Interdisciplinary Scholarship Research Articles

Bibliometric Analysis of Islamic Crowdfunding: A Literature Review of Its Journey

Background The potential of Islamic crowdfunding to encourage the development of Islamic fintech globally, even in countries with non-Muslim majority populations, needs to be examined in a literature study on this issue. More extensive research is needed regarding the factors that most reliably predict the success of Islamic crowdfunding, such as compliance with Islamic crowdfunding laws, sustainability, and the potential of Islamic finance. This article describes a comprehensive and systematic Literature Review (SLR) regarding papers published in the field of Islamic crowdfunding. This research aims to contribute to a better understanding of Islamic crowdfunding, provide useful information for practitioners, and stimulate further research in the field to increase the success of Islamic crowdfunding. Methods We conducted a review of selected papers to identify gaps and significant issues in Islamic crowdfunding, providing guidance for future researchers. This article review was based on 704 articles retrieved using the keyword “Islamic crowdfunding” from the Scopus database between 2013 and 2022. To minimize bias, we formulated 5 research questions to guide our analysis: RQ1: How do publication and citation rates vary annually? RQ2: How can we determine the most influential studies based on citation counts for each keyword? RQ3: What are the most common subject areas addressed in Islamic crowdfunding literature from 2013 to 2022? RQ4: What are the most frequently used keywords in Scopus documents? RQ5: How are Islamic values discussed in articles related to Islamic crowdfunding? Results The findings of this research demonstrate that Islamic crowdfunding, characterized by interdisciplinary scholarship, has emerged as an increasingly significant alternative for aiding society and the economy. It contributes to poverty alleviation and the development of specific sectors through channels such as crowdfunding for small and medium enterprises and social projects tailored to meet the diverse needs of Muslims. However, the challenge facing the future development of Sharia crowdfunding is that, despite its benefit of increasing community participation in projects aligned with religious values, it also carries the potential risk of investment losses and non-compliance with Sharia principles. Ways to address the current scarcity of Sharia fintech are also needed, ensuring its broader acceptance across all societal levels, and enhancing Muslims’ understanding of compliance with Islamic religious rules, particularly Fiqh law. Conclusion Urgently needed are specific fiqh regulatory guidelines to ensure that Sharia-compliant crowdfunding adheres to Islamic principles. Government support, particularly through legislation in countries where the majority of the population is Muslim, is crucial to enhance public participation and trust in Sharia crowdfunding.

Digital multimodal composing in L2 classrooms: A research agenda

Abstract Research on digital multimodal composing (DMC) in second language (L2) classrooms has proliferated considerably in recent years, to a large extent in response to the changing digital and multimodal communication landscape. This article offers a research agenda on DMC in L2 classrooms. We begin with a theoretically oriented overview of DMC scholarship. We then examine seven research themes for future research inquiry, from which we draw seven research tasks. The seven themes are: (1) the effectiveness of DMC for L2 writing development; (2) DMC task design; (3) L2 teacher education/training for implementing DMC; (4) feedback practice for DMC; (5) DMC assessment; (6) collaborative DMC as a translanguaging space; and (7) the deployment of DMC for critical digital literacies. Throughout the article, we refer to interdisciplinary scholarship and methods from multimodality, L2 writing, composition studies, new literacy studies, language teacher education, and computer-assisted language learning. The seven research tasks represent what we see as the essential next steps for understanding DMC, which is a young domain that has great potential to advance L2 language and literacy education in the digital age.

Collaborative Ethnography and Matters of Care in Counterspaces

This paper offers a reflexive analysis of an interdisciplinary and cross-race collaboration to advance equity in engineering called LATTICE (Launching Academics on the Tenure-Track: an Intentional Community in Engineering). We engage two bodies of scholarship—matters of care in feminist science and technology studies (STS) and critical race theory on counterspaces—to theorize on the data infrastructure and narrative practices that we developed when applying critical methodologies to collective action in technoscience. We discuss how our care practices conflicted with traditional ethnographic practices and thus, inspired us to innovate on methods. These methods—member-checking and polyvocal memo-ing—make transgressing the boundaries of LATTICE counterspaces for public dissemination possible by invoking caring as praxis. We conclude that using these methods to discuss the contradictions and challenges in STS collaborations is an opportunity for advancing mutual intelligibility among interdisciplinary scholars and a politics of knowledge production grounded in values of care and friendship that may contribute to equity and justice in technoscience.

