Cross-disciplinary Engagement Research Articles

Analyzing the evolution of machine learning integration in educational research: a bibliometric perspective

Machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence, has experienced rapid advancements and applications across various domains. In education, its integration holds great potential to revolutionize teaching, learning, and educational outcomes. Despite the growing interest, there needs to be more comprehensive bibliometric analyses that track the trajectory of machine learning’s integration into educational research. This study addresses this gap by providing a nuanced perspective derived from bibliometric insights. Using a dataset from 1986 to 2022, consisting of 449 documents from 145 sources retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS), the research employs network analysis to unveil collaborative clusters and identify influential authors. A temporal analysis of annual research output sheds light on evolving trends, while a thematic content analysis explores prevalent research themes through keyword frequency. The findings reveal that co-authorship network analysis exposes distinct clusters and influential figures shaping the landscape of machine learning in educational research. Scientific production over time reveals a significant surge in research output, indicating the field’s maturation. The co-occurrence analysis emphasizes a collective focus on student-centric outcomes and technology integration, with terms like “online” and “analytics” prevailing. This study provides a nuanced understanding of the collaborative and thematic fabric characterizing machine learning in educational research. The implications derived from the findings guide strategic collaborations, emphasizing the importance of cross-disciplinary engagement. Recommendations include investing in technological infrastructure and prioritizing student-centric research. The study contributes foundational insights to inform future endeavors in this ever-evolving field.

User-Centered Design of Limb Prostheses: A New University Course Designed to Spark Interest in Orthotics & Prosthetics for Bioengineering Students.

There is a current need to increase recruitment in orthotics and prosthetics, and a promising approach is to increase awareness, interest and cross-disciplinary engagement in O&P among students of allied disciplines such as bioengineering. We describe a new interdisciplinary course we jointly developed at the University of Pittsburgh and deployed for the first time in the spring of 2023. The course was built on core foci of human-centered design, design thinking, experiential learning, 3D printing, creative problem-solving and prototyping. We leveraged a real-world project-based learning approach that included early and ongoing involvement of student teams with clients who used prosthetics. We explored creating a learning environment in which bioengineering students were motivated to learn about the O&P field by partnering with clients to investigate their unmet prosthetic needs and invent new solutions, with computer-aided design and 3D printing as key enabling technologies. Each student team produced an individually designed and fitted device for a specific application for a person with limb difference. Student feedback was positive throughout with several recipients expressing enthusiasm about the field of O&P and about the opportunity to work with actual patients. Several students stated their new-found interest in pursuing a career in the field. We believe that this sort of class offering could be implemented in many institutions that host O&P graduate programs, to raise awareness of the profession and attract more and better prepared applicants.

Clio in the Operating Theatre: Historical Research, Emotional Health, and Surgical Training in Contemporary Britain.

Drawing on my experience working as a postdoctoral research and engagement fellow on the Wellcome Trust-funded project, Surgery & Emotion, this article reflects on this innovative model of historical research and professional engagement, explores the challenges posed by crossing disciplinary boundaries, and interrogates the practical and theoretical utility of bringing historical research into the operating theatre. How do surgeons specifically engage with the history of their profession? What can the history of emotions offer to the training of medical students and surgeons? What obstacles interfere in this type of cross-disciplinary engagement? What peculiar opportunities and challenges do the United Kingdom higher education system and National Health Service pose to the teaching of medical history in clinical settings? Bringing Clio into the operating theatre provides surgeons with an alternative narrative to that which they have come to expect about the emotions they ought to feel and express in their work. It allows them to explore the high feelings of their professional lives at a remove and offers an array of possible solutions to the current emotional health crisis in British medicine. History allows surgeons to imagine an alternative world: one where the pervasive and persistent models of emotional detachment - damaging to both patient experience and professional wellbeing - dissolve.

