Disciplinary Boundaries Research Articles

Confidence of practitioners to support self-management of pain: A multidisciplinary survey.

Supported self-management is an important component of management for persistent pain according to current recommendations and guidelines. However, it is unclear whether staff from differing disciplines who may be in early contact with people with established or developing persistent pain are confident to introduce and support self-management for this patient group. To determine the confidence of staff across professional disciplines to introduce and support self-management. Cross-sectional online survey. Charts were constructed to represent information on professional grouping, prior training in self-management and confidence in supporting key components of self-management for persistent pain. Analysis of variance was used to test for differences between groups. Overall, 165 practitioners reported confidence to support self-management below the midpoint of a ten-point scale and 93 above. There were few differences between different professions apart from in explaining pain (f = 6.879 p < .001), managing activity levels (f = 6.340 p < .001) and supporting healthy habits (f = 4.700, p = .001) in which physiotherapists expressed higher confidence than other professional groups. There was no difference in confidence expressed between staff who had or had not received previous training in self-management (f = 1.357, p = .233). Many front-line staff who might be expected to introduce and deliver self-management support for persistent pain lack the confidence and skills to do so. This is consistent with a known lack of education about pain across disciplinary boundaries in primary and community-based care. In order to meet treatment priorities for persistent pain there is an urgent need to upskill the workforce by providing access to good quality training and resources.

Between science and art

Abstract Professor Irene Manton (1904–1988) was in the vanguard of technical advances in botany through the use of electron microscopy. As well as new techniques and discoveries communicated through a considerable body of scientific publications, she left behind a collection of antiquities spanning a broad range of cultures and dates. Through these objects, Manton investigated intellectual problems in the history of science and communicated her findings with a highly original and idiosyncratic approach. At first sight a disparate group of unprovenanced antiquities, through the lens of Manton’s archives this collection can be understood as a rich repository of material evidence. This critical examination of Manton’s collecting practices and the uses she made of her ancient objects provides new evidence for the variety of approaches to collecting and interpreting antiquities, spanning disciplinary boundaries, over the course of the twentieth century.

“We Are Flying Like a Fish”: Female Academics in Social Work in Hungary

Social 1 work was reintroduced to Hungary during the third wave of democratization in Europe. As an academic discipline, it is in a disadvantaged position: the domestic academic traditions prefer strict disciplinary boundaries to inter- or transdisciplinary integration. Ongoing reforms in the country highlight the economic gains and the societal mission of higher education, with a strong focus on internationalization and direct connections to professional practice. Unfortunately, in this new framework, social work is understood as an auxiliary profession. This, in combination with female academics’ unfavorable position in Hungary, establishes a situation in which gender-based and disciplinary disadvantages result in a negative synergy. To explore the potential impacts, we maintain a dual focus throughout the paper and analyze academic women's position and the position of academics in social work.

Enacting multisectoral service chains and packages in the health and social care regions in Finland

Abstract Several studies have concluded that about 10% of the users of the health care and social services use most services and produce about 80% of the costs of care. However, this client group and their needs for services, which are often complex and multisectoral, are poorly characterized. The new Act on Organizing Health and Social Care Services in Finland obliges the health and social care regions to identify the client groups who need integrated services and to define the multisectoral service chains and packages for these clients. The assumption is that an individual client's personal service path can be planned and enacted by utilizing the pre-defined service chains and packages. This study aimed at studying the definition, development and enactment of the service chains and packages. The study was based on a survey which was carried out in the 22 health and social care regions in spring 2023 for analyzing 1) to which client groups the service chains and packages are defined, 2) what needs there are in the background of defining service chains and packages, 3) what kind of goals are defined for the service chains and packages, 4) what the current developmental state of the service chains and packages is and how they manage to cross the sectoral and disciplinary boundaries, and 5) what successes and challenges there are in defining, developing and enacting the service chains and packages. The survey was the first part of a study which focuses on the development and enactment of service chains and packages in the health and social care regions. The survey results showed that most of the development activities were in the definition phase. The survey gives perspective and background knowledge to the second part of the study which focuses on one specific client group, the children with neuropsychiatric symptoms, and on the definition and enactment of their service chains and packages within three regions.

'I wasn't made to feel like a nut case after all': A qualitative story completion study exploring healthcare recipient and carer perceptions of good professional caregiving relationships.

