The Politics Of Interdisciplinary Studies

This collection of essays first highlights the popularity of interdisciplinary undergraduate studies and their recent gains in the world of higher education, and then addresses the paradoxical failure of these studies to achieve a permanent position in the curricula of individual universities and colleges. This question and its attendant issues are explored in three ways: (1) an overview of how these changes are affected by the political economy, (2) case studies from actual universities and colleges, and (3) a discussion of the sustainability of undergraduate interdisciplinary studies programs.

Through an in-depth sociological study of the development of nanomedicine in France and in the United States, this book challenges conventional views of academic disciplines as forming separate 'siloes' which hinder the development of interdisciplinary research.

The political process focuses on the ways that people come together to engage in collective decision making in a variety of contexts. The central elements of the political process include: the formation of rules, the subsequent interactions that take place within those rules, and the evolution of rules over time. Scholars working in the area of Virginia political economy—e.g., James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock—emphasize the importance of applying the tools of economics to non-market settings, including politics. Scholars in this tradition focus on both politics and economics to understand the formation of political rules—constitutional political economy—as well as the subsequent play within those rules—public choice. Scholars in the Bloomington School—most notably, Elinor and Vincent Ostrom—have emphasized three important aspects of the political process and political order. The first is the distinction between “rules in form” and “rules in use.” The rules in form refer to codified rules while the rules in use refer to the rules that people actually follow in their daily lives. Together, these dynamics generate the political order. The chapters in this volume explore and engage the key thinkers and ideas of the Virginia and Bloomington schools of political economy. The diversity in topics and approaches will make the volume of interest to readers in a variety of fields, including economics, entrepreneurship, history, political science, and public policy.

The Second Edition provides a comprehensive introduction to interdisciplinary studies with an approach that is succinct, conceptual, and practical. Completely updated to reflect advances in the literature on research, learning, and assessment, the book describes the role of both disciplines and interdisciplinarity within the academy, and how these have evolved. Authors Allen F. Repko, Rick Szostak, and Michelle Phillips Buchberger effectively show students how to think like interdisciplinarians in order to facilitate their working with topics, complex problems, or themes that span multiple disciplines.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights: History, Politics, Practice is an edited collection that brings together analyses of human rights work from multiple disciplines. Within the academic sphere, this book will garner interest from scholars who are invested in human rights as a field of study, as well as those who research, and are engaged in, the praxis of human rights. Referring to the historical and cross-cultural study of human rights, the volume engages with disciplinary debates in political philosophy, gender and women’s studies, Global South/Third World studies, international relations, psychology, and anthropology. At the same time, the authors employ diverse methodologies including oral history, theoretical and discourse analysis, ethnography, and literary and cinema studies. Within the field of human rights studies, this book attends to the critical academic gap on interdisciplinary and praxis-based approaches to the field, as opposed to a predominantly legalistic focus, drawing from case studies from a wide range of contexts in the Global South, including Bangladesh, Colombia, Haiti, India, Mexico, Palestine, and Sudan, as well as from Australia and the United States in the Global North. For students who will go on to become researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and activists, this collection of essays will demonstrate the multifaceted landscape of human rights and the multiple forces (philosophical, political, cultural, economic, historical) that affect it.

In this volume, Julie Klein provides the first comprehensive study of the modern concept of interdisciplinarity, supplementing her discussion with the most complete bibliography yet compiled on the subject. Spanning the social sciences, natural sciences, humanities, and professions, her study is a synthesis of existing scholarship on interdisciplinary research, education and health care. Klein argues that any interdisciplinary activity embodies a complex network of historical, social, psychological, political, economic, philosophical, and intellectual factors. Whether the context is a short-ranged instrumentality or a long-range reconceptualization of the way we know and learn, the concept of interdisciplinarity is an important means of solving problems and answering questions that cannot be satisfactorily addressed using singular methods or approaches.

The chapters in this volume explore and engage the key thinkers and ideas of the Virginia and Bloomington schools of political economy.

Themes play a central role in our everyday communication: we have to know what a text is about in order to understand it. Intended meaning cannot be understood without some knowledge of the underlying theme. This book helps to define the concept of 'themes' in texts and how they are structured in language use. Much of the literature on Thematics is scattered over different disciplines (literature, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science), which this detailed collection pulls together in one coherent overview. The result is a new landmark for the study and understanding of themes in their everyday manifestation.