Clarifying Perspectives

As noted elsewhere [Forming a Successful Research Team], scholars are more likely to transcend their disciplinary perspective if they are self-aware of the set of largely subconscious assumptions (regarding what to study and how and why) that comprise that perspective. One very promising strategy for doing so is a questionnaire developed by the NSF-funded Toolbox project. They have developed, and are refining, a questionnaire that they give to members of interdisciplinary research teams in order to identify key differences in assumptions. [Other questionnaire approaches are discussed in Forming a Successful Research Team] See:

• Eigenbrode, S.D., O’Rourke, M., Wulfhorst, J.D., Althoff, D.M., Goldberg, C.S., Merrill, K., Morse W., Nielsen-Pincus, M., Stephens, J., Winowiecki, L., Bosque-Pérez, N. 2007. Employing Philosophical Dialogue in Collaborative Science. Bioscience 57(1):55-64

  • The Toolbox website http://www.cals.uidaho.edu/toolbox/ and chapter 11 in the book below.

• Michael O’Rourke et al., Enhancing Communication and Collaboration in Interdisciplinary Research, Sage, July 2013. That book also contains multiple case studies of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary communication.

See also: Choi, Seongsook, and Richards, Keith, Interdisciplinary Discourse: Communicating Across Disciplines. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. The authors emphasize how scholars occupy and need to transcend epistemic domains.

Attitudes: Interdisciplinary collaboration will also benefit from the correct attitudes. Several authors associated with td-net, as well as Gabriele Bammer of Integration and Implementation Sciences and Rick Szostak of the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies have in various publications extolled the value of Jurgen Habermas’ ideas on constructive conversation: [again see Forming a Successful Research Team]

· Most obviously, participants should want to cooperate rather than compete

· They should thus wish to understand why others might reach different conclusions

· They should then work together in a search for common ground