Interdisciplinary Engagement Research Articles

Past, present and future of respiratory research: A survey of Canadian health care professionals.

The Canadian Respiratory Health Professionals (CRHP) is the multidisciplinary health care professional group of the Canadian Lung Association. Although the CRHP has a growing number of highly qualified researchers, the landscape of their research in Canada has not been described. To describe the level of respiratory research engagement; identify barriers and facilitators to research engagement; describe the experience and interest in developing research skills; and identify priority areas of future respiratory research among health care professionals. An online survey of CRHP members was used to collect demographic information; barriers and facilitators to conducting research; future directions in respiratory research; and research funding and mentorship. Experience with and interest in 'upskilling' research skills were also evaluated. A total of 119 surveys were completed (22% response rate), of which 69 (58%) respondents were engaged in respiratory research. Reasons for not being involved in respiratory research were lack of mentorship, support and funding. The top research areas were chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (74%) and asthma (41%). The top facilitators for research engagement were amount of funding (29%) and mentorship (28%). Respondents in research positions rated their experience in research skills as high; those in nonresearch positions as low. However, both groups expressed interest in improving their research skills. Areas of development, such as research skills, greater funding opportunities and mentorship to increase the research capacity of health care professionals in respiratory health were identified. Health professional researchers have an important role in the national respiratory research strategy to increase interdisciplinary engagement and build collaborative teams.

Interdisciplinary workshop in the philosophy of medicine: medical knowledge, medical duties.

On 27 September 2013, the Centre for the Humanities and Health (CHH) at King's College London hosted a 1‐day workshop on ‘Medical knowledge, Medical Duties’. This workshop was the fifth in a series of five workshops whose aim is to provide a new model for high‐quality, open interdisciplinary engagement between medical professionals and philosophers. This report identifies the key points of discussion raised throughout the day and the methodology employed.

Social psychology, history, and the study of the Holocaust: The perils of interdisciplinary “borrowing”.

The article offers a critical examination of “borrowing” as a form of interdisciplinary engagement between psychology and history. This is where specific insights from one discipline are used (often selectively) by the other to shed light on a specific problem regarding experience, human motivation, or behavior. Using two studies on the social psychological aspects of the Holocaust as relevant examples, the article highlights some of the epistemological and conceptual tensions implicit in this form of interdisciplinarity. These include the role of narrative and emplotment in historical reconstruction, the relationship between texts and historical context, the role of discourse and interpretation, and the tension between universalism and particularism. The article considers the different ways in which some of these challenges could be overcome in future research, and how one might take the interdisciplinary study of the Holocaust, but also other instances of mass crimes and genocide, beyond selective “borrowing.”

After Romanticism, psychoanalysis and postmodernism: New paradigms for theorising creativity

While Romanticism, psychoanalysis and postmodern theory have provided the dominant paradigms for understanding creativity in the humanities in the past century, this paper argues that interdisciplinary engagement with sociobiology and the cognitive sciences might provide ground-breaking perspectives. Against the ‘supra-rational’, masculinist and solipsistic visions of creativity that have prevailed, the work of the sociobiologist Ellen Dissanayake and of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio invite new ways of thinking about the role of the feeling body, femininity and mutuality in creative practice. This paper will survey Dissanayake’s and Damasio’s research to explore the possibility and desirability of a paradigm shift when it comes to understanding creativity, with poetry as a strategic focus for its argument. This paper is not interested in putting forward a new methodology for writing poetry but in recognising the embodied condition from which all poetry fundamentally arises.

The need for collaboration in the future delivery of improved therapies for patients

The defining issue for the improvement of health care in the future, both in Europe and around the world, is the need for enhanced collaboration. This is vital if we want to deliver true medical innovation to patients with unmet and intractable medical conditions and do so in a predictable and costeffective manner. All disciplines that are involved in this worthy endeavour must find better ways to work together. Obviously, this includes the industry to which I have belonged for many years, but also regulators, prescribers, patients, payers, academics, and public and private enterprises. Trying to create such collaborations is a challenge. If it had been easy we would have done it a long time ago. However, I do think that the advent of stratified (sometimes referred to as ‘personalised’) medicines provide a long awaited impetus to such drive interdisciplinary engagement. By stratified medicines, what I am referring to are medicines that can be specifically targeted to subpopulations of patients on the basis of their genetic, metabolic and molecular profiles. The question is why stratified medicine should provide such a common focus across the healthcare sector? In order to understand this, we should start with the evolutions currently occurring in science.

