To understand and be understood: facilitating interdisciplinary learning through the promotion of communicative competence

Whilst interdisciplinarity has become a central concern of research and learning in geography, few from the discipline have considered the practical facilitation of interdisciplinarity in the classroom. Module convenors, I argue, must pay greater attention to how learners engage and negotiate with peers and perspectives from other disciplines. In this paper, I focus on my own efforts in designing and teaching a second year undergraduate course on health, biomedicine, and society, to illuminate the opportunities and challenges facing teaching staff who seek to provide opportunities for interdisciplinary learning in the classroom. Drawing upon theories of communication, I demonstrate the significance of developing “communicative competence” as a pathway to successful interdisciplinary learning. Unless learners from one discipline can understand, and be understood by, peers from other disciplines, the accomplishment of interdisciplinary learning is undermined. Interdisciplinary modules should include learning outcomes that facilitate student development in this area. Approaching interdisciplinary learning through the lens of communicative competence casts critical attention upon the central abilities and cultural sensitivities that are the hallmarks of interdisciplinary collaboration – from negotiating meaning to critical disciplinary awareness – and highlights the lessons that interdisciplinarity poses for disciplines, such as geography, tasked with preparing students for interdisciplinary learning.     

Rethinking historiography and ethnography: Surrealism’s intellectual legacy

ABSTRACT

Taking up Maurice Blanchot’s perceptive claim that “Surrealism remains always of our time”, the essay traces the importance of Surrealism for rethinking the methods of historiography (for Walter Benjamin) and ethnography (for James Clifford) in ways that allow us to appreciate the significance of Surrealism’s intellectual legacy. In his early essays on Surrealism and the monumental, unfinished work, The Arcades Project, Benjamin developed a new historical methodology, what I term surrealist historiography, that sought to uncover the latent dimensions of culture, obscured by the dazzling sheen of progress embedded within conventional historical narrative. If Benjamin found in Surrealism a way to overcome the limitations of a Rankean historicism, the point of departure for Clifford’s essay, “On Ethnographic Surrealism” is the crisis of ethnographic authority precipitated by a postcolonial critique of the discipline of anthropology. Clifford’s aim in this essay is thus to provide a provocative reassessment of Surrealism’s self-reflexive ethnographic spirit and what it might contribute to a refashioning of ethnographic practice as a polyvocal assemblage that holds in tension disparate material realities and aesthetic principles. Surrealism’s intellectual legacy thus lies, as Michel Foucault has claimed, in its path-breaking interdisciplinarity, which is why it continues to be, for Blancot and others, “a brilliant obsession”.     

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.     

Between orthodoxy and heterodoxy: the troubled relationships between heritage studies and heritage law

This article discusses the relationships between heritage law (HL) and heritage studies (HS) from the perspective of international law. More specifically, it focuses on the ways in which HL scholars have integrated (or failed to integrate) HS considerations into their work, and vice versa. The paper shows that the relationship between HL and HS is better resolved with respect to orthodox approaches to both law and heritage. More specifically, orthodox HS and HL take each other into account only lightly, a strategy that, while unsatisfactory on many grounds, is balanced on both sides. However, when it comes to heterodox (critical) analyses in these fields, the relationship is far more fragile and unbalanced, from the point of view of heterodox HS, the law tends to be neglected or even sometimes rejected; whereas from the point of view of HL, there is a more conscious effort to fully engage with HS, which is made difficult by heterodox HS’s push against the law. This dissonance can lead to severe difficulties in understanding heritage work and even the field itself.     

Towards a nuanced understanding of health‐supportive place using composite research methods

Chronic non‐communicable diseases comprise a major challenge for health in contemporary Australia and across the globe and, while various factors are at play, personal choices in behaviour and lifestyle are significant. The physical make‐up and ongoing management of the places where we live positively and negatively influences these lifestyle choices and subsequent health outcomes. However, responses—in research, policy, built environment design, construction, and management—frequently fail to recognise the intricacies of this people‐place‐behaviour nexus largely because those responses are highly focused and empirical. Rather, the health‐supportive environments needed to address the current chronic disease epidemic also require additional—networked, nuanced, and intuitive—understandings. Responding to that need, the study described in this paper took a comprehensive view of what constitutes a health‐supportive built environment. We detail the composite methods employed—built environment audits, interviews, and focus groups—all of which are available for use by others in similar situations. Then, using two case study examples, we reflect upon how our methodology revealed otherwise hidden aspects of the extent to which the study sites supported or hindered health‐supportive behaviours and responses. These results suggest intervention actions for policy makers and practitioners that will help them respond to the complex needs of communities in creating a health‐supportive environment.     

