across disciplines:
As attention focuses ever more intently on complex worldwide problems, it makes growing sense to pull research out of its disciplinary silos and focus directly on the problems at hand. Or – at least – it is becoming increasingly important to be seen to do this.
But what does all of this mean? Vague notions of interdisciplinarity arise in many inconsistently labelled forms. There is much confusion. It’s all about getting beyond conventional academic blinkers, as habitually practised in universities. Here, disciplines typically follow internal logics of jealously guarded, enthusiastically policed theories, methods, networks, cultures and power structures. The precarious identities of “sub-” or “emerging” disciplines can make them even more susceptible to these tendencies.
How to get beyond these tribal rivalries and build a broader and deeper focus on the problems themselves? Transcending narrow disciplinary agendas comes in many different forms, so it is not always clear what exactly is being attempted – or achieved.
You can read the full article on the political science blog on the Guardian.
