interdisciplinary adj : drawing from or characterized by participation of two or more fields of study; "interdisciplinary studies"; "an interdisciplinary conference"

English

Adjective

1. Of or pertaining to multiple distinct academic disciplines or fields of study.

Related terms

• multidisciplinary

Translations

Interdisciplinary is a term of art in several professions concerned with education and training that refers to the qualities of studies that cut across several established disciplines or traditional fields of study. This involves researchers, students, and teachers in the goals of connecting and integrating several academic disciplines, professions, or technologies, along with their specific perspectives, in the pursuit of a common task. Interdisciplinary approaches typically focus on problems felt by the investigators to be too complex or vast to be dealt with the knowledge and tools of a single discipline, for example, the epidemiology of AIDS or global warming. The term may be applied where the subject is felt to have been neglected or even misrepresented in the traditional disciplinary structure of research institutions, for example, women's studies or ethnic area studies.

The adjective interdisciplinary is most often used in educational circles when researchers from two or more disciplines pool their approaches and modify them so that they are better suited to the problem at hand, including the case of the team-taught course where students are required to understand a given subject in terms of multiple traditional disciplines. For example, the subject of land use may appear differently when examined by different disciplines, for instance, biology, chemistry, economics, geography, and politics.

In a sense, interdisciplinary involves attacking a subject from various angles and methods, eventually cutting across disciplines and forming a new method for understanding the subject. A common goal of understanding unites the various methods and acknowledges a common or shared subject or problem, even if it spreads to other disciplines.

Development

Although interdisciplinary and interdisciplinarity are frequently viewed as twentieth century terms, the concept has historical antecedents, most notably Greek philosophy. Julie Thompson Klein attests that "the roots of the concepts lie in a number of ideas that resonate through modern discourse—the ideas of a unified science, general knowledge, synthesis and the integration of knowledge" while Giles Gunn says that Greek historians and dramatists took elements from other realms of knowledge (such as medicine or philosophy) to further understand their own material.

Interdisciplinary programs sometimes arise from a shared conviction that the traditional disciplines are unable or unwilling to address an important problem. For example, social science disciplines such as anthropology and sociology paid little attention to the social analysis of technology throughout most of the twentieth century. As a result, many social scientists with interests in technology have joined science and technology studies programs, which are typically staffed by scholars drawn from numerous disciplines. They may also arise from new research developments, such as nanotechnology, which cannot be addressed without combining the approaches of two or more disciplines. Examples include quantum information processing, an amalgamation of quantum physics and computer science, and bioinformatics, combining molecular biology with computer science.

At another level interdisciplinarity is seen as a remedy to the harmful effects of excessive specialization. On some views, however, interdisciplinarity is entirely indebted to those who specialize in one field of study—that is, without specialists, interdisciplinarians would have no information and no leading experts to consult. Others place the focus of interdisciplinarity on the need to transcend disciplines, viewing excessive specialization as problematic both epistemologically and politically. When interdisciplinary collaboration or research results in new solutions to problems, much information is given back to the various disciplines involved. Therefore, both disciplinarians and interdisciplinarians may be seen in complementary relation to one another.

Varieties

There are several types of inquiry that may be referred to as "interdisciplinary." Interdisciplinarity is often used interchangeably with such terms as multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and crossdisciplinarity.

Multidisciplinarity

Multidisciplinarity is the act of joining together two or more disciplines without integration. Each discipline yields discipline specific results while any integration would be left to a third party observer. An example of multidisciplinarity would be a panel presentation on the many facets of the AIDS pandemic (medicine, politics, epidemiology) in which each section is given as a stand-alone presentation.

A multidisciplinary community or project is made up of people from different disciplines and professions who are engaged in working together as equal stakeholders in addressing a common challenge. The key question is how well can the challenge be decomposed into nearly separable subparts, and then addressed via the distributed knowledge in the community or project team. The lack of shared vocabulary between people and communication overhead is an additional challenge in these communities and projects. However, if similar challenges of a particular type need to be repeatedly addressed, and each challenge can be properly decomposed, a multidisciplinary community can be exceptionally efficient and effective. A multidisciplinary person is a person with degrees from two or more academic disciplines, so one person can take the place of two or more people in a multidisciplinary community or project team. Over time, multidisciplinary work does not typically lead to an increase nor a decrease in the number of academic disciplines.

Interdisciplinarity

"Interdisciplinarity" in referring to an approach to organizing intellectual inquiry is an evolving field, and stable, consensus definitions are not yet established for some subordinate or closely related fields.