Building CapaCITY/É for sustainable transportation: protocol for an implementation science research program in healthy cities

IntroductionImproving sustainable transportation options will help cities tackle growing challenges related to population health, congestion, climate change and inequity. Interventions supporting active transportation face many practical and political hurdles. Implementation...

Theorising Support for Interdisciplinary Early-Career Researchers Using Communicative Genre and 'Rules of the Game'.

Qualitative social scientists working in medical faculties have to meet multiple expectations. On the one hand, they are expected to comply with the philosophical and theoretical expectations of the social sciences. On the other hand, they may also be expected to produce publications which align with biomedical definitions and framings of quality. As interdisciplinary scholars, they must handle (at least) two sets of journal editors, peer reviewers, grant-awarding panels, and conference audiences. In this paper, we extend the current knowledge base on the 'dual expectations' challenge by drawing on Orlikowski and Yates' theoretical concept of communicative genres. A 'genre' in this context is a format of communication (e.g. letter, email, academic paper, and conference presentation) aimed at a particular audience, having a particular material form and socio-linguistic style, and governed by both formal requirements and unwritten social rules. Becoming a member of any community of practice involves becoming familiar with its accepted communicative genres and adept in using them. Academic writing, for example, is a craft that is learned through participation in the social process of communicating one's ideas to one's peers in journal articles and other formats. In this reflective paper, we show how the concept of a communicative genre can sensitise us to the conflicting and often dissonant expectations and rule systems governing different academic fields. We use this key concept to suggest ways in which the faculty can support early-career researchers to progress in careers which straddle qualitative social science and medical science.

Conceptualising Sustainability as the Pursuit of Life

AbstractComplex and urgent challenges including climate change and the significant decline in biodiversity provide a broad agenda for interdisciplinary scholars interested in the implications facing businesses, humanity, and other species. Within this context of sustainability, persistent conflicts between key paradigms create substantial barriers against—but also opportunities for—developing new conceptual approaches and theoretical models to understand and respond to these critical issues. Here, I revisit paradigmatic tensions to assess their impact on research and debate on sustainability, ethics, and business. Drawing on relational ontology and values of nature that recognise humanity’s tight embeddedness within the planetary ecosystem, I examine how conceptualising sustainability as the pursuit of life might generate new insights for research and practice into the wider transformation needed to sustain and restore socioecological systems. The aim here, however, is not to reconcile these paradigmatic tensions but instead use them as a fruitful lens for examining the implications for sustainability, while acknowledging the inherent ethical dilemmas for individuals, organisations, and society.

The ‘Datafication’ of Borders in Global Context: The Role of the International Organization for Migration

ABSTRACT This article examines the transnational politics of datafication in migration management through a case study of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Datafication, such as the automation of border processes, the use of biometrics and the deployment of large-scale statistical techniques, is increasingly central to the management of migration. Much of the current focus on these processes for migration management is focused on state-level policies or on supranational institutions such as the EU. There is relatively little work on the role of international organisations in this area, despite their well-researched role in setting formal standards and informal expectations around migration and mobility. The article’s first main argument is that focusing on the global level of governance yields new insights on the promotion and diffusion of data-intensive practices of migration management. The second argument is that the emerging global context of datafication around border management fits into a broader managerial agenda in which international organisations seize agenda-setting power and act as transmission mechanisms for datafication projects and ideas. The third portion of the argument is that the IOM’s projects in this area reinforce its role as a service provider and consolidate its emerging role as an orchestrator of data-driven approaches to migration governance. The article thus contributes to ongoing work on the IOM’s shifting identity as well as interdisciplinary scholarship on the role of data in migration management.

