Interdisciplinary Scholarship Research Articles

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.

Social Identities and Intersectionality: A Conversation About the What and the How of Development

Research on the development of social identities in early and middle childhood has largely focused on gender; increasingly, however, theory and research have addressed the development of ethnic/racial, social class, sexual, and immigrant identities. Moreover, it is assumed that individuals’ thinking about and articulating of the intersectionality between their social identities emerge in adolescence and young adulthood, but a growing body of work has shown that minoritized children conceptualize their intersectional identities by middle childhood. This article reviews that work and addresses how interdisciplinary scholarship and quantitative and qualitative methodologies can deepen our understanding of the development of social identities and intersectionality. We take a contextual approach to investigate how relational and cultural contexts contour the socialization of social and intersectional identities. Most of our review focuses on theory and research in the United States; however, because we aim to consider immigrant identity, we also include theory and research on how immigrant families and communities help minoritized children and youth navigate their identities in schools and communities and cope with discrimination.

Cosmic Beavers

In this article, the authors introduce the concept of a “queer counter-mythology.” They do so by discussing a speculative song they wrote as an enactment of research-creation. Research-creation names an interdisciplinary scholarly praxis where artist-scholars create the artefacts they want to think-with, rather than analysing existing cultural productions. The song discussed in this article, “Cosmic Beavers,” proposes a queer counter-mythology that reimagines the historical, colonial archive by foregrounding the stories of giant, trans-dimensional beavers who shred Lewis and Clark and use them to reinforce their Time-Dam. Drawing on this song, as well as queer theories of time and anti-colonial thinkers, the authors suggest that artistic interventions invoke speculative lures that, while not changing history, can complicate state-sanctioned archives and narratives of the past and future: they frame this intervention as a queer counter-mythology.

Modes de connaissance et de devenir : apprendre ensemble dans un cours de cycle supérieur sur l’interdisciplinarité

Developing as a scholar is a critical aspect of graduate school. In this article, we use an autoethnographic approach to explore our experiences in a newly redeveloped interdisciplinary graduate course. The course was designed to emphasize interdisciplinary scholarship and to encourage students’ awareness of their own developing epistemological, ontological, and axiological commitments. In this paper, we identify themes that arose from the final class paper, in which the students/researchers reflected on our development as emerging scholars. Through this course we developed an understanding of the value of interdisciplinarity, the cultural embeddedness of knowledge, and our own responsibilities as researchers in relation to social structures of power and marginalization. Our analyses of our experiences suggests that reflections on our own positionality and axiology are important for developing our identities as emerging scholars and that becoming a scholar may be more about the process than an end goal. We conclude with a discussion of how our learning in this course may be relevant for other instructors and emerging scholars.

From Rejection to Reconciliation: Protestantism and the Image in Early Modern England

AbstractThe idea that Protestantism in post-Reformation England was inherently hostile to the visual arts has a long history and has become embedded across an interdisciplinary scholarship and within popular consciousness. While more recent historiography addresses numerous exceptions to this prevailing trend, this article provides a new assessment of how English Protestantism in a more positive mood not only came to terms with the image but actively embraced it. In identifying patterns of thinking within a wide body of contemporary comment, we offer a chart in the mode of early modern figurative diagrams to emphasize the diverse criteria that Protestants weighed when considering whether an image was suitable for its intended purpose, from the circumstances of its making and using through audience response to location, medium, subject matter, and patron. In doing so, we stress the importance of historicizing the sense of the terms civil and religious use, which do not map neatly onto a modern reading of secular and sacred spaces. We further illustrate how the criteria of the model operated in practice, through detailed analysis of two extant artworks commissioned by committed Protestants, highlighting keen engagement with pictorial art in theory and in practice. The shift in emphasis from rejection to reconciliation captures the spirit of English Protestantism's negotiation and rapprochement with the image over the period ca. 1560–ca. 1640.

