Disciplinary Dialogue Research Articles

Experienced journal reviewers' perceptions of and engagement with the task of reviewing: an Australian perspective

As part of a mixed-methods doctoral project, this study drew on an interview, bracketed by two surveys, with experienced Australian reviewers. It explored questions about the contributions of peer review, the need and possibility to improve it and the driving factors for reviewers to contribute voluntarily. The respondents emphasised the essential status of peer review, especially for ensuring quality in research and publication. They also acknowledged its contributions of gatekeeping, establishing credibility and authority, building capacity, improving quality and facilitating disciplinary dialogue. They indicated there had been no significant change to peer review, and nearly half of them indicated no change was needed. A strong sense of faith and a high level of tolerance of the deficiencies in peer review were evident, which appeared to be related to the awareness that for most problems there was no obvious solution and to an appreciation of the voluntary nature of the task. This faith and tolerance, along with the complex nature of peer review, partially explained why it was so difficult to make any change to it. There is one area where the respondents were keen to see improvement – they called for their contribution as reviewers to be recognised in a more explicit manner, especially by employing institutions. The study calls into question how long a voluntary system can endure.

One letter and 55 footnotes: the assassination of Llwyd ap Iwan by the outlaws Wilson and Evans

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsMike PearsonMike Pearson is Leverhulme Research Fellow in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Aberystwyth University. Between 1971 and 1997 he made theatre professionally, most notably with Welsh company Brith Gof (1981-97). He continues to create performances with Pearson/Brookes (1997-present) and National Theatre Wales (The Persians, 2010; Coriolan/us, 2012). He is co-author with Michael Shanks of Theatre/Archaeology: Disciplinary Dialogues (2001) and author of In Comes I: Performance, Memory and Landscape (2007), Site-specific Performance (2010), Mickery Theater: An Imperfect Archaeology (2011) and Marking Time: performance, archaeology and the city (2013). Email: mip@aber.ac.uk

CURRICULA, HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND SCIENCE EDUCATION

Generally speaking, current school science curricula have been constructed for the purpose of preparing students for university and college scientific degrees. Such education does not meet the needs of the majority of students who will not pursue tertiary studies in science or even science-related fields. These students require knowledge of the main ideas and methodologies of science. It seems that the didactics of scientific disciplines across Europe have failed to solve the “crisis” between scientific education and European social and economic development. This is generally recognized in the reports published concerning science education in Europe (Rocard report, etc.) which propose new strategies to be implemented in teaching through the identification and promotion of Inquiry based Science Education (IBSE) and other strategies. It is timely that there is a multi disciplinary dialogue exchanging new ideas and proposals between educational researchers, historians, philosophers and learning theorists.

Boundary crossings: using participatory theatre as a site for deepening learning

Amongst the academic community there has been an increasing acceptance that knowledge and learning is no longer situated solely within academic settings and that workplace settings are also legitimate spaces for reflecting on practice in order to enhance professional capabilities. Learners are uniquely placed to draw on their workplace experiences as they explore the relationship between this experience and the academic curriculum. Moreover, biography, prior experience and lived experiences are being recognised as legitimate knowledge arenas in tackling challenging issues of inequality and promoting diversity. Within this context, which teaching and learning methodologies enable facilitators and learners to negotiate the boundaries between workplace and academic environments? This article discusses a multi-disciplinary research project in which youth and community practitioners engaged in participatory theatre as a site for critical action learning. We argue this approach furthers our understanding of the process of in-depth learning concerning issues of equality across disciplinary and cross service dialogues.

The Big Bangs of IR: The Myths That Your Teachers Still Tell You about 1648 and 1919

International relations as we know them emerged through the peace of Westphalia, and the discipline of International Relations emerged in 1919 and developed through a First Great Debate between idealists and realists. These are the established myths of 1648 and 1919. In this article we demonstrate how historical and historiographical scholarship has demolished these myths, but that the myths regardless are pervasive in the current textbooks that are used in teaching future IR scholars. Disciplinary dialogue seems to have failed completely. Based on a detailed reading of the myths and their perpetuation, we discuss the consequences of the discipline’s reliance on mythical origins, why there has been so little incorporation of revisionist insight and what possibilities there are for enhancing the dialogue.

