The New Critical Idiom is a series of introductory guides to current critical terminology. Each volume provides a guide to the use and abuse of terms related to literary studies with an accent on clarity and lively debate.

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.

A cognitive ethnography of how bioengineering scientists create innovative modeling methods. In this first full-scale, long-term cognitive ethnography by a philosopher of science, Nancy J. Nersessian offers an account of how scientists at the interdisciplinary frontiers of bioengineering create novel problem-solving methods. Bioengineering scientists model complex dynamical biological systems using concepts, methods, materials, and other resources drawn primarily from engineering. They aim to understand these systems sufficiently to control or intervene in them. What Nersessian examines here is how cutting-edge bioengineering scientists integrate the cognitive, social, material, and cultural dimensions of practice. Her findings and conclusions have broad implications for researchers in philosophy, science studies, cognitive science, and interdisciplinary studies, as well as scientists, educators, policy makers, and funding agencies. In studying the epistemic practices of scientists, Nersessian pushes the boundaries of the philosophy of science and cognitive science into areas not ventured before. She recounts a decades-long, wide-ranging, and richly detailed investigation of the innovative interdisciplinary modeling practices of bioengineering researchers in four university laboratories. She argues and demonstrates that the methods of cognitive ethnography and qualitative data analysis, placed in the framework of distributed cognition, provide the tools for a philosophical analysis of how scientific discoveries arise from complex systems in which the cognitive, social, material, and cultural dimensions of problem-solving are integrated into the epistemic practices of scientists. Specifically, she looks at how interdisciplinary environments shape problem-solving. Although Nersessian’s case material is drawn from the bioengineering sciences, her analytic framework and methodological approach are directly applicable to scientific research in a broader, more general sense, as well.

Calls for closer connections among disciplines can be heard throughout the world of scholarly research, from major universities to the National Institutes of Health. In Defense of Disciplines presents a fresh and daring analysis of the argument surrounding interdisciplinarity. Challenging the belief that blurring the boundaries between traditional academic fields promotes more integrated research and effective teaching, Jerry Jacobs contends that the promise of interdisciplinarity is illusory and that critiques of established disciplines are often overstated and misplaced. Drawing on diverse sources of data, Jacobs offers a new theory of liberal arts disciplines such as biology, economics, and history that identifies the organizational sources of their dynamism and breadth. Illustrating his thesis with a wide range of case studies including the diffusion of ideas between fields, the creation of interdisciplinary scholarly journals, and the rise of new fields that spin off from existing ones, Jacobs turns many of the criticisms of disciplines on their heads to mount a powerful defense of the enduring value of liberal arts disciplines. This will become one of the anchors of the case against interdisciplinarity for years to come.

Interdisciplinarity, a favorite buzzword of faculty and administrators, has been appropriated to describe so many academic pursuits that it is virtually meaningless. With a writing style that is accessible, fluid, and engaging, Lisa Lattuca remedies this confusion with an original conceptualization of interdisciplinarity based on interviews with faculty who are engaged in its practice. Whether exploring the connections between apparently related disciplines, such as English and women's studies, or such seemingly disparate fields as economics and theology, Lattuca moves away from previous definitions based on the degrees of integration across disciplines and instead focuses on the nature of the inquiry behind the work. She organizes her findings around the processes through which faculty pursue interdisciplinarity, the contexts (institutional, departmental, and disciplinary) in which faculty are working, and the ways in which those contexts relate to and affect the interdisciplinary work. Her findings result in useful suggestions for individuals concerned with the meaning of faculty work, the role and impact of disciplines in academe today, and the kinds of issues that should guide the evaluation of faculty scholarship.

This Open Access book builds upon Science and Technology Studies (STS) and provides a detailed examination of how large-scale energy research projects have been conceived, and with what consequences for those involved in interdisciplinary research, which has been advocated as the zenith of research practice for many years, quite often in direct response to questions that cannot be answered (or even preliminarily investigated) by disciplines working separately. It produces fresh insights into the lived experiences and actual contents of interdisciplinarity, rather than simply commentating on how it is being explicitly advocated. We present empirical studies on large-scale energy research projects from the United Kingdom, Norway, and Finland. The book presents a new framework, the Sociology of Interdisciplinarity, which unpacks interdisciplinary research in practice. This book will be of interest to all those interested in well-functioning interdisciplinary research systems and the dynamics of doing interdisciplinarity, including real ground-level experiences and institutional interdependencies.

This book offers a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities. Rooting itself in the authors' own experiences, the book establishes a radical agenda for collaboration across these disciplines. This book is open access under a CC-BY license.