On Snakes and Ladders

The climate emergency mandates a refocusing of society and education on the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world. Emerging from decades of social constructionism that openly promoted climate science denial, social and educational theorising now engages with new materialist philosophies and the agency of matter. Physicist Karen Barad’s book Meeting the Universe Halfway, cited over 13,000 times, offers an ontological foundation for new materialism based on her idiosyncratic application of quantum physics. While critically reviewing Barad, I found myself unexpectedly “sliding back down” into the terrain of my physicist pastime, rereading quantum mechanics in depth. I reflect here on how this “ontological detour” empowered me to “climb up a ladder” towards the theoretical foundation for my PhD project in climate change education. I argue that ontological grounding and cross-disciplinary engagement are vital for advancing research and gaining perspectives through lateral connections.

Review of Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India by Sandeep Mertia

Since the arrival of the Internet in India a little over two decades ago, numerous academics and practitioners have written about the promises afforded by the digitization of one of the world’s largest economies. As a result, there has also been a widespread informational turn, which has included the generation of volumes of data on various aspects of everyday life and has seen the rise of several infrastructural frameworks that support data governance. The book pays close attention to the sociotechnical relationalities of data, people, and phenomena (social and mathematical) in India. This edited volume is noteworthy for the ways in which it offers a wide-ranging cross-disciplinary engagement with topics of interest to historians, anthropologists, data scientists, media studies and STS scholars. Each of the essays in this volume engages carefully with both theoretical and methodological questions that are common to studies of big data and data infrastructures in India. Altogether, the essays also engage with the question of how this informational turn has impacted broader questions of biopolitics and governmentality. The book’s focus on both the speculative and the material affordances of data allow for a sustained engagement with the numerous specific imaginaries and practices that come to be grouped under the realm of the digital. Most usefully, the volume remains continually attentive to the many pluralities and fragmentations within Indian digital infrastructures, as well as the ways in which they intersect with stark social hierarchies.

Evaluating the Impact of a Comprehensive Canadian Science-Art Residency Program on the Participating Scientist, Artist and the Public

Science-art residencies can provide opportunities for insightful cross-disciplinary collaborations, science communication, and engagement with the general public. Currently, there are few formal ways for artists and scientists to collaborate in Canada, and even fewer publications on how these experiences can impact learning in informal settings. Art the Science (a Canadian non-profit organization facilitating cross-disciplinary relationships between artists and scientists) piloted a comprehensive multiphase science-art residency program. Phase 1 informed the artist’s work through a full-time experience in a scientific laboratory at an academic institution, Phase 2 showcased the artist’s final artwork, Between the Sand at an off-campus local community event, and Phase 3 published an interactive online version of the work for global exhibition. Residency evaluation in each phase was conducted through the use of qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews, concept mapping, video diaries, and surveys. The artist, scientist and lab members gained new perspectives and inspiration about their respective fields. The artist was able to incorporate theories and processes from the research group into their artistic practice. On the other hand, the scientist saw renewed enthusiasm and curiosity within their research lab, and the lab members reported new ways of thinking about how to communicate their research. Both exhibitions proved to be engaging informal learning experiences for 66.2% of survey participants, and revealed several major learning themes. Despite promoting both events as artwork exhibitions, 79.2% of survey participants considered Between the Sand as both an artwork and a science communication product suggesting that science-based art may have the potential to communicate science, even when it is not presented as a science communication effort. Public responses revealed that public perception of funding is not skewed to either discipline and instead seems to call upon both science and arts grants to fund such interdisciplinary initiatives. Providing comprehensive artist residencies in science labs may have a valuable impact on everyone involved: the artist, the research group, and the public.