Professional caregiving relationships are central to quality healthcare but are not always developed to a consistently high standard in clinical practice. Existing literature on what constitutes high-quality relationships and how they should be developed is plagued by dyadic conceptualisations; discipline, context and condition-specific research; and the absence of healthcare recipient and informal carer voices. This study aimed to address these issues by exploring how healthcare recipients and carers conceptualise good professional caregiving relationships regardless of discipline, care setting and clinical condition. A qualitative story completion approach was used. Participants completed a story in response to a hypothetical stem that described a healthcare recipient (and, in some instances, carer) developing a good relationship with a new healthcare provider. Stories were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Participants were 35 healthcare recipients and 37 carers (n = 72 total). Participants' stories were shaped by an overarching discourse that seeking help from new providers can elicit a range of unwanted emotions for both recipients and carers (e.g., anxiety, fear, dread). These unwanted emotions were experienced in relation to recipients' presenting health problems as well as their anticipated interactions with providers. Specifically, recipient and carer characters were fearful that providers would dismiss their concerns and judge them for deciding to seek help. Good relationships were seen to develop when healthcare providers worked to relieve or minimise these unwanted emotions, ensuring healthcare recipients and carers felt comfortable and at ease with the provider and the encounter. Participants positioned healthcare providers as primarily responsible for relieving recipients' and carers' unwanted emotions, which was achieved via four approaches: (1) easing into the encounter, (2) demonstrating interest in and understanding of recipients' presenting problems, (3) validating recipients' presenting problems and (4) enabling and respecting recipient choice. Participants' stories also routinely oriented to temporality, positioning relationships within recipients' and carers' wider care networks and biographical and temporal contexts. The findings expand our understanding of professional caregiving relationships beyond dyadic, static conceptualisations. Specifically, the findings suggest that high-quality relationships might be achieved via a set of core healthcare provider behaviours that can be employed across disciplinary, context and condition-specific boundaries. In turn, this provides a basis to support interprofessional education and multidisciplinary healthcare delivery, enabling different healthcare disciplines, specialties, and teams to work from the same understanding of what is required to develop high-quality relationships. The findings are based on stories from 72 healthcare recipient and carer participants, providing rich insight into their conceptualisations of high-quality professional caregiving relationships.

Moralizing Supernatural Punishment and Reward

In this article we respond to three critiques of our 2019 article ‘Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History.’ We clarify that our research does not, as our critics suppose, support the claim that moralizing gods played a decisive role in the development of complex societies. Indeed our goal was to test this claim and we found it wanting. Our methods ‘reduce’ neither religion or social complexity in the ways claimed, while our tentative conclusions about the relationship between frequent, routinized ritual and social cohesion are supported by much research beyond the paper under discussion. In the Roman Empire, many forms of collective ritual contributed to the propagation of Romanitas. We have never claimed that this depended on absolute uniformity of belief. Other misconceptions about our supposedly ‘inattentive’ qualitative analysis result from misreadings of information in our open-access database, which functions as an evolving set of information relevant to specific research questions rather than a general encyclopedia. Despite these disagreements, we continue to maintain that neither qualitative historical methods nor quantitative analytic approaches alone can produce satisfying answers to causal questions about world history. The best approach, we argue, is to integrate the insights from humanities with ‘Big Data’ analyses from social science, and we welcome continued engagement and collaboration across traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Implementation of 'One Health' approach in Kerala state, India - A systematic review.

With humans, animals and the environment being as interconnected as they are, the science describing their interactions needs to cut across disciplinary boundaries. Systems research at the interface between the three goes by several names, such as 'Eco-Health' and 'Planetary Health', each with a varied focus, but the concept of 'One Health' (OH) has stood out as the most popular one. COVID-19 has reiterated the importance of OH in response to health challenges. This review aimed to assess the OH approach integration and implementation level in Kerala state, India, in the context of emerging zoonotic diseases. A systematic literature review was conducted by searching for relevant articles with specific keywords across six electronic databases. This involved screening the initial hits for titles and abstracts, then systematic sorting to identify the ones that met the criteria, followed by more thorough scrutiny to finally shortlist the six studies to be included in the review. We found that OH in Kerala has made good progress, as evident from a few recent examples, but has a long way to go with significant challenges. In line with the study's aim, identifying and analysing what is already done, what is missing and what needs to be done can have wider implications for future OH implementation. Relevant threats and opportunities were identified, with lessons for Kerala and India and broader applications.