An interdisciplinary community or project is made up of people from multiple disciplines and professions who are engaged in creating and applying new knowledge as they work together as equal stakeholders in addressing a common challenge. The key question is what new knowledge (of an academic discipline nature), which is outside the existing disciplines, is required to address the challenge. Aspects of the challenge cannot be addressed easily with existing distributed knowledge, and new knowledge becomes a primary subgoal of addressing the common challenge. The nature of the challenge, either its scale or complexity, requires that many people have interactional expertise to improve their efficiency working across multiple disciplines as well as within the new interdisciplinary area. An interdisciplinarary person is a person with degrees from one or more academic disciplines with additional interactional expertise in one or more additional academic disciplines, and new knowledge that is claimed by more than one discipline. Over time, interdisciplinary work can lead to an increase or a decrease in the number of academic disciplines.

Transdisciplinarity

Transdisciplinary, while the term is frequently used, may not yet have a stable, consensus meaning. Usage suggests that a transdisciplinary approach dissolves boundaries between disciplines. Most uses of the term suggest a deliberate and intentionally scandalous or transgressive violation of disciplinary rules, for the purpose of achieving new insight, or of expanding the discipline's resources.

A less polemic view of transdiciplinarity treats it as the act of taking theories and methods which exist independently of several disciplines and applying them to organize and understand different areas or fields. This is based largely on the idea that "knowledge cannot be singularly claimed as belonging to or originating in any one discipline".

References

Further reading

• Augsburg, Tanya. (2005), Becoming Interdisciplinary: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies (Kendall/Hunt)

• Davies. M. and Devlin, M. (2007). Interdisciplinary Higher Education: Implications for Teaching and Learning. Centre for the Study of Higher Education, The University of Melbourne. http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/pdfs/InterdisciplinaryHEd.pdf

• Henry, Stuart (2005). Disciplinary hegemony meets interdisciplinary ascendancy: Can interdisciplinary/integrative studies survive, and if so how? Issues in Integrative Studies, 23, 1-37.

• Trans- & inter-disciplinary science approaches- A guide to on-line resources on integration and trans- and inter-disciplinary approaches.

• Klein, Julie Thompson (1996) Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities(University Press of Virginia)

• Klein, Julie Thompson (2006) Resources for interdisciplinary studies. Change, (Mark/April). 52-58

• Kleinberg, Ethan (2008). Interdisciplinary studies at the crossroads Liberal Education, 94 (1). 6-11.

• Newell, William H. (2001). A theory of interdisciplinary studies. Issues in Integrative Studies, 19, 1-25. Online text

• Peter Weingart and Nico Stehr, eds. 2000. Practicing Interdisciplinarity(University of Toronto Press)

• College for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

• The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington

• NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York, NY

• Truman State University's Interdisciplinary Studies Program

• School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine

• Association for Integrative Studies

• Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts (University of Manchester)

• Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies

• Humanities/Policy

• Interdisciplinarity and tenure

• Chubin, D.E. (1976). The conceptualization of scientific specialties. The Sociological Quarterly 17: 448-476.

• Defila, R., and Antonietta Di Giulio. (1999). Evaluation criteria for inter and transdisciplinary research: Project report, instrument. Panorama Special Issue 1.

• Gerhard Medicus Interdisciplinarity in Human Sciences (Documents No. 5, 6 and 7 in English)

• Johnston, R. (2003). Integrating methodologists into teams of substantive experts. Studies in Intelligence 47(1).

• Rhoten, D. (2003). A multi-method analysis of the social and technical conditions for interdisciplinary collaboration.

• Siskin, L.S. & Little, J.W. (1995). The Subjects in Question. Teachers College Press. about the departmental organization of high schools and efforts to change that.

See also

See :Category:Interdisciplinary fields

• American studies
• Anthropological theories of value
• Astrobiology
• Area studies
• Biomedical engineering
• Biomedical informatics
• Biomedical technology
• Biophysics
• Cognitive science
• Computer graphics
• Crossdisciplinarity
• Cultural studies
• Cybernetics
• Disciplinary
• Econophysics
• Environmental science
• Evolutionary psychology
• Film studies
• Geography
• Holism in science
• Integrative learning
• Intelligence analysis
• Liberal arts
• Library and information science
• Media studies
• Multidisciplinarity
• Music Psychology
• Nanotechnology
• Nativist theorizing
• Political economy
• Science studies
• Science and technology studies
• Soil science
• Systems thinking
• Systems theory
• Transdisciplinarity
• Transdisciplinary Studies
• Translation Studies
• Women's studies
• Urban studies

External links

• Labyrinthe. Atelier interdisciplinaire (a journal in French), with a recent special issue on La Fin des Disciplines?
• an article about interdisciplinary modeling in French with an English abstract : http://www.afscet.asso.fr/resSystemica/V4-2004/entete-2004.html
• Dieter Wolf, http://www.dieterwolf.net/pdf/Unity_of_Knowledge_1.pdf Unity of Knowledge. The unity of knowledge An Interdisciplinary Project
• Soka University of America has no disciplinary departments and emphasizes interdisciplinary concentrations in the Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences, International Studies, and Environmental Studies.