Pushing Boundaries: Building a Community of Practice at the Intersection of Human Rights and Economics

ABSTRACT One criticism of the human rights framework is that it has not – and therefore, some argue, cannot – meaningfully contest the hegemony of neoliberal economic thinking. In this article, we argue that the manner in which the disciplines of human rights and economics ‘speak past each other’ is a critical factor in this perception. While there has been a notable push to strengthen interrelations between the two fields, for the most part this has primarily been through the application of human rights norms to specific economic issues, rather than as a challenge to the logic underpinning economics, as a discipline. The article draws from a year-long project to build a community of practice at the nexus of human rights and economic justice, primarily in South Africa. South Africa is an illustrative context in which to explore cross-disciplinary engagement. While it has one of the most progressive constitutions in the world and a vibrant human rights community, the government has neglected rights in economic policymaking. This article considers the theoretical, methodological, and strategic opportunities and challenges involved overcoming such contradictions. In particular, we argue for the usefulness of a law and political economy (LPE) approach to build out the interrelations between the two fields.

Relational Sociology and Comparative Law

Abstract Relational sociology, or the idea that relationships are the starting point for empirical research, offers comparative law distinctive analytical frameworks, heuristics, and methods. This Article proposes that these could advance traditional goals of comparative law by reconceiving fundamental categories of law, state, and society in relational terms while broadening the scope of useful comparison, and adopting a processual view of legal communities, legal knowledge, and culture rooted in practical action. It also highlights how comparative law offers sociology opportunities for deeper engagement with law, culture, transnationalism, and the dynamics of different normative orders. A relational analysis of disciplinary knowledge production suggests that deeper cross-disciplinary engagement has been limited less by shared interests than by the structures of academic knowledge production.

Matching Interaction Design Principles and Integrated Navigation Systems in an Electronic Classroom

This article deals with cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary virtual engagement aimed to match human-computer interaction design principles and contemporary integrated navigation information systems. As interaction design principles ten general principles - heuristics are used, and as examples of contemporary navigation information systems, chart Radio Detection (or Direction) and Ranging (RADAR) device and Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS) are used. This cross-disciplinary research has been achieved through a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project by Durban University of Technology (DUT) in South Africa and University of Colima (UoC) in Mexico. Namely, the students from both sides guided by their lecturers have been engaged in analyzing today’s most frequently used marine navigational aids from the perspective of their reliability and user centeredness. The complexity of the systems and the lack of standards are observed as main problems when it comes to marine information systems effectiveness and their user centeredness.

Controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning

Scholarly interest in dialogic pedagogy and classroom dialogue is multi-disciplinary and draws on a variety of theoretical frameworks. On the positive side, this has produced a rich and varied body of research and evidence. However, in spite of a common interest in educational dialogue and learning through dialogue, cross-disciplinary engagement with each other’s work is rare. Scholarly discussions and publications tend to be clustered in separate communities, each characterized by a particular type of research questions, aspects of dialogue they focus on, type of evidence they bring to bear, and ways in which standards for rigor are constructed. In the present contribution, we asked four leading scholars from different research traditions to react to four provocative statements that were deliberately designed to reveal areas of consensus and disagreement[1]. Topic-wise, the provocations related to theoretical foundations, methodological assumptions, the role of teachers, and issues of inclusion and social class, respectively. We hope that these contributions will stimulate cross- and trans-disciplinary discussions about dialogic pedagogy research and theory.[1] The authors of this article are five scholars, the dialogic provocateur and the four respondents. The order of appearance of the authors was determined alphabetically.

Anti-money laundering: The world's least effective policy experiment? Together, we can fix it

This paper uses anti-money laundering as a case study to illustrate the benefits of cross-disciplinary engagement when major policymaking functions develop separately from public policy design principles. It finds that the anti-money laundering policy intervention has less than 0.1 percent impact on criminal finances, compliance costs exceed recovered criminal funds more than a hundred times over, and banks, taxpayers and ordinary citizens are penalized more than criminal enterprises. The data are poorly validated and methodological inconsistencies rife, so findings cannot be definitive, but there is a huge gap between policy intent and results. The scale of the problem not addressed by “solutions” repeatedly “fixing” the same perceived issues suggest that blaming banks for not “properly” implementing anti-money laundering laws is a convenient fiction. Fundamental problems may lie instead with the design of the core policy prescription itself. With an important policymaking function operating largely as an independent silo of specialist knowledge, this paper suggests that active engagement with critical, diverse perspectives, and deeper connections between the anti-money laundering movement and other disciplines (notably, policy effectiveness, outcomes and evaluation principles of public policy) should contribute to better results.

