Thinking Outside the Box: Interdisciplinary Integration of Teaching and Research on an Environment and Development Study Programme

Abstract

Interdisciplinary education and research are increasingly in demand in land use, environment and development because understanding complex human-nature relationships requires a holistic approach. While the need for interdisciplinarity is acknowledged by most, in practice, traditional disciplines are still accorded greatest scientific recognition. This article illustrates how interdisciplinarity has been approached on an international education and research programme. A major challenge was how to strike a balance between interdisciplinarity and specialization, and a specific model based on problem-oriented group work and specialized research teams was developed which successfully negotiated this divide, according to a comprehensive student evaluation. International co-operation among Denmark, Thailand, Malaysia, South Africa, Swaziland, and Botswana has revealed structural and cultural barriers to the implementation of interdisciplinary programmes. Successful negotiation of these barriers requires personal relations based on long-term commitment which was achieved in this case through the study programme and annual joint student field courses.     

Art and science in the UK: a brief history and critical reflection

ABSTRACT

This paper begins by reviewing the historical construction of ‘SciArt’, and the way in which its supposed interdisciplinarity often shaded into science communication. Early discussions about the complementarity of art and science were conceived in terms of epistemology, notably the qualities of imagination and curiosity. The paper moves on to discuss how, during the current decade, Art and Science (A&S) discourse has altered due to changes in the cultural politics of both its constituent fields, emerging as a ‘transdiscipline’ characterized by ‘creativity’. Eighteen in-depth surveys with leading practitioners in A&S form a substantial part of the research material, yielding an evaluation of what the disciplinary, economic and cultural implications of this changed discourse may be. Though potentially angled towards the solution of ‘wicked’ problems, transdisciplinarity also sacrifices the specific critical expertise of art, fetishizes tech at the expense of science and selectively ignores institutional problems inherent in funding and power structures.     

Ecosystem Management Research: Clarifying the Concept of Interdisciplinary Work

Abstract

Ecosystem management (EM) is a process for addressing environmental problems. It draws on research from multiple disciplines in order to ensure long-term maintenance of socio-ecological systems. The present study evaluates the definition of interdisciplinary work among researchers involved in generating data use (EM). The goal is twofold: to generate further discussions in research supporting EM, and to better situate this research in the broader context of interdisciplinary science. Using an online questionnaire, data was collected from 119 researchers. A cluster analysis identified both distinct and shared understandings of the concept. A logistic regression analysis identified the extent to which personal characteristics and researchers’ understandings of interdisciplinary theory determine definitions of interdisciplinary work. Researchers differ on the terminology but share an understanding about what it is: both a ‘way to do research’ and a ‘way of thinking about research’. Differences between researchers suggest a growing interest in developing deeper engagements with theoretical discussions of interdisciplinarity. Results are discussed in the context of the current state of development of research for EM and its contributions to sustainability.     

Childhoods past and present: anxiety and idyll in reminiscences of childhood outdoor play and contemporary parenting practices

ABSTRACT

Outdoor play is considered an essential aspect of a ‘proper childhood’. However, unsupervised outside play is declining, a decline attributed to parental anxieties about children’s safety. However what drives these anxieties and how this impacts on contemporary outdoor play is less clear. Our paper seeks to explore this through an analysis of adult narratives generated through digital map-making and forum discussion about where they played as children and where they would allow a child to play unsupervised now. Our analysis explores the nature of these narratives and pivotal moments in which adults articulated the disconnect between their own recollections of idyllic spatial freedom and the spatial restrictions they place on contemporary children. This offers a rich understanding of how parents navigate conflicting cultural imperatives on risk-avoidance and children’s rights to a ‘good’ childhood.     

An outline of Alan Wilson’s philosophy of knowledge,with special attention given to the importance of interdisciplinarity and its role in undergraduate education

ABSTRACT

This article explores two ideas due to Alan Wilson: superconcepts and enabling disciplines. These ideas emerge from Wilson’s philosophy of knowledge and, in particular, from his thinking on interdisciplinarity. Both ideas are described, analysed and developed in the context of their wider importance in interdisciplinary undergraduate education and their implementation on the Arts and Sciences BASc at UCL. Some suggestions for future developments of these ideas at the proposed new university at the London Interdisciplinary School are offered.     