Environmental Engineering and Management for Interdisciplinary Research-based Solutions and Education for Sustainable Transformations

Environmental sustainability is the foundation for maintaining global systems and supporting economic development within society. However, issues such as the climate crisis, overexploitation of natural resources, biodiversity loss, and significant alterations in ecosystems, complicate our ability to thrive in an ever-changing environment. These issues have far-reaching implications, from personal well-being to the vulnerability of entire populations to food and water scarcity, energy challenges, hazardous substances, and social inequalities. These challenges transcend the boundaries of specific scientific disciplines.

Interconnected Agencies For Sustainable Futures

This article presents a nuanced discussion of four episodes on the complexity of possible trajectories for sustainable futures through diverse but intersecting practices and discourses as heterogeneous but complementary articulations of ‘adaptation and space.’ As design and creative processes evolve, new tools and methods, often adopted from science and technology, are integrated into art, design, and architecture. However, knowledge flow in these developments tends to be unidirectional, with science and technology influencing these fields more than vice versa. The diverse developments relating to the concept of ‘space’ have profound impacts on industries, urban habitats, design approaches, and the arts within the expanded field. This article engages in a conversation from four different disciplinary perspectives, each articulating its own voice in relation to the broad notion of ‘adaptation and space.’ Through this multidisciplinary dialogue, presented in four episodes, it critically contributes to the ongoing discussion on sustainable futures, offering new trajectories for Problem-Based Learning (PBL) beyond disciplinary boundaries. In an era dominated by umbrella terminologies like sustainability, the field of higher education faces the challenge of integrating different expertise to foster new solutions for complex challenges. This article highlights the need for diverse fields such as architecture, art, and social science to engage in a dialogue about perception, interaction, and manipulation of space. Its purpose extends beyond the exploration of novel solutions, instead inviting multifarious perspectives that shape interconnected agencies for sustainable futures and their impact on education.

Digital Twins in Manufacturing: A RAMI 4.0 Compliant Concept

Digital twins are among the technologies that are considered to have high potential. At the same time, there is no uniform understanding of what this technology means. Definitions are used across disciplinary boundaries, resulting in a multitude of different interpretations. The concepts behind the terms should be clearly named to transfer knowledge and bundle developments in digitalization. In particular, the Reference Architectural Model for Industry (RAMI) 4.0, as the guiding concept of digitalization, should be in harmony with the terms to be able to establish a contradiction-free relationship. This paper therefore summarizes the most important definitions and descriptions from the scientific community. By evaluating the relevant literature, a concept is derived. The concept presented in this work concretizes the requirements and understanding of digital twins in the frame of RAMI 4.0 with a focus on manufacturing. It thus contributes to the understanding of the technology. In this way, the concept is intended to contribute to the implementation of digital twins in this context.

Future of Food Computing: Deepening the Scope by Broadening the Network

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using food data in various areas of computer science. Food, as a fundamental necessity for human sustenance, undergoes complex processes from farm to fork, involving physical, biological, intellectual and emotional dimensions. The need to ensure the effective and sustainable functioning of global food systems, while addressing human and environmental challenges, necessitates the development of food computing. But the question remains: How should food computing evolve to address fundamental issues in the food systems? While global sharing of data, information andknowledge is a way forward, we propose to increase the effectiveness of this sharing by transcending narrow disciplinary boundaries and engaging a wider range of stakeholders to address practical challengesfacing human society. We argue that food computing requires a multidisciplinary approach that is expansive in both scope and effectiveness. We envision a future where food computing serves as a comprehensive computational infrastructure for all aspects of food, including its production, consumption, and impact on individuals and the environment. The field of Food Computing is highly relevant to Digital Humanities (DH) researchers. By actively engaging in this area, DH researchers can make substantial contributions and shape the trajectory of future food systems, taking into account the intricate interplay of cultural, social and ethical complexities.