Integrated Risk Assessment for the Blue Economy

With the anticipated boom in the ‘blue economy’ and associated increases in industrialization across the world’s oceans, new and complex risks are introduced to ocean ecosystems. As a result, conservation and resource management increasingly look to factor in potential interactions among the social, ecological and economic components of these systems. Investigation of these interactions requires interdisciplinary frameworks that incorporate methods and insights from across the social and biophysical sciences. Risk assessment methods, which have been developed across numerous disciplines and applied to various real-world settings and problems, provide a unique connection point for cross-disciplinary engagement. However, research on risk is often conducted in distinct spheres by experts whose focus is on narrow sources or outcomes of risk. Movement towards a more integrated treatment of risk to ensure a balanced approach to developing and managing ocean resources requires cross-disciplinary engagement and understanding. Here, we provide a primer on risk assessment intended to encourage the development and implementation of integrated risk assessment processes in the emerging blue economy. First, we summarize the dominant framework for risk in the ecological / biophysical sciences. Then, we discuss six key insights from the long history of risk research in the social sciences that can inform integrated assessments of risk: 1) consider the subjective nature of risk, 2) understand individual social and cultural influences on risk perceptions, 3) include diverse expertise, 4) consider the social scales of analysis, 5) incorporate quantitative and qualitative approaches, and 6) understand interactions and feedbacks within systems. Finally, we show how these insights can be incorporated into risk assessment and management, and apply them to a case study of whale entanglements in fishing gear off the U.S. west coast.

Cli-fi, Petroculture, and the Environmental Humanities: An Interview with Stephanie LeMenager

Cli-fi, Petroculture, and the Environmental Humanities: An Interview with Stephanie LeMenager River Ramuglia (bio) Stephanie LeMenager is the Barbara and Carlisle Moore Dis tinguished Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century, co-founder and advisory board member of the journal Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, and a passionate advocate for cross-disciplinary engagement with environmental culture. In addition to her academic work, which includes numerous publications in the fields of American Studies and environmental criticism, LeMenager has been profiled in the New York Times, Time Magazine, and ClimateWire, and has also appeared as a guest on National Public Radio’s Science Friday. The following interview was conducted via email in May 2017. In response to questions by River Ramuglia, LeMenager shares her perspective on the genesis and current popularity of the cli-fi genre, discusses the relevance of her work in the current political climate (even recommending a novel to Rex Tillerson), and contemplates the future of the environmental humanities in an era of rapid technological, political, and environmental change. Q. In your essay “The Humanities after the Anthropocene,” you attribute the rise of cli-fi as a popular genre to the sociological phenomenon of “genre trouble,” whereby a genre emerges because “the affective expectations we hold for how things unfold, in art and life, do not make sense anymore” (476). It seems that, in your view, cli-fi is a useful way of getting environmental topics into the news, but might also risk simplification or evasion of the climate crisis. How are writers navigating—or perhaps breaking out of—the boundaries of this genre? [End Page 154] A. Cli-fi is more interesting to me than simply as a way of getting climate change into the news—and under the “safe house” of fiction, although it does that, and I see that as a social good. Primarily I find cli-fi fascinating as a sociological phenomenon because the excitement about it, the fact that it has spawned such a fervent fan community and media interest, suggests to me that, on some level, the mainstream media and perhaps a broader public than the arts faculty believe that fiction is a survival strategy. As in: cli-fi might pattern for us a new way of being human and living in a world without the benefits of Holocene climate. As a person who has taught literature for over twenty years, I was shocked to see the press pick up cli-fi to the extent that the New York Times would appear in my class at the University of Oregon on the pretext (more or less) that a new kind of novel might save the world. In part, cli-fi draws upon the charismatic subcultural lifestyles spawned by science fiction, one of its parent genres. If we consider that science fiction acts more as a way of life than as a genre per se, that sci-fi communities have grown up around book clubs, workshops, fan fiction, festivals, multiplayer games, and environmental causes like Peak Oil—as my colleague Matthew Schneider Mayerson has written about—then the relationship of cli-fi to social action is easier to see. However, not all cli-fi novels are clearly related to science fiction, not all are futuristic, not all are dystopian or utopian. Novels like Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital series, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Saci Lloyd’s YA Carbon Diaries series, or even Jennifer Haigh’s Heat and Light—which is about fracking—give us complex realism for the Anthropocene, making clear that critics have exaggerated how problems of scale make it impossible to write a realist novel about either climate change or petroculture. Moreover, realist cli-fi with dystopian or futurist elements—such as Octavia Butler’s Parable series, Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle, George Turner’s The Sea and Summer, and Karl Taro Greenfeld’s satiric novel The Subprimes—makes crucial contributions to our understanding of the interrelationships of colonialism, racism, neoliberalism, and climate...

