Interdisciplinary Roots Research Articles

Medical historical notes on myoma treatment by uterine artery embolization on the occasion of its introduction 30 years ago.

Since its development, uterine artery embolization (UAE) for the treatment of symptomatic fibroids has become an established minimally invasive alternative to surgical myoma treatment. Currently, more than 25,000 myoma patients worldwide are likely to be treated with UAE annually. Thirty years ago, Jacques-Henri Ravina (b. 1930) and his Paris team first performed this therapy as a "substitute" for gynecologic surgery. We contacted him as part of the preparation of the present review. In addition, we performed a literature search with the aim of summarizing the current literature and data in addition to a historical account of the development of UAE. On the occasion of this anniversary, we would like to recall the interdisciplinary roots and some facets of the history of the development of this relatively young myoma treatment method. · UAE is an established minimally invasive alternative to surgical myoma treatment.. · UAE was first developed 30 years ago.. · UAE has continuously increased in importance in recent years.. · Psilopatis I, Fleckenstein FN, Gebauer B et al. Medical historical notes on myoma treatment by uterine artery embolization on the occasion of its introduction 30 years ago. Fortschr Röntgenstr 2023; DOI: 10.1055/a-2077-1387.

INTERDISCIPLINARY LEADERSHIP: A Leadership Development Model for Scholar-Practitioners

Leadership scholar-practitioners seldom need to be sold on the benefits of working together. Rather leadership educators want to know how to teach adult leadership scholar-practitioners how to work together across differences. The aim of this paper is to guide leadership development practitioners on how to nurture leadership that can address the complex problems the changing global arena demand of us today and into the future. We argue when preparing adult leadership scholar-practitioners, using adult learning theories and paying attention to the interdisciplinary roots of the field of leadership might lead to better learning and engagement with real world challenges. In this paper we present a leadership development model we call interdisciplinary leadership. First, we discuss the interdisciplinary roots of leadership. Second, we describe interdisciplinary leadership as a tapestry – an intricate combination of identities, practices, and outcomes used to prepare people to address complex problems. Finally, we describe the mission, structure, curriculum, and instructional strategies that can be used by leadership educators when applying interdisciplinary leadership. This model acknowledges the identity, practices, and outcomes needed to develop scholar-practitioners of leadership and provides practical techniques to help leadership educators prepare leaders to work together across differences to address complex problems.

The Normativity of Communication Research: A Content Analysis of Normative Claims in Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles (1970–2014)

ABSTRACT In times of rapid media change, society is increasingly asking for expertise from communication research. Well-founded assessments of current developments require knowledge of the normative foundations of the discipline, but empirical analyses of the normativity of communication research are scarce. We developed an innovative, multistep approach to make the discipline’s normative perspectives visible. We identified, systemized, and quantified normative claims consisting of three elements: content (what is evaluated/should happen?), subject (who is responsible?), and object (who benefits?). This approach provides the basis for a long-term content analysis of articles from international peer-reviewed journals in communication research (1970–2014). The results show that communication research is normative, but research fields differ in their degree of normativity, likely resulting from the discipline’s interdisciplinary roots. The normative focal points vary over time, reflecting changes in the discipline and in the media during the period examined. Based on these results, we call for informed handling of the normativity shaping communication research.

Critical policy scholarship in education: An overview

This paper presents an overview of critical policy scholarship (CPS) in education. Historically, policy research has been dominated by what is commonly referred to as the policy science tradition, which is positivist in its philosophical stance and instrumentalist in its purpose—it focuses on producing knowledge relevant for policy decisions. However, with the rise of interpretive social inquiry in the 1970s and against the backdrop of unique political developments in the 1980s, CPS emerged as an alternative policy research perspective. This review discusses the scope and foci of CPS in education under four themes: methodological assumptions, interdisciplinary roots, enduring analytical goals, and emerging empirical contexts. Implications of the prevalence of inequality, Big Data and digital panopticon for educational policymaking and policy research are also briefly discussed. The paper concludes that although its foci of analysis have shifted considerably in the last four decades, analytical interest and tools of CPS remain largely unchanged.