Disciplinary boundaries between art and anthropology

This article provides the perspective of an anthropologist who uses art practice and theory to reflect on interdisciplinary engagements, focusing on the arguments made about disciplinarity that feature in Chapter 5 of Alana Jelinek's This Is Not Art. The article considers the nature of boundaries metaphorically and methodologically, in relation to the comparability of art and anthropology. It examines whether ‘policing’ boundaries is necessary to wrest art from not-art, considered in terms of the instrumentalisation of art, and the appropriation of methods across the disciplines. It is concerned with what counts as knowledge, and how disciplines account for their conditions of existence, which the article explores in terms of an ‘ecology of practices’, in order to consider to what extent such boundaries are meaningful.

Book Review: Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works

Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. By James K. A. Smith. Cultural Liturgies, volume 2. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2013. 224 pp. $22.99 (paper).Plenty of modem theologians have exposed the problems involved in privileging the human mind and rational thought over the body and experience. Few, however, have developed constmctive holistic accounts of how human beings live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28) as embodied creatures. James K. A. Smith addresses this need by exploring the dynamics of human formation and action in Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. This second volume of Smith's Cultural Liturgies series revolves around a deceptively simple conviction: human beings are animals (p. 3) whose lives are formed and transformed by stories (p. 14). Yet the complexity of Smiths thought comes to fife through his interdisciplinary engagement with French phenomenology and social theory, classic literature, and American popular culture. Although Smith's insights could gain greater force through further contextualization, Imagining the Kingdom offers a provocative contribution to theological anthropology, ecclesiology, and liturgical studies.Part I of the book sets out to assemble a theoretical toolbox (p. 29) for correcting intellectualist theological perspectives that mistakenly assume that right knowledge produces right action (p. 33). According to Smith, human experience regularly demonstrates the inadequacy of this view; human formation-whether Christian or secular-is not such a straightforward or even conscious process. In search of a fuller account, Smith turns to Maurice Merleau-Ponty s phenomenology of perception in chapter 1 and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice in chapter 2, and he navigates both streams of thought with ease. Readers who have previously encountered these challenging thinkers will appreciate Smith's accessible descriptions of their key concepts. With the help of Merleau-Ponty, Smith elaborates the texture of human subjectivity, in which embodiment, perception, place, desire, and all come together to shape ones participation in a given situation. Smith then takes up Bourdieu's understanding of social habituation and practice to articulate how human perception and action are indelibly formed over time.With these tools in hand, Smith delineates the formative power of (p. 137) in Part II. In chapter 3, he draws upon Mark Johnson s discussion of the relationship between the body and metaphor in order to show how embodied experience weaves together imagination, metaphor, and narrative (p. 124). This poetics provides a basis for Smiths argument in this chapter: liturgies work on us because they consist of stories. …

Understanding Christianity in the history of African religion: An engagement with theological and anthropological perspectives in the pursuit of interdisciplinary dialogue

There is ample ground and good motives for interdisciplinary engagement between theology and the �new� anthropology of Christianity. Theologians can learn much about the character of the church in all its plurality from the often insightful descriptions of anthropologists who have recently started to take a strong interest in Christianity. On the other hand, theologians can help anthropologists come to more complex understandings of the meaning of Christianity. Concerning contrasting anthropological perspectives of anti-essentialism and culture theory regarding the nature of Christianity, this article suggested that the work of missiologists, such as Andrew Walls, might usefully aid the progression of the debate and referred to the historical interplay and conflict between Christianity and indigenous knowledge in southern Africa by way of illustrating this point. The argument pursued in this article hinges on the prioritising of an interdisciplinary approach in theological studies, a cause which Prof. Julian M�ller has long championed. Therefore, this contribution sought to honour his legacy by illustrating a further avenue of interdisciplinary engagement.

Transnational bureaucracies

This paper assesses geographic and especially political geographic work on transnational bureaucratic knowledge production. The term ‘transnational’ signals policy processes that blend national and extranational dynamics in institutional settings that transcend the governmental structures of states. The focus is on the international arena rather than national policy-making. The paper foregrounds the growing attention to bureaucratic processes in geography and highlights some productive arguments about spatiality and practice in that work. I stress the need for closer interdisciplinary engagements and I point to the insights that we would gain from the work of Pierre Bourdieu in that effort.