Poetry and the Environmentally Extended Mind

Over the last two decades, cognitive scientists working in embodied, extended, enactive, and embedded cognition (the 4Es) have sought to understand mental processes in ways that take us “out of our heads.” They argue that the body and environment beyond the brain are integral components of cognitive processing. In this article, Moses explains how the “postcognitivist” models of mind they are advancing help us appreciate the mediated nature of literary texts and the social and environmental conditions that shape our experience of them. He argues that this new science transforms our understanding of such supposedly “inward” meditative experiences as poetry reading into a more collaborative, individually tailored, and culturally situated activity. By privileging the role that the body and physical and cultural environment play in organizing and constituting thought, these models of cognitive analysis present humanities scholars with a fresh entry point for productive cross-disciplinary engagement with scientists. Such experimentally based theories can expand understanding of how we cognitively encounter texts, here understood in a larger practice-based context. Meanwhile, literary critics can raise into view distinctive cultural objects, such as modernist lyric poems, that meaningfully test the parameters and assumptions of the underlying theories. Moses argues that such poems aim a needed spotlight on the role that affect plays in reading practices and challenge some of the functionalist assumptions of this research. Focusing on poetry’s cognitive complexity may, in turn, contribute to the larger effort, just begun, of resocializing the neurosciences and challenging the “neuroreductionist program.”

Dynamic organizational learning: a narrative inquiry into the story of Huawei in China

In this paper, we apply a model derived from dynamic capability theory to analyse the evolution and development of Huawei as an emerging MNC that is also a dynamic learning organization. We show how this firm has evolved through four distinct eras, characterized in succession by imitation, improvement, integration and cross-disciplinary engagement. Each era has involved a sequence of steps, beginning with opportunities, and followed by path, position, processes and transformation. Through much of its history, Huawei drew heavily on outside expertise. By contrast, the contemporary Huawei has become self-sufficient, as progressive transformations have enabled the firm to acquire dynamic capability for developing unique client-driven solutions by combining knowledge from diverse internal expert communities.

Leveraging Technical Library Expertise for Big Data Management

Shell Australia’s librarians were key stakeholders in a project to improve the databases and processes used to manage the company’s geophysical data. Geophysical data are challenging to manage: they are complex ‘big’ data and defy traditional cataloguing. During the project, the librarians collaborated with geophysicists, geophysical data analysts, IT support specialists and database architects. Their contributions as library and information science (LIS) professionals included providing advice on required metadata fields, developing controlled vocabularies and naming conventions, defining required search parameters, identifying opportunities for added functionalities, undertaking database testing and providing feedback, populating the database and developing procedures. The librarians brought a long-term perspective to the review of geophysical data management, essential for data preservation beyond the business cycle. Cross-disciplinary engagement led to the implementation of tools and processes that provide improved metadata capture, clearer connections between projects and data, improved search functionality and better data management. Collaboration provided the librarians with an opportunity to learn more about geophysical data and its life cycle, and provided an opportunity to demonstrate the value of LIS skills in big data management.

