Transdisciplinarity and Urgent Challenges

At Hampshire, we usually work in a transdisciplinary way - it is what is required to address urgent challenges or complex problems or to create new ways of seeing things. 

Transdisciplinarity is how we create new ways of knowing by incorporating multiple methodologies in our work.

On this page, you might address any of the goals listed below. Or you might show pieces of work where you looked across traditional disciplinary lines - how have you addressed urgent challenges or began to respond to a complex problem. Or you might reflect on what you have learned about creating knowledge without regards to traditional boundaries.

Goal: 

Integrate multiple domains of knowledge in the pursuit of creative problem-solving. 

Objectives: 

• Gain breadth of knowledge across fields of study 

• Draw connections among ideas and across fields of study to address and solve multi-faceted issues

• Pursue knowledge through questions that drive methodology

• Learn the strengths and limitations of different methodologies - select or create new methods to solve problems or gain purchase on your questions

If it is applicable, you can talk about how you have brought different disciplinary skills, thinking, and lenses together in one or more pieces of work. How have you learned from and across different fields of study and made it your own? Does your work address an urgent challenge that requires looking from different perspectives? Have you engaged with an LC to understand how this works? 

As you probably noticed in my work on ..... pages, I have focused on using ideas from .... and .... in order to ....

The methods I learned in my ..... courses were particularly useful in shaping my ideas about.... 

I think across these ideas to ask questions about..... and I have connected those to my community engaged work by....