Staging an encounter between anthropology and philosophy: Hits and misses in the work of Michael Jackson

This review essay assesses Michael Jackson’s ongoing project of staging an encounter between anthropology and philosophy in two books: Lifeworlds (2013) and As Wide as the World Is Wise (2016). Considering his philosophical enrichment of ethnographic theory and method, this essay addresses foundational questions about the prospects and practices of interdisciplinary engagement. It also suggests future avenues for continued dialogue between philosophy and anthropology.     

Does the History of Medicine Begin where the History of Philosophy Ends? An Example of Interdisciplinarity in the Early Modern Era

Abstract

A popular saying attributed to Aristotle states that ‘medicine begins where philosophy ends’—but this principle does not seem entirely valid for the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when medicine and philosophy were considered to be integral parts of the same branch of knowledge. For this reason, although today medicine and philosophy are clearly distinct disciplines, historians of ideas cannot study them entirely separately. Indeed, since the early modern era was a period of profound revision of knowledge, probably only a truly interdisciplinary investigation can identify the conceptual shifts and transfers capable of reinstating medicine in its fundamental role in the development of civilisation and modern thought, in particular as a model of a rational knowledge aimed at improving the social good through a fitting interpretation of experience. This article intends to offer arguments in support of such a historiographical approach, and to illustrate certain interesting methodological ideas that emerge from a study in which the history of philosophy and history of medicine cross-pollinate.     

Cubism and the Fourth Dimension

This article revisits the historiography of Cubism and mathematics, with a particular focus on Pablo Picasso's uses of geometry at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. In particular, I consider the artistic appropriation of the concept of the fourth dimension, and its pictorial uses as a conduit for a conceptual reformulation of pictorial space. I investigate Picasso's distinctive adoption of this geometric framework in relation to one of his 1909 experiments across painting and photography, and advocate the possibility of drawing novel historiographical lessons from Picasso's work — lessons that bring the historiography of Cubism in a closer dialogue with recent debates in the historiography of science. I conclude with an appeal to consider the continued relevance of this past experiment in art and science when assessing the contemporary drive toward art-science collaborations, and use the case of Cubism and the fourth dimension as a springboard for a critical reflection on the future directions of art-science collaborations.     

Connecting Things through the Visual Arts: Medieval Crescent Moon Pendants as Horse Ornaments

Medieval archaeology as a discipline is usually defined in relation to written sources and history, while other kinds of sources and scholarly traditions studying the same period are overlooked. With a small group of 14th-century crescent moon pendants of bronze from Finland as its focal point, the present article analyses the way in which archaeology connects with the visual arts and the discipline specialized in studying them, art history. Instead of some shared methodology, the inquiry proceeds along the tensions between the material and the visual. After the artefact and its technical qualities are examined in the framework of medieval material culture, the object is reduced, first, to an iconographical motif and, second, into a represented object. Third, the anthropomorphic features applied on the pendant are extracted and considered against the body of medieval grotesque art. This reveals how the visual is also an effective force in the sphere of material culture and human interaction. In the interdisciplinary work between archaeology and art history, the visual and the material emerge as travelling concepts destabilizing traditional approaches and inspiring new insights.     

Decomposition as Practice and Process: Creating Boundary Objects in Computational Humanities

Abstract

The emergent reflexive process, by which researchers in a computational humanities project work towards a viable organizational modality for interdisciplinary collaboration, is analyzed. Using the metaphor of decomposition, successful collaboration between computer scientists and humanities scholars can be seen to require a reflexive scrutiny — a decomposition — of the disciplinary research processes that are involved, thus allowing crucial differences with respect to typical ways of posing research questions, the role of data, and the rhythm of the research process to be highlighted. It is argued that the currently popular expectation towards data as a self-identical organizational unit tends to downplay the role of decomposition as practice and process. A European cyberinfrastructure initiative that tries to respect the specificities of scholarly practice in the humanities is critically assessed, reflecting in particular on the inherent tension between ‘mutual shaping’ of digital tools and their users on the one hand, and the policy interest in efficient, functionalist design principles on the other.