Promoting Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration: A Systematic Review, a Critical Literature Review, and a Pathway Forward

ABSTRACT Interdisciplinary research has been a topic of interest for many decades – perhaps longer. And yet, even now, there is still much we do not understand about how to stimulate collaboration across research disciplines. This article reports the results of a systematic review of the academic literature on strategies for promoting new interdisciplinary research collaborations, which returned only a very small number of empirical studies. A broader review of the scholarship in this area reveals a literature that is highly theorized, but not adequately operationalized for empirical investigation of how to enable new collaborations. A shift toward a better formulation of research questions, with a view toward generating more empirical data on practical strategies for connecting researchers and encouraging them to work together across disciplinary boundaries, will be required to further the research agenda on interdisciplinary collaboration.

Encountering creative climate change pedagogies: Cartographic interruptions

In this paper, we highlight climate change pedagogies within the context of an Indigenous Summer Encounter for Latinx and Indigenous children led by Miakan-Band Elders, members of a Central Texas Coahuiltecan community. We focus on anticolonial cartographies activated through movement, sound and performance that enacted Indigenous fugitivity, futurity, and relationality; pedagogical attunements that remain undertheorized as approaches to climate change education. In engaging with these pedagogies as climate change education, we are interested in contributing to recent work that resists the disciplinary boundaries of what typically counts as climate education and invites expansive and interdisciplinary approaches to climate change education. This includes approaches that inquire into how climate change education can be a site to nurture reciprocal relations with the more than human world. In particular, we highlight the Summer Encounter as illustrating possibilities for anticolonial climate education that engages creative pedagogies in foregrounding Indigenous relational onto-epistemologies with young people. We discuss the potential of this work as climate change education that actualizes and dreams more livable futures.

Climate Garden 2085: An easily applicable transdisciplinary public art-science experiment for transformative learning about climate change

AbstractClimate change education is inherently part of Education for Sustainable Development which has manifold aims to develop transformative learning from primary to tertiary pupils. Climate change is challenging as a school subject, as although it can improve pupils’ knowledge, it is less evident how such knowledge translates into decreasing the value-action gap. Climate change also transverses disciplinary boundaries and teachers struggle to incorporate it into the curriculum. We present a transdisciplinary art-science public experiment—theClimate Garden 2085, as a methodology which has proved a popular tool for schools to engage their pupils with climate change and sustainability. TheClimate Garden 2085is a participatory art-science work that engages school pupils as social groups, and in emotional ways with scientific questions related to the effects of climate change on plant species that are important for food production and gardening. Greenhouses simulating different climate change scenarios engage pupils in a tangible way with climate change effects on plants while accompanying plant science and art workshops allow them to carry out hands on experiments. The garden art-science intervention has so far been created 24 times, with more than 100 workshops, and reached around 40,000 people. It continues to attract major interest by teachers and schools. Based on qualitative observation and some quantitative data, we discuss possible reasons for the attractiveness of the methodology for schools and explore how it might affect awareness and behavioral changes of participants. We propose that the poetic nature of a garden and the length of engagement that the garden affords, combined with the embodied experience and time and place for discussions, has great potential for enabling reflection and action toward climate friendly and sustainable urban futures. We present the project here in order to encourage others to create their ownClimate Garden.

Reframing Mental Health Ethics.

Mental health ethics has been classically focused on ethical concepts and problems in clinical mental health spaces. Psychiatric and psychotherapeutic ethics are main threads of analysis in this subfield of bioethics. However, ethical issues emerge around mental health and illness both within and beyond clinical settings. In particular, ethical quandaries arise in employment, education, family caregiving, and incarceration of people with mental health conditions outside of the clinical setting. Likewise, ethics are an important consideration within alternative care systems where mentally ill people seek support beyond biomedicine, psychotherapy, and case management. In this article, we argue that our understanding of "mental health ethics" should expand to be more inclusive of value questions and conflicts that arise in all areas of the lives of people with mental health conditions, rather than focusing more narrowly on how clinical practitioners and researchers should best respond to ethical quandaries in the delivery of mental healthcare. Community mental health is an ideal space in which to think about such ethical issues, as scholars and practitioners in the field strive to meet not only medical needs but the broader social needs of people with mental health conditions. We begin by providing an overview of psychiatric and psychotherapeutic ethics, and then describe broader applications of ethics in the lives of people experiencing mental illness. We encourage community mental health practitioners and researchers to reconceptualize disciplinary boundaries to consider the vast scope of ethical issues related to mental health in and out of the clinic.