Crossing Borders and Joining Forces

It is my privilege to join Joanne Loewy as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Music and Medicine. To familiarize the readership of what I bring to the journal, I am pleased to provide some insight based on history and perspective of the growth of music and medicine and my involvement in these domains for the past 25 years. As I see it, this new journal offers a peer-reviewed platform for inter- disciplinary dialogue. Music and Medicine is the official organ of the International Association for Music and Medicine (IAMM). In my capacity as president of the International Society for Music in Medicine (ISMM), I welcome the opportunity for us to dialogue, thus strengthening our common goal. I see our goal as one of fostering and confirming the use of music and musical stimuli as a preventive, diagnostic, therapeutic, and rehabilitative means in clinical medicine and health care in gen- eral on a broad scale. Music therapy and MusicMedicine as defined below are still not part of routine therapeutic regimes in traditional medicine to the extent that scientific evidence and clinical experience can be expected to suggest...

No Bridges to Swamps: A Postcolonial Perspective on Disciplinary Dialogue

No Bridges to Swamps: A Postcolonial Perspective on Disciplinary Dialogue

Global Development? Monitored Object(ive)s, Omitted Subject(ivitie)s

In this article I critically reflect on the hegemonic modernist framework of development by focusing on its reflection and application in the United Nations’ (UN) Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and practices. Not only do I find it falling short of explaining, understanding or bringing about global development, but quite the opposite, since it feeds into and reproduces the status quo. While I plead for serious (re)definitions, and genuine global commitment towards the (re)solution, of the current micro/macro social problems, which are interdependent and need to be treated in connection and at once, I pick four urgent areas of transformation as sub-topics for the present discussion. They include the (meta)theoretical framework and discourse of development, historical and contextual analyses of diverse human socio-cultural conditions, political will and agency and psychology's contributions within a transdisciplinary participation paradigm. I also briefly hint at various issues from the ‘developing’ context of Turkish society in order to illustrate some of the arguments. It is hoped that the complexity of these issues and widespread inequity problems will no longer be ignored in favour of conventional policies and programmes that are based on the reductionist framework and that truly trans(/post)disciplinary and trans(/post)cultural dialogues will enable new connections, meanings and actions towards desired global transformations.

Habits of the Mind: Challenges for Multidisciplinary Engagement

The extraordinary complexity of knowledge in today’s world creates a paradox. On the one hand, its sheer volume and intricacy demand disciplinary specialization, even sub‐specialization; innovative research or scholarship increasingly requires immersion in the details of one’s disciplinary dialogue. On the other hand, that very immersion can limit innovation. Disciplinary specialization inhibits faculty from broadening their intellectual horizons—considering questions of importance outside their discipline, learning other methods for answering these questions and pondering the possible significance of other disciplines’ findings for their own work. This article seeks to understand more fully the factors that enhance and impede cross‐disciplinary conversations and the possible longer‐term effects of those conversations. Based on 46 interviews with a sample of seminar participants, it examines the experiences of faculty members who ventured (voluntarily) into multidisciplinary waters and its implications for the organization of disciplines and universities.

For What and for Whom Is Our Research? The Ethical as Transformative Lens in Instructed SLA

In this article, I argue for adopting an ethical lens that interrogates our ends and purposes when generating research on second language learning and teaching, in light of concerns surrounding questions about the uses and users of our work. Such an ethical lens would help us transform our methodological and epistemological debates and would also strengthen the social and educational worth of the research that is generated by diverse second language acquisition (SLA) communities. I offer 3 normative principles for disciplinary discussion: The value of research is to be judged by its social utility; value‐free research is impossible; and epistemological diversity is a good thing. For each principle, I present the thrust of the argument and illustrate it by reference to 1 or more selected problems central to SLA research programs. I end with a broad brush characterization of a field of instructed SLA that is epistemologically diverse and ethically involved in justifying both the methodological rigor and the value commitments of our research programs and our studies. My goal is to open a space for disciplinary dialogue that allows us to engage in the articulation of valued research goals and professional and social responsibilities for the field of instructed SLA.