Histories with Sound: Using Noise and Music to Teach (and Research) the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

AbstractIn recent years, the history of sound has developed into a rich body of interdisciplinary scholarship. This article explores the benefits of considering sonic evidence alongside a host of other material; teaching and writing histories with—rather than of—sound. In the classroom, this kind of “history with sound” is particularly useful for its ability to cut across lines of scholarly inquiry. This makes sound an especially potent resource when teaching the history of the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. During these years, American society underwent a many-sided process of development difficult to adequately narrativize. The study of sound, with its ability to link numerous trends and dynamics within densely layered events, can help address this issue. Providing insight into the practices and problems of everyday life, such sonic history can reveal the interplay of change and continuity that defined the social experience of the turn-of-the-century United States. Focused on sound in New York, this article provides an overview of the topic’s historiography before examining a series of distinct case studies for classroom use.

Interdisciplinary Collaborations in Academia: Modeling the Roles of Perceived Contextual Norms and Motivation to Collaborate

ABSTRACT In academia, interdisciplinary collaborations allow individuals with different areas of expertise and resources to accomplish shared goals. Nevertheless, because interdisciplinary scholars often have different knowledge areas or methodological training, such collaborations may be less likely to form. In this manuscript, we provide a step toward understanding how interdisciplinary collaborations form within academic contexts. Specifically, we propose a model in which the effect of organizational norms on collaborative outcomes are mediated by departmental norms and motivation, sequentially. To test this model, 197 interdisciplinary faculty members from a large university in the Northeast were surveyed. Overall, the results provide some support for our proposed model, such that if organizations provide structural support and foster an environment that welcomes collaborations, interdisciplinary collaborative relationships will be more likely to form (i.e. faculty members will be increasingly motivated to engage in interdisciplinary research).

Using starling murmuration as a model for creating a global health community of practice to advance equity in scholarship

Background Disparities in scholarship exist between authors in low- or middle-income countries (LMIC) and high-income countries. Recognizing these disparities in our global network providing pediatric, adolescent, and maternal healthcare to vulnerable populations in LMIC, we sought to improve access and provide resources to address educational needs and ultimately impact the broader scholarship disparity. Methods We created a virtual community of practice (CoP) program underpinned by principles from starling murmuration to promote interdisciplinary scholarship. We developed guiding principles- autonomy, mastery and purpose- to direct the Global Health Scholarship Community of Practice Program. Program components included a continuing professional development (CPD) program, an online platform and resource center, a symposium for scholarship showcase, and peer coaching. Results From February 2021 to October 2022, 277 individuals joined. Eighty-seven percent came from LMIC, with 69% from Africa, 6% from South America, and 13% from other LMIC regions. An average of 30 members attended each of the 21 CPD sessions. Thirty-nine authors submitted nine manuscripts for publication. The symposium increased participation of individuals from LMIC and enhanced scholarly skills and capacity. Early outcomes indicate that members learned, shared, and collaborated as scholars using the online platform. Conclusion Sharing of knowledge and collaboration globally are feasible through a virtual CoP and offer a benchmark for future sustainable solutions in healthcare capacity building. We recommend such model and virtual platform to promote healthcare education and mentoring across disciplines.

Contextualising Statelessness: Contingent Citizenship and The Politics of (non)Recognition in Thailand

AbstractThe legal evidentiary approach to “solving” statelessness can sometimes lead to the issue being framed in terms of certain groups of people not meeting objective citizenship criteria or lacking required legal documents. Building on critical interdisciplinary scholarship in anthropology, history and legal studies, this article demonstrates the “constructedness” of citizenship and statelessness through the lens of the politics of recognition and documentation. Using Thailand as a case study, I highlight how global economic, political and social contexts play a significant and dynamic role in delineating the legal line of membership. By tracing how Thai nationality has been instrumentalised by the state throughout the twentieth century, this article contextualises statelessness as a legal and social by-product of statemaking. As such, it challenges the framing of nationality as a non-discriminatory mode of recognition founded in legal objectivity and reiterates the politics of statelessness. In emphasising the fragility of citizenship when granted without genuine social, political and moral recognition, I argue that the objective of statelessness advocacy should not simply be about turning stateless persons into citizens, but rather about creating a more equitable society wherein one's rights are upheld regardless of legal status.

Playing at SLSA: A Game Studies Stream Retrospective

ABSTRACT: This retrospective essay weaves together the reflections of 12 diverse voices on the inclusion of game studies at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) annual meetings. The first game studies stream was organized in 2011 and brought together a series of interdisciplinary scholars, presentations, and panels on video games, virtual worlds, art, storytelling, war, time, platform, and identity. The stream was then and continues now to be a community of graduate students, scholars, developers, teachers, and artists, some of whom have published in Configurations . These are a few of their stories.