Critical Policy Scholarship in Education: An Overview

This paper presents an overview of critical policy scholarship (CPS) in education. Historically, policy research has been dominated by what is commonly referred to as the policy science tradition, which is positivist in its philosophical stance and instrumentalist in its purpose—it focuses on producing knowledge relevant for policy decisions. However, with the rise of interpretive social inquiry in the 1970s and against the backdrop of unique political developments in the 1980s, CPS emerged as an alternative policy research perspective. This review discusses the scope and foci of CPS in education under four themes: methodological assumptions, interdisciplinary roots, enduring analytical goals, and emerging empirical contexts. Implications of the prevalence of inequality, Big Data and digital panopticon for educational policymaking and policy research are also briefly discussed. The paper concludes that although its foci of analysis have shifted considerably in the last four decades, analytical interest and tools of CPS remain largely unchanged.

Re-empowering into voice: experiments in organic community co-production

Abstract This article explores and extrapolates an emerging concept within community practice: namely that of organic community co-production. The concept is influenced by previous uses of the term ‘organic’, specifically as applied by Tönnies in relation to certain types of community, and Gramsci in respect of a concept of leadership. Our development of the term has been generated within the context of reflective practitioner experience, located in a community-led action campaign Voice4Deptford, in South East London. The case study explores the interdisciplinary roots of this form of co-production. It highlights the way that these pre-existing principles and methods have been adapted, reflected upon and improvised in the light of 30 years’ grassroots engagement by Green to evolve a bespoke approach that we are proposing to call ‘organic community coproduction’. The case study outlines several original dimensions or modalities of community organic co-production including; stepping aside; the academic as a non-expert and giving voice. It unpacks the different elements of impact and transformation, that are consequent upon organic community co-production. These include; evidence of change; working together and community reflective time. The article concludes with a discussion of the issues involved in reframing of local power, the campaigns early successes and its continuing challenges.

The Role of the Academy and HRD in the Changing of the Guard

The Problem Life for faculty members is becoming more complex and stressful due to the rate of change and the ever-increasing demands being placed on them: publish in top journals, apply for funding, teach and support more students, integrate new technology into classes, serve on committees, and contribute to your discipline and professional association. Current systems, policies, and practices within higher education often fail to recognize the unique contributions of faculty members, especially those who might not reflect the traditional perspectives that have been put in place for decades. Rather, there remains a strongly guarded tradition of what is valued and rewarded within higher education. Hence, higher education needs to transform its organizational culture, valuing individual contributions, meeting workforce demands, and ensuring the health of the education system and society. The Solution The field of human resource development (HRD) with its interdisciplinary roots and expertise in learning, leadership, organizational change, and culture is uniquely poised to not only inform this conversation, but also to critique and contribute to the transformation of faculty work and associated expectations. This Issue addresses and identifies where changes are needed at the individual, organizational, and societal levels to transform the role of faculty members so that it is better aligned with the current environment and context of higher education. The Stakeholders Scholars, practitioners, administrators, and community who recognize that the health of the broader community is affected by the quality of higher education and, in particular, faculty and the way that they teach and prepare students to be scholar-practitioners.

Building Bridges with Big Brothers Big Sisters: Service-learning Links Between Professional and Civic Engagement Education at a Predominantly Black Institution

During spring and fall semesters of 2017, Clayton State University students in corporate communication minor courses collaborated with film production majors to raise awareness for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metropolitan Atlanta. Through this three-way collaboration, students helped to build tactical communication with the objective of increasing interest among potential volunteers for the organization’s mentoring program. The deliverables included three videos that Big Brothers Big Sisters used in its drive to increase the number of volunteer mentors in the communities for both the organization and Clayton State. This paper examines the importance of community-engaged service-learning for a student population at a minority-serving predominantly Black institution in Morrow, Georgia, part of the Atlanta metropolitan area. As part of Clayton State’s broader community engagement initiative, this collaboration is being evaluated using a case study design. Consequently, we examine the interdisciplinary roots of the initiative while positioning professional and civic education as simultaneously achievable. Ultimately the research positions Clayton State as a centrifuge for collaborative experience, which serves this dual purpose.