Cultural Geography in a New Millennium: Translation, Borders, and Resistance

In a period in which movements of people, ideas, and technology have come under growing and intensified scrutiny it seems particularly important to reflect on the possibilities and challenges for understanding mobility in cultural geography. Increasingly, a key component of the subdiscipline has been the exploration of the ways in which place and identity are embedded in a range of cultural landscapes, and the ways in which those social and material landscapes have reflected and influenced various experiences and notions of movement. Of course, mobility and travel are intricately interwoven with a range of other identities and relations, such as race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and physical ability. To understand the ways in which these relations mediate and produce space it is necessary to interrogate places and moments that compete, reinforce, and resist dominant notions of place (and who should be able to move). As cultural geographers, this interrogation offers an opportunity to understand the practices and uses of boundary making and how these are interwoven with issues such as cultural diversity and social justice. While this is a very general suggestion for what direction cultural geography may take in the near future, and which to some extent has already yielded provocative and insightful research, I will now briefly turn to some specific journeys that pose further challenges along the way to a (hopefully) more inclusive subdiscipline. 1) SPEAKING: CLAIMING SPACE When we dare to speak in a liberatory voice, we threaten even those who may initially claim to want our words ... our words connect us with anyone, anywhere who lives in silence (hooks 1989, 18). Conversations move. They produce (and are part of) spaces, and they propel and stifle emotive understandings of place. As such, and linking into hooks' statement above, speech and conversation pose significant practices and mediums through which we can negotiate cultural landscapes. Given the growing number of studies exploring the linkages between space and representation I would also suggest that in order to interrogate and depict cultural geographies in more diverse ways it is worthwhile paying attention to the ways in which we integrate and prioritize varied ways of speaking and the different voices that become part of disciplinary dialogues. By this, I mean, how do we--as geographers, oral historians, neighborhood residents, storytellers, photographers, and audiences--select specific places for study, actively look for difference, or re-present landscapes as another kind of exotic locale in which we engage with other voices, but in ways that perhaps make everyday banalities seem exotic for academic eyes? How do we make new cultural geographies, new connections, in a politically progressive manner? Are we creating dialogues when we incorporate new voices into our studies, or are we simply making a statement? These questions require complicated answers and demand the interweaving of research and praxis, i.e., they necessitate the self-reflexive positioning of cultural geography research within specific political contexts. 2) GLOBALIZATION AND TRANSLATION: JOURNEYS THROUGH COLLABORATION Recently, I have been reflecting on the ways in which we teach about difference and cultural geography, particularly in a postcolonial context. …

Through Dialogue to Engaged Pluralism:. The Unfinished Business of the Third Debate

In what has frequently been referred to as the “third debate,” postmodern, postpositivist, critical, feminist, and constructivist scholars who have alternative assumptions about social inquiry and knowledge construction have vigorously challenged conventional scholarship in international studies. Issues of theoretical pluralism, cross-paradigmatic communication, incommensurability, reflexivity, and theory choice have been raised in this discussion but until recently dialogue, as such, has received only indirect and sporadic attention. Presently, however, the rising tide of interest in dialogue concerning social theory seems to have reached the shores of the international relations discipline. Therefore, the present is as good a moment as any to ask the inevitable question: Is this new preoccupation with dialogue yet another metatheoretical diversion (see Moravcsik in this forum)—whereby international relations scholars divert precious and scarce scholarly resources from productive “first order” (for example, empirical) investigations to sterile “second order” navel gazing—or are we witnessing here a potentially important development that may eventually help us leave the isolated intellectual realms into which we have drifted over time? In what follows, this author will argue that the latter is clearly the case. Borrowing from Richard Bernstein (1992), if “flabby” (anything goes) and “fortress-like” (incommensurable) forms of pluralism are the dubious legacies of the third debate and “engaged pluralism” rather than “inevitable synthesis” (Moravcsik, this forum) or even “dialogical synthesis” (Hellmann, this forum) is the most feasible and deserving destination for the international relations theory enterprise in the foreseeable future, then dialogue must figure prominently on our agenda at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The successful harnessing of dialogue as a potential remedy to our long-enduring knowledge problems, however, will necessitate a well-targeted metatheoretical prelude (for example, a reflexive disciplinary dialogue about dialogue) to ensure that this putative “dialogical turn” will itself be genuinely dialogic. Such appears to be the …

With both eyes open: notes on a disciplinary dialogue between ethnographic and epidemiological research among injection drug users