Functional Linguistics – a new journal for the scientific study of language

© A m Welcome to Functional Linguistics, a peer-reviewed open-access journal supported by the M.A.K. Halliday Library, Sun Yat-sen University, China and published by SpringerOpen. This open-access journal publishes scholarly articles and reviews in the broad area of functional linguistics, with a special focus on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Our aim is to provide a platform for the exploration of language and linguistic issues from a functional and meaning-oriented perspective. SFL is a functional model of language inspired by the work of linguists such as Saussure, Hjelmslev, Whorf, and Firth. The theory, as a general linguistics model of language, was initially developed by M.A.K. Halliday and his colleagues in London during the 1960s, and its development has been “one of continuous expansion of its ‘territory’ in terms of theory, description, application, interdisciplinary engagement, and so on” (Matthiessen 2010). As the name indicates, SFL distinguishes itself as a functional theory by the emphasis placed on system in relation to structure. Martin (1984) explains that “it is... the use of paradigmatically based metafunctional components in the grammar which most clearly distinguishes systemic from other functionalist approaches”. The theory has also been particularly concerned with modelling language in context. It is especially well-known for the work on discourse analysis, cohesion, genre and register, appraisal and so on, which have been taken up by scholars working in the humanities and social sciences. Since Halliday’s early work on Chinese and English, systemic functional linguists have also been increasing the coverage of the description of different languages over the decades, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Danish, Finnish, Persian, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog and Bahasa Indonesian. SFL can be characterized as an “appliable” linguistics theory. Halliday (2008: 189) states that his aim is to work towards “a coherent account of language which is ‘appliable’, in the sense that it can be helpful to at least some of the large numbers of people who are in some way or other engaging with language in the course of their work”. SFL is wellknown for its application in a variety of fields, including education, translation, computational linguistics, multimodal studies, and healthcare, and scholars are always exploring new areas of application (Matthiessen 2010). As Fawcett (2013) points out, the development of SFL has benefited from the social structures that have been developed to maintain and nourish the theory. These include SFL associations and conferences (international, regional and national), teaching and research posts, MA and PhD courses and programs in universities, and

Co-producing knowledge: Academics and non-academics partner to build synergistic teams to produce sustainable pathways to advance the emerging field of bamboo farming, manufacturing and processing in Alabama

Black Belt Bamboost project was developed to advance knowledge of bamboo as a catalyst for a new type of agricultural development, identify associated potential end markets, as well as its processing, manufacturing, and general awareness within the state of Alabama, specifically the Black Belt region. It exists to provide a launch pad for leaders in multidisciplinary research collaboration, education, and the community to partner in order to build synergistic teams to develop discoveries that will position Alabama to be a leader in the emerging field of bamboo farming, manufacturing and processing. It also serves as a platform for individuals engaged in creative pursuits using bamboo. This paper examines the development of this interdisciplinary community engagement project. With the belief that a co-production of knowledge is essential for developing more sustainable pathways, an agorist strategy was used to bring non-academic and academic communities along with public, private and governmental institutions together.

The Incurable Constitutional Itch: Transnational Private Regulatory Governance and the Woes of Legitimacy

Transnational private regulatory governance in a host of areas from food and product safety, aviation security, accounting, corporate and labor standards, as well as forestry and marine stewardship has long attracted the attention of those with concern for the public interest. The chapter recognizes these concerns, which are usually expressed in terms of a wide-ranging legitimacy deficit of private governance regimes. At the same time, I contend that there is no easy fix in response to regulatory developments that have their origin in nation-state transformation and in a functionally differentiated proliferation of global societal activity. I provide a brief account of what is here called the ‘Global Governance condition’ and of the particular challenges emanating therefrom for the development of legal agency. I then engage with law’s potential to resituate itself in a global context against the background of competing accounts of functionalism and normativism. Thereafter follows a discussion of the particular role played by private law in navigating public and private interests and of the (futile?) aspirations for a political critique. The next section contextualizes the public-private law dynamics against the background of a high degree of functional and sectorial specialization which characterizes transnationalization processes and significantly challenges any effort of designing overarching and inclusive models or concepts of post-national justice. The concluding section interrogates the prospects of an interdisciplinary and normative engagement with the pressing political regulatory challenges that arise from law’s transnationalization.