Reflections on the ‘Trans’ in Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words (In altre parole)

ABSTRACT Jhumpa Lahiri’s translingual text In Other Words (In altre parole, 2015) functions in the article both as a test case to explore disciplinary boundaries and as a case study to examine the ‘trans’ prefix. Firstly, can the infrastructure of Italian Studies accommodate non-Italianist writers and researchers? What sort of conversations might a Transnational Italian Studies scholar have with a comparatist? Secondly, to what extent does Lahiri’s text merit the prefix ‘trans’, especially if we adopt Jessica Berman’s view of the ‘trans’ prefix as disruptive of the normative? An analysis of In Other Words focusing on four trans-prefixed terms – transnational, transgender, transvestite, and translation – reveals a tension between essentialised concepts of national belonging, gender, and language and more performative instances of the same.

Artificial intelligence approach for linking competences in nuclear field

Bridging traditional experts’ disciplinary boundaries is important for nuclear knowledge management systems. However, expert competences are often described in unstructured texts and require substantial human effort to link related competences across disciplines. The purpose of this research is to develop and evaluate a natural language processing approach, based on Latent Semantic Analysis, to enable the automatic linking of related competences across different disciplines and communities of practice. With datasets of unstructured texts as input training data, our results show that the algorithm can readily identify nuclear domain-specific semantic links between words and concepts. We discuss how our results can be utilized to generate a quantitative network of links between competences across disciplines, thus acting as an enabler for identifying and bridging communities of practice, in nuclear and beyond.

Data Curation in Interdisciplinary and Highly Collaborative Research

This paper provides a systematic analysis of publications that discuss data curation in interdisciplinary and highly collaborative research (IHCR). Using content analysis methodology, it examined 159 publications and identified patterns in definitions of interdisciplinarity, projects’ participants and methodologies, and approaches to data curation. The findings suggest that data is a prominent component in interdisciplinarity. In addition to crossing disciplinary and other boundaries, IHCR is defined as curating and integrating heterogeneous data and creating new forms of knowledge from it. Using personal experiences and descriptive approaches, the publications discussed challenges that data curation in IHCR faces, including an increased overhead in coordination and management, lack of consistent metadata practices, and custom infrastructure that makes interoperability across projects, domains, and repositories difficult. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research.

AIsmosis and the pas de deux of human-AI interaction: Exploring the communicative dance between society and artificial intelligence

As the global influence of artificial intelligence (AI) in our daily lives and the looming advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) become increasingly apparent, the need for a sophisticated interpretive framework intensifies. This paper introduces ‘AIsmosis’–a term that captures AI’s gradual, nuanced integration into society, and akin to the biological process of osmosis. AI’s integration dynamics are examined through the lens of three pivotal theories: social construction of technology, technological determinism, and diffusion of innovations. These theories collectively elucidate the sociocultural influences on AI, the potential repercussions of unchecked technological growth, and the factors driving the adoption of novel technologies. Building upon these explorations, the ‘controlled AIsmosis’ conceptual framework emerges, emphasizing ethically conscious development, active stakeholder communication, and democratic dialogue in the context of AI technology adoption. Rooted in communicative action theory, this framework illuminates AI’s transformative impact on society. It calls for a comprehensive evaluation of systems that steer AI diffusion and their potential impacts, acknowledging the pervasive influence of AI and transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries. This work underscores the need for a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach in investigating the complex AI-society interplay and understanding the ethical and societal consequences of AIsmosis.

Beyond data labor: sowing synthesis science in the Global South

Synthesis science is an emergent research field for harmonizing different data, concepts, and theories to create new insights and endorse novel approaches. Here we provide a brief general overview of synthesis science, emphasize the geographically biased location of synthesis centers一particularly their paucity in the Global South一and highlight the pioneering role of the Synthesis Center on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (SinBiose, CNPq) concerning transdisciplinary aspirations in the Global South. Working with the ecosystem service dimension requires breaking discipline boundaries to approach society, stakeholders, and decision-makers, which SinBiose fosters and is rarely found elsewhere. This article features a “Brazilian experience” of synthesis science through the perception of SinBiose’s postdoctoral researchers, which have a central role in the workflow as the only professionals dedicated exclusively to the projects. As a conclusion, we present recommendations for improving the support for postdoctoral researchers and arguments for a continued funding of synthesis science in Brazil.