It is well documented that successful work thrives in climates that stimulates awareness of interdisciplinary opportunities, especially if it helps identification of own viewpoints and limitations. Quality is to a large extent achieved by adhering to agreed norms on how things should be done– norms that are handed on by traditions. A number of explicit and implicit norms lie beneath each and every discipline and these norms are, to a considerable extent, mirrored in written outputs. What is to be told, how to tell it and where the various components should be placed vary from discipline to discipline. In this course we use participant-selected papers published in the peer-reviewed literature to decipher, analyze and discuss the constituents of “high quality”.
One of the professors at IRES, Gunilla Öberg, is offering a course that looks at the similarities and differences in different academic disciplines, for students interested in doing interdisciplinary work and publishing in more than one discipline. It’s a new course, and late for this term, so she is looking for a few grad students that might want to take the class, meeting every other week starting in Feb, and then doing 4 days in April or into early May, so it would be a full course, but not on a conventional schedule.
A descriptive para about the class is below, and the course outline is below. If you are interested, please contact Gunilla Öberg at goberg@ires.ubc.ca
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RMES 500L: Interdisciplinary Research: Opportunities and Challenges
To become a graduate student in an interdisciplinary context can be confusing. Students and scholars who are active in a disciplinary environment use that context as a springboard when they plan a study, collect data, analyse, read and write. It is as a rule more challenging to work in an interdisciplinary environment, since such settings often embrace differing and in some respects incommensurable academic cultures. To draw on the strength of interdisciplinary work one needs to manage differences among academic cultures. This course explores how one might use such differences as a springboard for inventive and original work, rather than letting them be a hindrance.