Second Laws,Two Cultures,and the Emergence of an Ecosystem Aesthetics

Abstract

The appropriation of scientific concepts by the humanities and the visual arts exemplifies what many feel are both the pitfalls and possibilities of interdisciplinary engagement. The principle of entropy, which C. P. Snow claimed could serve as a litmus test of the ‘two cultures’ divide, provides an excellent starting point for exploring how artists have employed scientific concepts far beyond their original contexts. As a case study in interdisciplinarity, the use of entropy in the visual arts is also a lens to consider the evolution of an artistic proposal from the 1960s known as ‘system aesthetics’. As an early challenge to the clean demarcation of art and science, system aesthetics was a precedent for what might be described as the emergence of an ecosystem aesthetics within contemporary art and design today.     

‘On the Road to Mandalay’: The Development of Railways in British Burma, 1870–1900

ABSTRACT

This article examines the history of railway development in British Burma between 1870 until 1900. In particular, it focuses on how railways and public works projects became a key site of contestation about Burma’s prospects, value, and future during the late nineteenth century, as well as how a litany of agents – both official and non-official – influenced the path of railway development in the colony. This article not only reveals the difficulties and disputes that impacted railway construction in Burma, but also how these debates led to the eventual privatisation of Burma’s railway system in the 1890s. In doing so, this article demonstrates how myriad agents with often competing aims affected the colony’s social and economic development, as well as how the results of these debates and the subsequent construction of railways produced a new geography of occupation in British Burma.     

Britishness Reconsidered: Interplay Between Immigration and Nationality Legislation and Policymaking in Twenty-first Century Britain

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to clarify the dynamic interplay between immigration and nationality legislation and policymaking in post-imperial and pre-Brexit Britain. In 1981 and 2002, the years on which this paper focuses, three pieces of legislation were enacted marking watershed moments for British policy regarding immigration and nationality. The British Nationality Act of 1981 established ‘British citizenship’ in the statute book. The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002 claimed to introduce new meaning and value to the acquisition of British citizenship by introducing a citizenship test and pledge. Furthermore, the British Overseas Territories Act of 2002 expanded the geographic scope of British citizenship by, in theory, providing citizenship to all those eligible in the existing dependent territories. Debates on the meaning of Britishness and the political projects linking immigration and nationality legislation to it, continue today in government, academia, and the media, all of whom are competing to have a tangible impact on policy. This paper addresses two questions. First, how can we account for the protracted nature of the debate on Britishness, and government efforts to enact immigration and nationality legislation based upon it? Second, if the meaning of Britishness has evolved over time, how has it been shaped by the course of these ongoing political debates?     

Leonardo Bruni and the Poetics of Sovereignty

Abstract

Leonardo Bruni’s well-known oration, the Laudatio Florentinae urbis, has long stood at the center of discussions on the emergence of the modern republican state. Recent historiographical trends have emphasized the degree to which Bruni’s oration represents a propagandistic attempt both to portray Florence as a territorial power of Northern Italy keen to impose its sovereign authority on neighboring polities and as a republic intent on fashioning an image of itself as a popular sovereignty. It is in this second element of Bruni’s oration that we can discover his rhetorical purposes: he needed to give a distorted image of Florence as enjoying “popular” rule precisely because Florence was in fact moving in the opposite direction towards a more oligarchic concentration of political authority. The essay investigates the changes contemplated in revisions to Florence’s juridical codes at precisely the time of the oration’s composition, suggesting that when these two sources are juxtaposed, Bruni’s oration appears as a strongly ideological literary work the rhetorical gestures of which camouflage the actual historical and legal developments of Florence’s political life in the early fifteenth century.     

The Idea of a Category Mistake: From Ryle to Habermas,and Beyond

Summary

The term ‘category mistake’ began to turn up regularly in public discourse in the 1990s as a general term to describe a confusion between different fields of thought with serious practical consequences. But it began its career in philosophy, introduced by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind in 1949 to attack Cartesian dualism and assert a monistic solution to the so-called mind-body problem. This paper traces the stages by which it came into general usage, arguing that while by the later 1960s it had generally been rejected by philosophers, it was saved from disappearance by its migration into fields such as psychology and theology. From there, it moved into critical theory and then into international relations. Its entry into these latter areas first made plain its potential in political argument. Eventually, multiple meanings of the term came to coexist with one another, with the practical and rhetorical usage supplementing rather than replacing its original philosophical sense.     