Emerging trajectories for spatial pattern analysis in landscape ecology

Landscape ecology is an interdisciplinary field, drawing on theories and methods from across the physical, natural, and social sciences. Spatial pattern analysis was built on this foundation of interdisciplinarity, and these connections continue to foster new trajectories in the field. Using the Isserman Curve (i.e., the innovation-adoption or cumulative knowledge curve) as a framing device, this paper examines how interdisciplinary perspectives continue to help de-lock from periods of incremental improvement in spatial pattern analysis and launch new, transformative directions for describing and analyzing spatial patterns. Examples of interdisciplinary perspectives from three fields are discussed alongside the promising trajectories being launched. These include: (1) microscopy and surface metrology, which are contributing methods for analyzing spatial patterns in gradient surfaces, (2) thermodynamics and information theory, which contribute a foundation for measuring entropy and an understanding of how landscape patterns are governed by the central organizing principles of nature, and (3) regional studies, which utilizes alternative conceptualizations of proximity that may be applied to graph-based approaches to better incorporate functional connectivity. Landscape ecology’s interdisciplinary roots have been instrumental for developing innovative approaches to spatial pattern analysis, and outside perspectives continue to add richly to development efforts today. During periods of incremental improvement, landscape ecologists have drawn from other disciplines to create new seedbeds for ideas. While many trajectories may emerge, there is no rule that only one must become dominant. Blending multiple perspectives and ideas together into mutually supportive structures is helping the field move beyond the status quo.

Global health and international business: new frontiers of international business research

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to revisit the interdisciplinary roots of international business (IB) by challenging the compartmentalized and obscured nature of certain major themes in current IB research. Here, the author broadens IB’s natural scope by introducing the links with global health while preemptively removing the existing limits of critical perspectives.Design/methodology/approachThe study synthesizes ignored common insights from IB and global health governance. It supplies a select composite of emerging themes mostly at the interface of IB and global health as foundational proposals for reengaging IB for radical social change. This is in response to the urgent calls for inquiries into the “extra dimensions” of IB in answering wicked questions of global sustainability, injustice and inequality and other emergent grand challenges whilst embracing novel conceptual, theoretical and empirical opportunities.FindingsThis study demonstrates that IB research in its current form is reductive, quintessentially compartmentalized and evidently weak in responding to the emergent wicked problems of global scale. This is because several layers of complex, burning interconnected questions with roots in IB hardly receive exposure in research although they are the very existential and emerging issues with massive impacts on populations both in home and host countries.Practical implicationsThis study sets new research agendas for critically studying IB and global health topics of vital relevance to reflect the changing frontiers of knowledge production in the fourth industrial revolution.Originality/valueThis study calls for deeper and broader discussions about the limitless opportunities of cross-fertilization of IB and other disciplines whilst highlighting the heretofore-overlooked connections between IB and environmental and medico-techno-scientific disciplines.

Integrative Approaches to the Undergraduate Public Health Major Curriculum: Strengths, Challenges, and Examples.

Many “first generation” undergraduate public health degree programs were designed based on “siloed” course structures centered around subunits in the discipline (e.g., Introduction to Epidemiology, Introduction to Environmental Health) that may be meaningful primarily to experts in the field. An alternative to the siloed approach is an integrative curricular design, in which courses are designed around meaningful thematic units (e.g., explaining public health problems, asking and answering scientific questions in public health), with an emphasis on drawing connections between knowledge from different but complementary disciplinary areas as a means to improve student learning and retention. The integrative approach shifts the curriculum conversation to capitalize on the interdisciplinary roots of the public health profession. This approach is consistent with the learning outcome recommendations in the Framing the Future Task Force report and in the CEPH requirements for the undergraduate public health major. We explore integrative approaches to developing curricular models for undergraduate public health programs and discuss both pedagogical and career preparation arguments supporting an integrative curriculum approach. These include facilitating the often-challenging task for students of seeing how concepts interrelate, making transparent how “basic” knowledge in the discipline relates to “real world” applications of the content, and better mirroring how professionals in the discipline actually use knowledge in practice. Finally, we review examples of core concepts and features in an integrative curriculum approach to the undergraduate public health major as an effective educational program with high-quality, learner-centered educational experiences.