Keystones for conservation: Diversity, Wellbeing, Coexistence

The field of conservation has a history of divisive debates over what exactly its purview covers, how to carry out its mission, and whose perspectives matter. With the world facing a host of interconnected socioecological crises, the conservation community needs a pluralistic framework within which varied ideologies and identities can work together toward more equitable and effective outcomes. Here, we propose three keystone concepts to help integrate and guide the complex conservation ecosystem, drawing upon growing interdisciplinary scholarship and diverse worldviews to expand concept meanings. The first keystone, diversity, supports a more holistic understanding of diversity as inclusive of intersecting human and nonhuman axes (e.g., race/ethnicity, species, ways of knowing) across scales. The second keystone, wellbeing, contests zero-sum thinking to promote multispecies interests across geographical space and generational time. The third keystone, coexistence, furthers recent momentum to expand our understanding of more-than-human communities and socioecological interactions. We explore the merits of applying these keystones across conventional dichotomies (e.g., human and nonhuman, individuals and collectives) to dismantle oppressive systems and reshape conservation norms. All three keystones apply to both conservation's external impacts and internal workings. This framework is not meant as a singular or static solution, but rather seeks to elucidate shared foci that can be built upon over time. Overall, we hope these keystones help conservation aim not solely for a survivable future, but for a thriving one.

On the blood of others: re-visiting how “health” happens in interdisciplinary scholarship

ABSTRACT In much interdisciplinary scholarship, when health and well-being are conceptualized, they are often contextualized in white supremacist, racist, and capitalist frames. To reframe scholarship towards more useful possibilities, we first must confront the historical and ongoing violence brought forth by our reliance on notions of health that often come directly from colonization and slavery and have failed to provide possibilities of health for racialized folks. If capitalism can be described as ‘labour on the backs of Others’, then health is founded on the blood of Others – particularly, those who were enslaved. In naming the socio-historical legacies and their current manifestations, we name some of the interconnected oppressions that we must dismantle in our everyday work as we engage with racialized communities. Our work requires us to politicize the role of health and healing as a crucial component of the better world we are building.

Education and socio-environmental justice in the pluriverse: decolonial perspectives

ABSTRACT A growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship underscores the imperative to explore and advance pluriversal education – an educational approach that embraces the diversity of ways of being, knowing, and acting, rooted in historical contexts and ecological interconnectedness. Central to this exploration is a pressing need to consider education as a means of promoting epistemic pluralism within spaces of settler colonialism. By contesting a westernized geopolitics of knowledge, a pluriversal education advocates for the revalorization of subaltern knowledges, Indigenous cosmovisions, activism, and socio-environmental justice grounded in human, cultural, and land rights. The paper first debates on fundamental divergences between the concept of pluriversal education, based on principles of decolonial interculturality, and the principles of global sustainable education announced by international mainstream institutions. Then, it refers to concrete experimentations of activism in pluriversal education in various locations illustrated by the contributions of the special issue.

A replication and extension of the prosocial effect of online social interactions among Chinese and American emerging adults

ABSTRACT The recent global crisis has had a profound and widespread impact on humanity, eliciting a heightened appreciation for the importance of prosociality. In response, interdisciplinary scholars have called for further research to investigate strategies for cultivating kindness, generosity, and cooperation. To answer this call, we conducted a study examining the potential prosocial impact of online social interactions (OSIs) in two distinct cultures. Through a survey of 644 emerging adults from China and the United States, we found that OSIs positively led to prosocial tendencies in both samples, with social connectedness and trust serving as significant mediating factors. Nevertheless, among the American sample, trust can serve as the sole mediator linking OSIs and prosocial tendencies. Conversely, among the Chinese sample, the development of prosociality stemming from OSIs requires the intervening facilitation of social connectedness. This divergence may speak to cultural research regarding the essential role of interpersonal relationships in fostering trust and prosociality in collectivist societies. This study contributes to prosociality scholarship by highlighting the role of OSIs as a crucial enhancer across two distinct cultures, clarifying the underlying mechanisms, and identifying cultural differences in the process of prosocial development. The results have implications for both prosocial theory and practice.

Interdisciplinary perspectives on digital technologies for global mental health.