From Methodology to Ontology: Interdisciplinarity as a Principle of Constitution of Objectivity—Reflections from the Study of American Philosophy

Summary

The idea of interdisciplinarity can be articulated in different ways. The aim of the article is to criticise the view that interdisciplinarity is to be treated as a quality of the historian's approach to his subject-matter, and to argue for a constructivist interpretation of that notion. A constructivist account of interdisciplinarity relies on the thesis that the latter is one of the manifold ways in which it is possible to give sense to the historical records of which the historian wants to gain knowledge. In the paper it is maintained that the function of the notion of interdisciplinarity is to account for the clash of languages that can be found when disciplines converge. This new paradigm is highlighted by taking into consideration the history of American pragmatism.     

Interdisciplinarity in the neurosciences

Abstract

The study of the human brain and of the biological nature of the mind and consciousness remains one of the greatest of all scientific challenges. Neuroscience can also lay claim to being one of the most interdisciplinary fields of scientific enquiry, and this has been true since well before the concept of interdisciplinarity was itself invented. Neuroscience draws on insights and developments in disciplines as diverse as molecular biology, electronics, biomedical engineering, statistics, psychology, biophysics, pharmacology, and linguistics. This paper examines the historical, transdisciplinary roots of modern neuroscience and reviews its contemporary interdisciplinary character, before examining two 'case studies', the emergence of functional neuroimaging as a powerful new neuroscientific tool and the ongoing dialogue between computer science and the neurosciences.     

“Land of Unfinished Monuments”: The Ruins-in-Reverse of Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

By focusing on the design and reception of successfully completed monuments, historians have overlooked the presence in nineteenth-century America of monuments that were left unfinished for decades, or even aborted altogether. This article recovers numerous such monuments, and shows how contemporaries seized on them not merely for their aesthetic value as homegrown ruins to be visited and sketched, but also for their rhetorical value as expressions of unfinished political and social struggles. In refashioning these incipient historical memorials as ironic anti-monuments to contemporary problems, diverse groups – radical workingmen and conservative Whigs, female activists and chauvinist newspapermen, patriotic Americans and critical Englishmen, proslavery southerners and abolitionist northerners – elaborated a broader discourse of unfinishedness. The fragments of these monuments could even figure the nation itself as a work-in-progress, contrary to current arguments about the construction of national identity through notions of organic wholeness. The article also questions scholars' assumption that monuments inevitably promote a culture of forgetting by projecting images of consensus and closure. In turning to the reception of monuments during their often-lengthy construction, we can perceive their more complex relationship to dominant ideologies and narratives of the nation-state.     

China’s urban ideology: new towns,creation cities,and contested landscapes of memory

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that “the urban” has emerged as the most significant ideological realm in contemporary China. In developing this argument, I suggest an alternative approach to how we theorize urbanization in China. Seeking to avoid the dichotomized analyses that often characterize scholarship on China’s urbanization, the paper suggests reading “the urban” as an ideological device. Such a reading calls for an analytical distinction between the city as a technology of socialist party-state planning and government and urbanization as a messy social process over which the state struggles for control. It also calls for a recognition of the ways that ideology itself has shifted dramatically in China, from the Mao-era centrality and coherence of class struggle and its overriding goal of proletarianization to a much less coherent post-reform message of “stability”. The paper begins with a brief discussion of ideology and Gramsci’s notion of “common sense” in a Chinese register. It then considers the film 24 City, directed by Jia Zhangke, as a template for understanding urban spaces as sites of conflict between the city as an ideological device and urbanization as a social process. New urban spaces are then explored in an effort to tease out their complex and contradictory ideological renderings. I conclude with an argument about the openness and contradictions of China’s urban spaces and how an ideological analysis can resist the kind of theoretical closure that much work on urbanization in China seems to aim for.     