Consequences in standardizing the soundscape data collection process

The ISO/TS 12913-2 dealing with data collection and reporting issues in the context of soundscape investigations was published in 2018. This technical specification proposes a range of methods and tools to perform the data collection process according to the current understanding of the soundscape approach. It intends to harmonize the data collection of soundscape studies and to ensure a certain level of comparability between soundscape investigations. In the past the vast majority of soundscape studies applied very different methods and tools limiting the comparability of results and avoiding the performance of meta-analyses. The reason might be the interdisciplinary roots of the soundscape concept asking for diverse disciplinary accesses to the phenomenon challenging the soundscape standardization efforts. Now, the disadvantage of the limited comparability of soundscape results might be overcome due to the publication of the ISO/TS 12913-2. The paper will discuss the expected impact of the technical specification defining the data collection requirements on soundscape research and will highlight the benefits and potential drawbacks in standardizing the holistic soundscape approach.

IS Information Systems a (Social) Science?

McBride (2018) worries that researchers increasingly approach information systems (IS) research like a natural science whereby they seek to develop general laws “by applying statistical surveys and running laboratory experiments”. While it is interesting to liken IS to the hard sciences, the discipline has deep interdisciplinary roots that join many ontological, epistemological, and even philosophical understandings of phenomena related to information technology (IT). These diverse viewpoints strengthen the discipline. They are healthy and beneficial for a discipline that studies rapidly moving, complex phenomena. Rather than turn away from rigorous, statistically intensive methods, we propose that IS researchers embrace diversity and adopt an entrepreneurial model of scholarship. By employing entrepreneurial mindsets to guide their selection of theories and methods, we believe IS scholars can create opportunities to conduct rigorous, relevant work that examines increasingly diverse, complex, and emerging IT-related phenomena.

Time–space distanciation: An empirically supported integrative framework for the cultural psychology of time and space

While researchers in social psychology often explore space and time in isolation, the relations between these dimensions are rarely considered. To address this gap, we explore a model of Time–Space Distanciation, the extent to space and time are abstracted from one another in the cultural coordination of activity. We introduce this construct with an emphasis on its interdisciplinary roots and its status as a feature of both group- and individual-level psychology. We then offer three studies providing initial evidence of the distinctiveness of this variable at both levels. We find that (1) state-level time–space distanciation is related to, but distinct from, collectivism and cultural tightness and (2) it has important implications for collective well-being. We further found that (3) individual-level time–space distanciation is associated with a wide range of trait differences. We conclude by describing the implications of this research for the study of time, space, and their connection.

Crafting a Career in STS: Meaning Making, Assessment, and Interdisciplinary Engagement

Drawing on her own biography, Ruth Müller opens her contribution by reminding us of the strong interdisciplinary roots and entanglements of STS as a field, as well as of its emancipatory political agenda. This rich history creates multiple valences for defining the worth of work in our field, ranging from scholarly excellence over successful interdisciplinary collaborative engagement to assembling matters of care and concern. Building on this, she analyzes how current indicatorized career dynamics render it increasingly difficult to derive a sense of meaning from one’s own work that builds on a successful integration of these multiple valences. She calls for developing “standards of our own,” that is, ways of defining quality and processes of accountability that do better justice to the multiple valences of our field.

The Repossession of the Interpersonal Tradition: On Holding Close Our Transdisciplinary Roots

Close examination of the history of the concept of participant-observation reveals an interdisciplinary lineage that takes us back to 19th-century anthropologists. The result is a legacy of interdisciplinary roots with complex entanglements that underscore the theoretical importance of the interpersonal tradition in contemporary practice today.

Social Work and Family Therapy: Interdisciplinary Roots of Family Intervention

Social work practice takes place between persons in families and other social institutions, such as schools, health systems, welfare systems or courts. Drawing from multi-disciplinary theoretical sources, the article brings together social work and family therapy to develop a contemporary model of social work practice with families. There are five generic principles of family systemic practice: 1) persons are inherently relational; 2) families have resilient strengths; 3) family life cycles proceed systemically generating relational tasks for family members; 4) repetitive family interaction generates relational structures; 5) cultures, as perceived by family members, are themselves in dynamic motion, necessitating a transcultural understanding of family interaction.