Digital Mental Health Technologies (DMHTs) have the potential to close treatment gaps in settings where mental healthcare is scarce or even inaccessible. For this, DMHTs need to be affordable, evidence-based, justice-oriented, user-friendly, and embedded in a functioning digital infrastructure. This viewpoint discusses areas crucial for future developments of DMHTs. Drawing back on interdisciplinary scholarship, questions of health equity, consumer-, patient- and developer-oriented legislation, and requirements for successful implementation of technologies across the globe are discussed. Economic considerations and policy implications complement these aspects. We discuss the need for cultural adaptation specific to the context of use and point to several benefits as well as pitfalls of DMHTs for research and healthcare provision. Nonetheless, to circumvent technology-driven solutionism, the development and implementation of DMHTs require a holistic, multi-sectoral, and participatory approach.

The making of critical data center studies

In this article, the authors demonstrate how the data center has become a key site, object, and metaphor for interdisciplinary scholarship of the internet. While the data center is a fabrication of engineering, computer science, and cognate fields, it has been the critical gaze of scholars outside of those industries. Together, this scholarship has established the field of Critical Data Center Studies. Critiques of the data center – often thought of more generally as ‘internet infrastructure’, and more evocatively as ‘the cloud’ – have emerged from the social sciences, humanities, journalism, and the arts. The authors do this by answering questions about the current social, cultural, political, and environmental landscapes of the data center. Scrutiny of the foundational imaginaries of the internet, real estate deals by Big Tech, the industry’s enabling policies, their connections to energy and other public infrastructure – among many other factors – serves, at the very least, to situate the data center as a media object, as more than simply a material infrastructure, as more than data warehouse, and as more than ‘the cloud’. Further to this, the authors reflect on how the data center has been and continues to be studied, and why critical interventions have been so fruitful within a vast array of disciplines – from history and anthropology, to media studies, information studies, and science & technology studies – for shifting the focus from questions of infrastructural visibility to questions that weave together concerns of efficiency, policy, popular culture, and planetary devastation.

Heroes as Harbingers of Social Change: Gender, Race, and Hero Choice in the USA and Britain

AbstractAcknowledging the importance of heroes in the framing of political identities and building on the expanding interdisciplinary scholarship, this paper offers a novel approach by situating the analysis of public choices of heroes within debates on social change, and, specifically, inclusion and diversity politics. Utilising an original dataset of two individual-level, nationally representative surveys of British and US adults, we demonstrate that the landscape of popular heroism in both countries is shaped by limited acceptance of traditionally under-represented groups such as women and ethnic minorities. Using rigorous testing and regression analysis, we highlight the endurance of a white male hero whose dominance is only challenged through preferences for same-sex and same-race/ethnicity hero-figures, with both trends signposting the symbolic boundaries of embracing the difference. Overall, this paper highlights a critical role of popular heroes in advancing inclusion and diversity agendas and urges for further empirical research on the socio-political functions, and gender, race-specific drivers of heroism.

Mobilising language, gender and sexuality studies

This introduction frames the special issue ‘Mobilising Language, Gender and Sexuality Studies’, situating the contributions in relation to interdisciplinary scholarship on migration, gender, sexuality and language. In particular, this introduction draws attention to Global South theorisations of migration as resistance, suggesting that scholars of language, gender and sexuality can build on such approaches to trace forms of agency that otherwise might go unnoticed. The contributions to this special issue investigate how gender and language circulate in dominant migration discourses and are contested by mobile communities, linking normative ideologies to individual bodies and lives through the use of stereotyped figures. The introduction also highlights how themes of time, place and nation weave through the contributions and calls for a scalar approach that resists the widespread downscaling of migrants’ own discursive acts. It concludes with a call to action that urges scholars to consider how they might support the ways in which mobile communities are making sense of and taking action in the world.

Mapping ‘metabolism’ in Marx’s Capital

This philological study investigates the German term Stoffwechsel, commonly translated as ‘metabolism,’ a concept central to biological processes in organisms. Originating from the natural sciences, Stoffwechsel is adopted, appropriated, and allegorized in Marx's Capital Volume 1, where it plays a key role in his critique of capitalism. The study adopts a dual analytical approach that mirrors the two metabolic processes: catabolism and anabolism. The catabolic phase traces the term's historical and linguistic origins, charting its incorporation into Marx's lexicon. The anabolic phase explores how Marx transforms Stoffwechsel and assesses the term’s philosophical and political implications within his ecological critique of capitalism. By drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship from political economy, linguistic philology, intellectual history, and the history of science, this study the pivotal role and evolving meaning of Stoffwechsel within Marx's critique of the economy, offering a comprehensive account of its significance in the Marxist canon.