‘We’re not very good at soccer’: gender,space and competence in a Victorian primary school

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on findings from a pilot project conducted at an inner city primary school in Melbourne, Australia. Inviting grade six girls and boys (aged eleven and twelve) to focus on spaces of their schoolground, we learned about the ways in which gender, age, ethnicity, language ability and sporting competence influenced active play and belonging. Informed by the understanding that schoolgrounds, gender and active play are socially constructed, and children are active agents in these constructions, the paper examines how girls and boys consider and negotiate spatial politics. The methods of participant-led photography, focus groups and thematic analysis, reveal how children understand gendered spatialities. A strong story emerged of girls’ experience of exclusion from active play spaces in particular, providing a perspective on the spatial and social performance of gender. The findings highlight the value of integrating a spatial analysis of schoolgrounds – and the gendered dynamics therein – for health, education and equity programmes.     

The strange case of ‘John Black’ and ‘Mr Hyde’: constructing migrating Jamaicans as (un)worthy nationals

This paper examines how migrating Jamaicans were constructed as ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’ of Jamaican diasporic membership in the early years of statehood, to demonstrate the role of nationalist cultural repertoires in constructing particular diasporic imaginaries. I conduct a discourse analysis of Jamaica's national newspaper, The Daily Gleaner, between 1962 and 1966, a period encompassing crucial transitions in Jamaican migration movements and from colony to statehood. I argue that tropes of respectability present in Afro‐creole nationalist ideology form the cultural repertoires used to distinguish migrants' actions as worthy or unworthy of national membership. These distinctions specify who ‘counts’ as part of the diaspora and how migrants of different social positions may claim and articulate their membership.     

The great divide? Notions of racism in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: new answers to an old problem

ABSTRACT

One of Michele Sarfatti’s greatest accomplishments has been to challenge the notion that there was a fundamental difference between the biological racism predominant in Nazi Germany and the ‘cultural racism’ of Fascist Italy. I examine how this dichotomy took shape and the meaning it acquired over time. My basic argument is that this division is the result of dialogue between Italian and German population experts during the interwar period, and that making a sharp distinction between a ‘German’ and an ‘Italian’ style of racism helped them to construct their own identities. In other words, the debate on racism was a vehicle for defining what it meant to be a ‘true’ Nazi or Fascist. In this way, differences in racist ideology can be understood as a product of struggles over meaning. Ultimately, my aim is to de-essentialize the meaning of race in research on both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.     

Indigenous claims and heritage conservation: an opportunity for critical dialogue

Abstract

Indigenous claims of ownership and access to material culture challenge the field of heritage conservation. This article illustrates how indigenous concerns conflict with basic constructs of Western conservation, and how conservators respond to these claims. Despite efforts of inclusion, relatively few conservation projects integrate indigenous knowledge with scientific research. Redistribution of conservation authority is rarely put into practice. The article concludes by pointing to conservation as a meeting ground where collaborative decisions can be made about material culture on display. Conflict negotiation in conservation presents a potential forum for cultural representation and contested meaning of objects on display.     

Gustav Metzger: iconoclasm and interdisciplinarity

ABSTRACT

Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) has been described as ‘the conscience of the art world’ for the consistently political content of his art and his commitment to political activism on the subject of nuclear weapons, capitalism and environmentalism. Metzger’s artistic output from the late 1950s onwards reflects a theory of art as both aesthetic form and social action and identifies him as a key precursor of activist art. This article considers the inherent interdisciplinarity of Metzger’s practice as it evolved during this early period between the late 1950s and early 1970s in relation to his agenda of social engagement.     

From water to tears: extra-curricular activities and the search for substance in China’s universities

ABSTRACT

Why do university students participate in extra-curricular activities in China? What do they seek in a meaningful education? This paper explains the rising interest in extra-curricular activities by looking into students’ frustration about classroom-bounded education in China’s universities. A transforming socio-economic landscape and increasing imagination about global modernity have inspired new neoliberal demands for practical knowledge and personal meaning. And yet, China’s universities have failed to keep up with students’ changing visions of education, success, and productive personhood. This paper explores students’ agentive pursuit of sociability and emotional sensitivity through extra-curricular activities as a lens to examine the fluidity of meaning-making in contemporary China. In the process, I discuss why self-reported aspirations in skill cultivation cannot encompass the range of motivations that have driven students to extra-curricular participation, and explain how the ethnographic method can help to address gaps of knowledge in inquiries about youthful aspirations.