Critical Analysis of Law: Interdisciplinarity, Contextuality, and the Future of Legal Studies

Critical Analysis of Law (CAL) is a broadly contextual approach to legal scholarship animated by the idea of bilateral interdisciplinary engagement. CAL aims to move beyond entrenched distinctions and self-imposed limitations, pursuing critique and analysis, theory and doctrine, because both are essential interdependent aspects of the enterprise of legal studies as a discipline. CAL embraces interdisciplinarity, reconceived and contextualized. It insists on the autonomy of law as a discipline, while at the same time regarding law as one discipline among others, and the interdisciplinarity of legal studies as a reflection of interdisciplinarity in all modes of scholarship and teaching.

Letter from the Editor

The editors of the International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering, Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship (IJSLE) are pleased to publish this, our first special edition of the Journal, entitled “Opportunities and Barriers to Integrating Service Learning into Engineering Education”. The editors solicited scholarly manuscripts that would explore three areas related to service learning in engineering, humanitarian engineering, and/or social entrepreneurship - both domestically and internationally. These three areas included: 1. Assessment of Service Learning in Engineering 2. Scholarship of Service Learning in Engineering 3. Interdisciplinary Engagement

Theories and methodologies of translation history: the value of an interdisciplinary approach

The premise for this special issue is that some form of interdisciplinary engagement with historical studies – the term I shall use here to denote all historiography that does not define itself by ...

Wading in the Water: A Case Study Approach to Engaging More Fully in the Patient Narrative

Working in the patient narrative has become a familiar part of the common language used in the context of caring for patients. Working in the patient narrative encompasses sharing conversation that allows exploration of the entire patient experience as it relates to health and illness. However, the complexity of engaging in end-of-life conversations, standing steady with conflict, remaining present, maintaining neutrality, and actively listening remain challenging concepts in practice even though they are integral to effectively doing so. Literature review has identified and defined key elements of interactions that can lead to significant opportunities to “wander more fully” in the patient narrative. Two case studies reviewed therein demonstrate ways in which palliative care encounters and end-of-life discussions afford the interdisciplinary team members purposeful engagement with patients. One case discusses taking risks to delve more deeply into patient's fears related to dying. This exploration lays the foundation for assuring goals of care are aligned with individual patient values. The other case demonstrates the use of symbols to share dialog related to an individual's tasks of dying. When directed, intentional facilitation occurs, the patient's unique holistic needs and values are identified, and goals of care can be clarified. In conclusion, highlights of research and clinical applications provide advantageous practice implications.

Middle-Aged Women’s Preferred Theory-Based Features in Mobile Physical Activity Applications

The purpose of this study was to describe which theory-based behavioral and technological features middle-aged women prefer to be included in a mobile application designed to help them adopt and maintain regular physical activity (PA). Women aged 30 to 64 years (N = 120) completed an online survey measuring their demographics and mobile PA application preferences. The survey was developed upon behavioral principles of Social Cognitive Theory, recent mobile app research, and technology adoption principles of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology. Frequencies were calculated and content analyses conducted to identify which features women most preferred. Behavioral features that help women self-regulate their PA (PA tracking, goal-setting, progress monitoring) were most preferred. Technological features that enhance perceived effort expectancy and playfulness were most preferred. Many women reported the desire to interact and compete with others through the application. Theory-based PA self-regulation features and theory-based design features that improve perceived effort expectancy and playfulness may be most beneficial in a mobile PA application for middle-aged women. Opportunities to interact with other people and the employment of social, game-like activities may also be attractive. Interdisciplinary engagement of experts in PA behavior change, technology adoption, and software development is needed.