Homesick Blues: Excavating Crooked Intimacies in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Jook Joints

This article traverses the bittersweet antagonisms of home and disorienting counter-privates inhabited by Black laborers during the decades following U.S. Reconstruction. I chart the inception of modern African American homes and the disorderly stages that queered homeliness. Drawing from snippets of oral history, blues lyrics, archival documents, and photographs, I excavate the material and spatial fabric of Black homes and their unruly counterparts—jook houses. This article facilitates a cross-disciplinary engagement with affect theory, queer theory, and ontological approaches to materiality in an attempt to understand how jook atmospheres generated disruptive intimacies. In doing so, this article examines how a coalescence of crooked bodies and homesick feelings threatened to throw the order of home into chaos. The assemblage of performers and materials that once resided in these rural spaces crafts a focal point for understanding the transformative possibilities of pleasure erupting in queer Black histories.

“Progress through Novelty”: The Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium

This report on the first-ever Art-Science Interface session at the annual Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium collects reflections from a number of the session’s invited participants as well as its organizers. What impact does the participation of artists have at an elite science research symposium? How does cross-disciplinary engagement of this kind both reflect on, and take part in, the larger conversation concerning art-science collaborations and the significance of their outcomes? These questions and others are briefly explored.

Build It, But Will They Come? A Geoscience Cyberinfrastructure Baseline Analysis

Understanding the earth as a system requires integrating many forms of data from multiple fields. Builders and funders of the cyberinfrastructure designed to enable open data sharing in the geosciences risk a key failure mode: What if geoscientists do not use the cyberinfrastructure to share, discover and reuse data? In this study, we report a baseline assessment of engagement with the NSF EarthCube initiative, an open cyberinfrastructure effort for the geosciences. We find scientists perceive the need for cross-disciplinary engagement and engage where there is organizational or institutional support. However, we also find a possibly imbalanced involvement between cyber and geoscience communities at the outset, with the former showing more interest than the latter. This analysis highlights the importance of examining fields and disciplines as stakeholders to investments in the cyberinfrastructure supporting science.

Ecological consequences of human niche construction: Examining long-term anthropogenic shaping of global species distributions

The exhibition of increasingly intensive and complex niche construction behaviors through time is a key feature of human evolution, culminating in the advanced capacity for ecosystem engineering exhibited by Homo sapiens. A crucial outcome of such behaviors has been the dramatic reshaping of the global biosphere, a transformation whose early origins are increasingly apparent from cumulative archaeological and paleoecological datasets. Such data suggest that, by the Late Pleistocene, humans had begun to engage in activities that have led to alterations in the distributions of a vast array of species across most, if not all, taxonomic groups. Changes to biodiversity have included extinctions, extirpations, and shifts in species composition, diversity, and community structure. We outline key examples of these changes, highlighting findings from the study of new datasets, like ancient DNA (aDNA), stable isotopes, and microfossils, as well as the application of new statistical and computational methods to datasets that have accumulated significantly in recent decades. We focus on four major phases that witnessed broad anthropogenic alterations to biodiversity—the Late Pleistocene global human expansion, the Neolithic spread of agriculture, the era of island colonization, and the emergence of early urbanized societies and commercial networks. Archaeological evidence documents millennia of anthropogenic transformations that have created novel ecosystems around the world. This record has implications for ecological and evolutionary research, conservation strategies, and the maintenance of ecosystem services, pointing to a significant need for broader cross-disciplinary engagement between archaeology and the biological and environmental sciences.