Support Collaborative Researchers

The League of European Research Universities (LERU) has worked to raise the profile of the AHSS disciplines within the European funding sphere.

And has showcased examples of successful interdisciplinary integration.

LERU’s report Interdisciplinarity and the 21st Century Research-Intensive University formulates recommendations for universities, governments and funders on how they can incorporate interdisciplinarity in their policies and programmes but also reveals some of the tensions between disciplinary and interdisciplinary excellence.

Catherine Lyall has written about the institutional challenges facing universities that want to support collaborative research and talks about some of these to her colleague Emily Woollen from the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Academic Development in this short video.

Previous work has identified five key success factors for interdisciplinary programmes and has made recommendations to funders and institutions wishing to support policy change.

This blogpost by Bianca Vienni Baptista and Danilo Streck (also available in Spanish) describes a practical tool that provides a way of re-imagining  how interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary initiatives are (or will be) embedded in institutions.

See also this INTREPID policy brief Recommendations on Integrating Interdisciplinarity, the Social Sciences and the Humanities and Responsible Research and Innovation in EU Research.

SHAPE-ID has produced this series of questions for those in higher education institutions  evaluating existing institutional supports for ID/TD researchers.

The British Academy has investigated the structures in place to support interdisciplinarity across the research and higher education system.  Their report highlights some of the debates and contradictions around not only how to develop an interdisciplinary career but also when this should occur.

Catherine Lyall addressed this theme in a SHAPE-ID panel presentation at the 2020 Vitae Connections Week Conference.

It is important to remember that there are different ways to “be interdisciplinary”. In this blog post, Andi Hess discusses the differences between individual and group-based interdisciplinarity.

In this recorded conversation, Emily Woollen and Catherine Lyall from the University of Edinburgh discuss some of the challenges that researchers might face when developing an interdisciplinary career path.

Given the recognised hazards of an interdisciplinary career, Emily Woollen and Catherine Lyall from the University of Edinburgh discuss the benefits of pursuing such a path.

The SHAPE-ID Toolkit deals mainly with inter- and transdisciplinary research but, as this British Academy report, Crossing Paths, argues, institutions also need to consider the relation between interdisciplinarity in teaching and research.

In this SHAPE-ID blog post Niamh NicGhabhann argues that, in order to harness the benefits of interdisciplinarity, we need to think about interdisciplinary education, and the ways that we can build a culture of interdisciplinary thinking and practicing across our university infrastructure.

While not yet a mainstream activity within research intensive universities in Europe, there are many examples of inter- and transdisciplinary research-led education programmes, for example, ETH-Zurich’s Td Lab.

The United States has a much longer tradition of teaching interdisciplinary studies and the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies provides resources on the scholarship of interdisciplinary teaching and learning.

The third SHAPE-ID learning case workshop was a collaboration with the TrUST project (Politecnico di Torino) and took place as part of the 2-day TrUST Unconference on inter/trans-disciplinary (ITD) educational tools and approaches that can support and improve sustainability education in the realm of urban transitions.  In this short video, participants talk about the importance of connecting inter-and transdisciplinary education and research.

In this SHAPE-ID blog post Professor Geoffrey Crossick draws on his experience of research and university management and his advocacy for the arts and humanities to reflect on how best to support AHSS capacity building for inter-and transdisciplinary research.

Under the coordination of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences, this free online course (MOOC) on Transdisciplinary Research is offered to students and researchers from all backgrounds, policy makers and practitioners involved in seeking solutions for complex societal challenges. The case study on migration is relevant to AHSS researchers.

Zurich University of the Arts’ MA Transdisciplinary Studies provides an example of a study programme developed to link various disciplines in the arts and design, the sciences and everyday life, enabling students to work in cooperative constellations and develop new and interdisciplinary methods and formats.

SHAPE-ID partners Maureen Burgess and Doireann Wallace have produced this guide to supporting the development of ID and TD that includes AHSS for pre-award research managers and administrators.

td-net is supported by the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences and provides resources for researchers and funders in the field of inter- and transdisciplinary research and teaching.

The i2Insights blog is part of a suite of Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) activities hosted by the Australian National University. 

The i2S resources repository provides a range of tools for tackling complex societal and environmental problems, as well as other useful information, including journals and professional associations, through which resources and like-minded colleagues can be located.

The Association for Interdisciplinary Studies hosts annual conferences and publishes the journal Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies.

The ITD Alliance is a global alliance for inter-and transdisciplinary research and education, working with these groups and others to provide an interconnected network to support regular community building opportunities and ongoing exchanges across science, social science, humanities, and arts. 

HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, called “haystack”) is an open online social network of  humanists, artists, social scientists, natural scientists, and engineers.

INTEREACH is an online community whose purpose is to articulate and promote the need for a dedicated career path around interdisciplinary research expertise, and to improve practitioners’ tools, best practices, success metrics, and career trajectories.

Although research institutions are starting to recognise that the “lone genius” image is unhelpful, universities still find it hard to evaluate the academic contributions made by individuals involved in collaborative teams.

This Academy of Medical Sciences report examines the current incentives and disincentives for individual researchers participating in ‘team science’, and how to improve reward and recognition for their contributions.

Julie Thompson Klein and Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski address some of these issues in their blog about their article Interdisciplinary and collaborative work: Framing promotion and tenure practices and policies (institutional subscription required).

Insights from this article are summarised in this blog post.

The Royal Society’s Resume for Researchers offers some further guidance.  

As does the University of Edinburgh’s.

The Association for Interdisciplinary Studies has guidelines for tenure and promotion for interdisciplinary faculty in a US context.

In this Open Access article, Simon Goring and colleagues suggest how we might expand our understanding of how we measure success in interdisciplinary collaborations beyond traditional metrics.  Their suggestions are especially apt for early career researchers and apply to many knowledge domains beyond ecology.

SHAPE-ID has produced a short list of questions for those in Higher Education Institutions developing policies to support collaborative researchers.

See also toolkit section Create an ID/TD CV under Develop a Career in Inter- and Transdisciplinary Research.

SHAPE-ID have produced a guide introducing interdisciplinary arts and humanities research infrastructures in Europe.

This SHAPE-ID case study profiles the European Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH).

This SHAPE-ID case study profiles the European Research Infrastructure for Language Resources and Technology (CLARIN).

In this SHAPE-ID webinar, Infrastructures for Interdisciplinary Engagement: Lessons from the Digital Humanities, panellists discuss insights from DARIAH, CLARIN and OPERAS on building capacity for interdisciplinary research. You can watch or listen to the recordings here.