Charting the future: Twentieth-anniversary issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents

ABSTRACT The Introduction to the special issue “Charting the Future: Twentieth-anniversary issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents” traces the first two decades of the journal’s publication. A survey of essays serves to exemplify its methodological and theoretical perspectives that embody fundamental questions moving beyond the historical paradigm of Atlantic Studies to explore, for example, images and paintings, cultural theory, the novel and poetry, and the narratives and iconography of popular culture. Its title reflects the recognition that all the world’s oceanic flows and currents feed into and out of the Atlantic world, as do the varied transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship published by the journal.

Confusion, Chaos, and Conflict in U.S. Law and Health Care after Dobbs

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision caused a proliferation of contradictory state laws and judicial decisions that are producing confusion for health care providers, which in turn limits access to care for all patients of reproductive age. This paper documents the rapidly changing legal landscape to investigate and contextualize the significance of these inter‑state conflicts and illustrate how inequities deepen when health care is left in the hands of state governments without national law to provide guardrails. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, including legal, medical, and public health research, this essay considers how traditional federalism theory, which encourages sub‑government variation, does not provide clear solutions to state law barriers to inter-state cooperation within a federal union, which has been essential to regulating health care in the U.S.

Applied corpus linguistics and legal interpretation: A rapidly developing field of interdisciplinary scholarship

This article offers an overview of developments in a newly emerging interdisciplinary research field: legal corpus linguistics. The field brings together corpus research and legal theory by applying corpus-analytic techniques and linguistic concepts to facilitate the interpretation of legal texts. Despite the field's short history, it has already contributed important new insights into the meaning of statutory texts and parts of the U.S. Constitution, insights that may have significant practical implications for the American legal system. Our article provides an overview of relevant developments in legal corpus linguistics, from early success stories to recent and ongoing collaborative work between corpus linguists and legal scholars. It aims to highlight the benefits and illustrate the potential of this type of interdisciplinary work by summarizing three recent case studies, each of which deals with an important topic in American constitutional law. The case studies focus in turn on the following parts of the U.S. Constitution: (1) Article III and the meaning of “cases,” (2) the Appointments Provision in Article II, Section 2 and the meaning of “such inferior officers,” and (3) the Impeachment Provision in Article II, Section 4 and the meaning of “misdemeanors.” All three case studies use corpus analysis to explore phraseological patterns in large collections of Founding Era texts to provide insights into the meanings of the selected words and phrases in context during the time the Constitution was drafted and ratified. The article discusses the practical relevance of results from these case studies and potential implications of this and related work in legal corpus linguistics for contemporary and future litigation.

Class Conflict and Spatial Domination in the Neoliberal City

Abstract This article analyzes spatial domination in middle-classed spaces—the spaces that cater to the dispositions, status, and lifestyle ideals of middle-class groups—of the neoliberal city. Grounded in interdisciplinary scholarship on the neoliberal city, the article introduces a typology of middle-classed spaces, which maps out different combinations of cross-class hostility and cordiality in dynamics of spatial domination. Through an extended case study of a new upscale neighborhood bordering a slum area in a southern Brazilian city, the article unveils the socio-historic conditions that inform the localized cross-class relations and situate it in the spatial typology. With the support of a semiotic square, the article then identifies, relates, and analyzes the hostile (“takeover” and “repression”) and cordial (“makeover” and “concession”) spatial practices by which dominant agents produce one specific type of middle-classed space. Through these practices, dominant agents improve the status, experience, and market value of the neighborhood for target upper-middle-class consumers, while further disenfranchising the poor from its spaces—effectively reproducing deep-rooted historical patterns of social exclusion. This study extends research on status consumption and spatiality while also adding insights into the role of the state in consumption and market dynamics.