The Discipline of Family Science and the Continuing Need for Innovation

The discipline of family science is entering a new phase, the evaluation and innovation stage. With shrinking academic budgets and threats of departmental dissolution or mergers, it is imperative for administrators of family science programs to be able to articulate the distinctiveness of the discipline, the worth of the unique skills and perspectives afforded by family science programs, the challenges affecting the field, and the solutions and resources necessary to propel family science to new levels of relevance and application. This article reviews the history of the development of the field of family science and then reports survey results from representatives of family science programs related to each of these matters. Innovative strategies for advancing the field and family science programs are discussed.

Grounding Meaning in Everyday Experience in the World: An Embodied Construction Grammar Analysis of Italian Caused-Motion Constructions

At a very general level, the present thesis may probably be better characterized as a two-folded enterprise: on the one hand, it is concerned with theoretical issues on the nature of language and cognition; on the other hand, its main goal is to carry out an empirical investigation of a circumscribed and clearly defined phenomenon in a specific language. With regard to the former, the starting point of the present study can be found in the conception of language as a cognitive function. Although mainstream paradigms in the fields of language and cognitive science tend to view language as an autonomous, innate faculty governed by domain-specific cognitive principles, we shall follow proponents of Embodied Cognition and Cognitive Linguistics and adopt the opposite starting point, according to which language is an emergent system shaped by the constant interplay of domain-general cognitive principles and embodied experience in the physical as well as sociocultural environment. The more concrete goal of this piece of work is to illustrate an analysis of a class of (rather prototypical) Italian caused-motion constructions: we shall be investigating a small sample of homogeneous utterances to provide a characterization of the various constructions (i.e. form-meaning pairings which can vary in size and level of concreteness) they instantiate and the way these contribute to the overall meaning of the expressions, allowing the language understander to grasp the semantic content of a message correctly. This goal will be pursued adopting the Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG) model, a computational formalism developed within the Neural Theory of Language paradigm, which stands on notions inherited from theories linking language to cognition and, ultimately, the latter to the bodily and experiential nature of the organism continuously interacting with the world. This model, applied to Italian data for the first time, possesses formal structures which allow the analyst to develop computational grammars adequate to investigate linguistic phenomena at different levels, examining both their formal and semantic properties, in order to capture the mechanisms whereby the interaction between the lexical units and the syntactic patterns instantiated in an utterance drives the understander to grasp the correct meaning of the message being conveyed. Overall, the application of the ECG approach to the Italian data analyzed in our case-study proves successful: the formalism can be easily extended to account for Italian data without requiring any substantial change, but just a few minor modifications. More generally, we can reasonably conclude that, due to its interdisciplinary roots which allow the model to include converging information from several different scientific disciplines, ECG proves suitable to exploit (and, possibly, elaborate) a number of notions inherited from the fields of Embodied Cognition and Cognitive Linguistics, endowing them with a rigorous computational dimension by means of its formalism. One of the main reasons of this model's effectiveness rests on its capability to satisfy two requirements which are often difficult to reconcile: flexibility and precision. Being extremely flexible, the formalism adopted in the analysis of our data can be adapted to a number of different situations, favoring the construction of computational grammars adequate to carry out the analysis of a several distinct phenomena in various different languages. At the same time, the level of precision of the ECG formalism allows us to develop rigorous grammars suitable to carry out consistent and plausible analysis of linguistic phenomena, also permitting to test their level of efficiency in real time.

1707, 2007, AND THE UNIONIST TURN IN SCOTTISH HISTORY

ABSTRACTThis article reviews the latest research on the making of the Anglo-Scottish parliamentary union of 1707 and unionism in modern Scotland. Stimulated by the tercentenary of the union, but running counter to the popular mood at the time of that anniversary, many of the recent publications exhibit a novel and sympathetic interest in principled support for union. Using Christopher Whatley'sThe Scots and the union(2006) and Colin Kidd'sUnion and unionisms(2008) as starting points, the article shows how the new histories differ from earlier work, while also identifying the interdisciplinary roots of the ‘unionist turn’ in Scottish history.