Understanding interdisciplinarity
Linguistic sustainability is closely correlated with its interdisciplinary nature, which contributes to the sustainable development of linguistic's academic practices by integrating knowledge, methods, and models from other fields. Understanding interdisciplinarity is the prerequisite for delving deep into sustainable linguistics. Thus, this page aims to demonstrate a concise introduction to interdisciplinarity.
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Definition
According to International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, interdisciplinarity “employs multiple academic fields of knowledge in order to create a comprehensive understanding of a globally relevant phenomenon, and to find solutions to concrete examples"[1].
Four key words (multiple, comprehensive, globally, solutions) succinctly illustrate the nature of interdisciplinarity in the definition - while the former two points out the foundamental characteristic of interdisciplinarity, in which knowledge, methods, and models from different academic fields are integrated ; the later two clarifies its ultimate goals, tackling globally related issues with comprehensive knowledge.
Advantages of interdisciplinarity
- Integrative: Interdisciplinarity is different from multidisciplinarity which juxtaposes knowledge without integration. Interdisciplinarity is integrative in blending knowledge, methods, concepts, and models from different fields.
- Innovative: Instead of just mixing multiple disciplines together, interdisciplinarity is innovative in creatively blending the knowledge from diverse fields and developing new integrated theories, methods, and models to provide a distinct collaborative perspective for targeted issues.
- Inclusive: Academic practice should remain open to the fact that with rapid development, most of the issues can only be tackled by interdisciplinary wisdom. By drawing upon the knowledge, methods, and models from multiple academic fields, interdisciplinarity enables problems to be viewed with diverse disciplinary lenses.
Challenges of interdisciplinarity
- Broad but shallow: Although involving broad knowledge, interdisciplinary result can sometimes be shallow. How to practice interdisciplinarity fruitfully and productively is a challenge.
- Innovative but intermittent, unstable, and non-cumulative: Interdisciplinarity can easily become Innovative, but intermittent, unstable, and non-cumulative. The challenge is to “retain innovation and an appropriate orientation towards societally relevant issues"[2], but without those downsides.
- Theoretical constraints: With existed disciplinary theoretical constraints, it is difficult and time-consuming to innovatively develop new theoris, concepts, and methods.
- Institutional constraints: conventional structured academic institutions hinders the mobilization between departments, disincentizing integration between different disciplines. Thus, efforts are required to revise institutional structures in order to promote interdisciplinary collaboration.
Goals of interdisciplinarity in sustainable sciences
The significance of interdisciplinary is examplified by the absoluteness of this sentence: "all science proper is interdisciplinary."[2] Interdisciplinarity is meaningful in achieving the goals as listed:
- promoting disciplinary transitions towards sustainability and boosting sustainable academic development.
- promoting innovation, synthesis and intellectual progress through collaborative projects.
- making full use of existing knowledge to tackle societally relevant issues.
- arranging various disciplines consciously to make sustainable science robust.
- conducting goal-oriented interdisciplinary research to efficiently solve global issues.
References
- ↑ Elsevier. (2020). Interdisciplinarity. International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edition). https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102295-5.10659-6.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Thorén, H., M. Nagatsu and P. Schönach. 2021. ‘Interdisciplinarity’. In Situating Sustainability: A Handbook of Contexts and Concepts, edited by C. P. Krieg and R. Toivanen, 21–37. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/HUP-14-2.
