Types of Interdisciplinarity PDF

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A discussion of three different types of interdisciplinary research...

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Unit 2 January 29, 2017 Types of Interdisciplinary Interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity approaches all involve viewing a subject or a problem from more than one perspective, but they differ in purpose, process, and the final product. Interdisciplinarity involves using ideas from multiple disciplinary perspectives, and integrating those ideas to form a more complete understanding of a problem. For example, a scholar writing about the effects of immigration on American society would need to draw from multiple disciplines including history, economics, and sociology, as well as the further interdisciplinary field of American studies. They would then need to integrate all of these ideas to form a more comprehensive understanding of the topic. Scholars approach interdisciplinarity from two points of view: critical and instrumental. Critical interdisciplinarity combines disciplines with the intention of reforming or replacing current knowledge and assumptions. As the name implies, it often criticizes the current system of education. The critical conception claims that one must reject the disciplines because they were created by the oppressors and they come with their biased values. An example of this type of interdisciplinarity would be women’s studies or feminist theory, which uses multiple disciplines such as history, literature, and social sciences to criticize the way women have been treated in society and advocate on their behalf. On the other end of the spectrum, instrumental interdisciplinary focuses more on gaining the full breadth of ideas, rather than rejecting some, the way the critical method rejects the disciplines. It pays more attention to where the disciplines agree and overlap than where they contradict. The goal of the instrumental conception is to find practical solutions to fix what

already exists, while the critical method aims to replace current structures. To summarize the differences, critical interdisciplinarity comes from conflicting ideas meant to criticize and then change, while instrumental interdisciplinarity comes from the cooperation, overlap, and integration of ideas. Interdisciplinarity also differs from other cross-disciplinary studies such as multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. Although they all involve viewing a subject from multiple perspectives, the process and end results differ. Multidisciplinarity involves taking the perspective of more than one discipline, but it does not synthesize these ideas. The multiple perspectives are not added together, but compared side by side. The multidisciplinary approach would be useful when comparing two ideas in an effort to decide which was better; for example, comparing two bills on public policy. It would be viewed from the different perspectives of economy, sociology, and political science, but these ideas would be juxtaposed and compared side by side, rather than integrating them to form one comprehensive understanding of the problem. The third type of cross-disciplinary work is transdisciplinarity, which differs from interdisciplinarity because it involves non-academic participants with the goal of changing public policy. For example, in the case of making laws that affect the LGBT community, a transdisciplinary approach would involve not only scholars from specific disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and political science, but non-academic groups: lawmakers, politicians, as well as local activists and religious organizations that bring different perspectives to the subject. Different from other cross-discipline work, transdisciplinarity is really a team approach to real world problems....