Is there nursing phenomenology after Paley? Essay on rigorous reading

At the bedside, nurses are expected to be precise when they read indications on screens and on the bodies of patients and decide on the meaning of words framed by the context of acute care. In academia, although there is no incident report to fill when we misread or misrepresent complex philosophical ideas, the consequences of inaccurate reading include misplaced epistemological claims and poor scholarship. A long and broad convention of nursing phenomenological research, in its various forms, claims a philosophical grounding in the ideas of Husserl, Heidegger, and other thinkers. But for nearly two decades, nurse phenomenologists' knowledge claims have been challenged by well-informed criticisms, most notably by John Paley. At the heart of criticism lies an observation that Continental phenomenological thought is misrepresented in many nursing sources and that nursing phenomenology, both descriptive and interpretive, cannot appeal to the authority of either Husserl or Heidegger. Taking these criticisms seriously, I am asking, Is phenomenology after Paley possible? If misreading seems to be an issue, how can - or should - we read rigorously? My thinking through these questions is influenced by the ideas of Jacques Derrida. Under a condition of a play of language, of Derridian différance, when meaning is never self-identical and never fully arrives, I suggest that one has to negotiate meanings through reading for differences. I develop this idea in relation to the methodological conventions of phenomenological nursing research and argue for a careful rereading of the whole field of phenomenological nursing research. Such rereading presupposes and necessitates interdisciplinary engagement between nursing and the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Greater familiarity with research practices of those disciplines that stress theoretical and writing rigour might make visible the limits of nursing research approaches and their quality criteria. An understanding of philosophical and theoretical works - a condition of quality scholarship - depends on our reading of both originary texts and contemporary literature from the humanities and the social sciences. This understanding, far from obliging researchers to always trace (often erroneously) their work to its philosophical roots, opens other, often more sound, methodological possibilities.

From complexity to the teaching of synthesis: constructing the way

Facing nature, man perceives reality. Observes, analyses, synthesises and through a metacognitive process of knowledge construction, associates and dissociates elements. This process of inter-relationship between elements fragments reality into simplified parcels later rebuilt in cognitive structures that apprehend the complexity through the adoption of analytical models. The synthesis that he seeks to construct expresses the dialectical relationship between the self and the world/object. Then, by desire and by reason, man transforms the natural environment, builds, shapes, occupies, limits, reinterprets the natural. However, before doing so as material, he does it in his consciousness, imagines, designs, verifies, and by doing it this way, before being real as material, it also becomes spiritual, virtual and aesthetic. The opposition between matter and space is rebalanced by human perception and consciousness in a tripartite structure that is constituted as the architecture object. We are interested in the systematization of this process, in other words, in the way that the self constructs the path or method of approach into the object. Antonio Machado suggests: Caminante, son tus huellas el camino, y nada más. Perante a natureza, o homem percepciona o mundo natural. Observa, analisa, sintetiza e através de um processo metacognitivo de construção de conhecimento, associa elementos e dissocia outros. Este processo de inter-relação entre elementos divide a realidade em parcelas simplificadas reconstruídas posteriormente em estruturas cognitivas de apreensão da complexidade, mediante a adoção de modelos analíticos. A síntese que procura construir exprime a relação dialética entre o mundo e o eu. Em seguida, pelo desejo e pela razão, o homem transforma o meio natural, constrói, modela, ocupa, limita e reinterpreta o natural. No entanto, antes de o fazer como matéria, fá-lo na sua consciência; imagina, projeta, verifica e, ao fazê-lo deste modo, antes de ser real como matéria, é também espiritual, virtual e estético. A oposição entre matéria e espaço é reequilibrada pela percepção e consciência humana numa estrutura tripartida que se constitui como o objecto da Arquitectura. Interessa-nos a sistematização deste processo, ou seja, a forma como, no projeto de Arquitectura, o eu/sujeito constrói o caminho ou método de abordagem ao mundo/objecto. Antonio Machado sugere, Caminante, son tus huellas el camino, y nada más.

Responsible scientists and a citizens' panel: new storylines for creative engagement between science and the public

Uncertainties over emerging technologies and their potential effect on society and the environment often lead to controversy between scientists, policymakers and the public. Opening up the debates and involving citizens and social scientists early in the process of developing new technology is one way of responding to this issue of governance. By doing so, the hope is that the ethical implications and acceptability of new science can be more carefully considered and framed in a responsible and democratised context. To explore an example of aspiration in practice, a series of interdisciplinary public engagement events was organised at Durham University under the title New Storylines for Living with Environmental Change: Citizens' Perspectives. In this commentary we report on one of these events, a one‐day workshop entitled Responsible Science and Public Engagement, where a citizens' panel aimed to explore ways of conducting deliberative engagement with scientists using the creative arts and a scientific dilemmas café format.