US opioid overdose death rates have increased between 2000 and 2014. While, the increase in prescription opioid use has been linked to the increase in heroin use, there are reasons to view this relationship as a partial explanation for the recent increase in heroin-related harms. This study documents the differences in trends in prescription opioid overdose-related (POD) and heroin overdose-related (HOD) hospitalizations.Data come from the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) for the years 2000 through 2014. POD and HOD hospitalizations were abstracted from ICD-9 codes. Rates of POD and HOD by census region and census division were constructed along with separate rates for age and race. Regression analysis analyzing trends across region were estimated along with graphs for documenting differences in POD and HOD rates.POD hospitalization rates were highest in the South and lowest in the Northeast. HOD hospitalization rates were highest in the Northeast region and grew the fastest in the Midwest. There was statistically significant heterogeneity in HOD trends but not POD trends across the four regions between 2000 and 2014. Between 2012 and 2014 POD rates decreased in eight of the nine census divisions, with only New England showing an increase. HOD hospitalization rates increased in all nine census divisions between 2012 and 2014. Both POD and HOD rates show different demographic patterns across the nine census divisions.Comparing POD and HOD hospitalization trends reveals significant disparities in geographic as well as demographic distributions. These epidemics are evolving and the simple opioid-to-heroin transition story is both supported and challenged by this paper. The opioid pill, heroin and fentanyl crises are intertwined yet increasingly have drivers and outcomes that support examining them as distinct. Addressing these complex and interrelated epidemics will require innovative public health research and interventions which need to consider local and regional contexts.

The Discourse of Cultural Psychology: Transforming the Discourses of Self, Memory, Narrative and Culture

The new discipline ‘cultural psychology’ has identified the dominant psychology, including its universalistic ‘ crosscultural’ version, as derived from a particular historical and cultural discourse. What receives only short shrift is that cultural psychology itself is also a body of texts and contexts linked with particular cultural and historical traditions. As examples of cultural psychology, Brockmeier and Wang’s papers (Brockmeier, 2002; Wang & Brockmeier, 2002) are critically examined with special regard to the tendencies of perpetuating the Western discourse, reifying analytical notions, and ethnocentric comparison and contrast. Further, it is argued that, in order for cultural psychology to become more ‘cultural’ than it has been hitherto, a rethinking about ‘culture’, especially along the lines of cultural studies, is required and that such a re-conceptualization calls for not less but more intercultural disciplinary dialogue and critique on ‘psychology’. In this perspective, transforming existing discourses of mind, self and other can, and should, become an important task of cultural psychology.

Commitment and Investigation in Knowing the Social World

The ‘Knowing the Social World’ project, of which this special issue is a part, began life as a series of informal conversations between philosophers of social science, social theorists and methodologists in the mid 1990s. As a result it became apparent that whilst people in these areas were often producing work with resonance that transcended the boundaries between them, academic divisions of labour meant that inter disciplinary and theory-practice dialogues were not as frequent as was hoped.

Effacing Difference in the Royal Society: The Homogenizing Nature of Disciplinary Dialogue

Effacing Difference in the Royal Society: The Homogenizing Nature of Disciplinary Dialogue

Effacing Difference in the Royal Society: The Homogenizing Nature of Disciplinary Dialogue

Effacing Difference in the Royal Society: The Homogenizing Nature of Disciplinary Dialogue

Postfoundationalism and Interdisciplinarity: A Response to Jerome Stone

Abstract. In my recent work I argued that the religion and sciencedialogue is most successful when done locally and contextually. However, I also argued against theology's epistemic isolation in a pluralist, postmodern world, and for a postfoundationalist notion of human rationality that reveals the interdisciplinary, public nature of all theological reflection. I now want to explore the possibility that, when we look at what the prehistory of thehuman mind reveals about the biological roots of all human rationality, some forms of contemporary evolutionary epistemology may actually hold the key to understanding the kind of cognitive fluidity that enables true interdisciplinary reflection. Philosophically the religion and science dialogue benefits from this move when a postfoundationalist notion of rationality redescribes the dynamic interaction of our various disciplinary dialogues with one another as aform of transversal reasoning. Transversality in this sense justifies and urges an acknowledgment of multiple patterns of interpretation as one moves across the borders and boundaries of different disciplines.

Les expressions intellectuelles et religieuses de l'homme préhistorique

J. Ries, The Intellectual and Religious Expressions of Prehistoric Man. J. Ries reports on the symposium of the International Association of Prehistoric Religions (Pontedilegno, Italy, 1979), which was devoted to the intellectual expressions of prehistoric man, namely art and religion. The fruit of this inter- disciplinary dialogue does not réside only in thirty or so monographs, but also in the discussion of certain fundamental questions, including the relations among myth, rite and ethnology, the way of thinking of the archaic homo religiosus, the religious meaning of prehistoric art and the définition of religion itself.