Know Justice, Know Peace: Reflections from a community-based, action research collective

This article provides an overview of the community-based, action research project called Know Justice, Know Peace: A Transformation & Justice Community Collective, which took place with six local grassroots justice-oriented organizations in Southern California’s Inland Empire region. Together we explored if, how, and where, wellness, healing and trauma-informed practices and transformative organizing exist in the daily operations and strategic vision of these organizations. Through interviews, focus groups, and healing circles, as well as an 8-month, bi-weekly training program, we identified individual and organizational needs, barriers, and facilitators of actualizing healing, wellbeing, and justice values in daily operation and organizational culture. Overall, the findings of this collective echoed what our review of literature in the field found from a diverse range of interdisciplinary scholars and activists; that to thrive individually and organizationally we must transform the relationships and structures we operate in to actualize values to stay grounded and connected while advancing effective strategies that resist toxic and violent structures and replace them with transformative and sustaining ones. This article summarizes community participants’ internal and organizational struggles as well as the assets they build upon. It explores theoretical frameworks deriving from healing justice, transformative movement organizing, trauma-informed and healing-centered methodologies, and emergent strategy that propose critical analysis and applied tools to advance individual and community wellness and healing as well as restorative organizing models and alternative organizational structures for values alignment in the daily operations of social justice-oriented community organizations. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

‘If there is right food, there is no need for medicine:’ millets, modernity and meaning in Karnataka, India

ABSTRACT The interconnections between food and medicine have long been a subject of interdisciplinary scholarship. Medical anthropologists, sociologists, and historians hold that an analysis of traditional and non-Western societies’ foodways can offer important insights into the social construction of illness and healing strategies. Yet, scholars also note that these linkages between food and medicine are dynamic, made and remade in the context of national liberation struggles, urbanization, and globalization. This article explores the contemporary promulgation of millets as ayurvedic medicine in the south Indian state of Karnataka. Drawing upon data gathered from key informant interviews and focal follows during six months of fieldwork between 2017–2020, it argues that millets are being prescribed as a pathway to an alternative modernity. Millets have become a site in which conceptualizations of authentic foodways and nutritionism are brought together to help reimagine both the definitions, and messy intersections, of food, medicine, illness and wellbeing.

Farm media: An introduction

This essay introduces the first special issue to explore the subject of farm media, which the authors identify as the multiple forms of mediation—representational, infrastructural, and elemental—that reproduce the modern agri-food system. Through this multi-lens framework, media scholars are invited to take the farm seriously as a site of analysis, particularly the recent transformation of agriculture through intensive datafication and its accompanying socio-technical and environmental dimensions. The essay launches these lines of inquiry by reviewing relevant interdisciplinary scholarship, particularly in media studies and critical agrarian studies, and introduces contributor essays exploring the multi-mediation of the farm.

Bibliometric Analysis of Malaysian Authorship: Trends, Patterns, And Prospects

Bibliometric analysis has emerged as a crucial instrument for interdisciplinary scholars who aim to comprehend the complex terrain of scientific knowledge. The current study employed a bibliometric analysis to scrutinise bibliometric publications by Malaysian authors. The bibliometric datasets utilised in this study were collected from the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases. The obtained datasets were subjected to analysis and visualisation through the utilisation of ScientoPy and VOSviewer. The results suggest that Malaysian authors have actively participated in producing bibliometric papers in both Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases. Ahmi A. from Universiti Utara Malaysia and Lim W.M. from the Swinburne University of Technology, Sarawak, have published 27 and 25 works, making them the most prolific authors. The terms “CiteSpace”, “artificial intelligence”, “PRISMA”, “machine learning”, “systematic literature review”, “Biblioshiny”, “Bibliographic coupling”, and “performance analysis” have garnered significant attention in academic circles in 2022. This study presented that India and the United Kingdom exhibit parity in co-author affiliations with Malaysian authors. The most commonly employed author keywords by previous researchers were “bibliometric analysis”, “research evaluation”, “scientometrics”, “citation analysis”, and “co-authorship analysis”. Future research endeavours could concentrate on delving deeper into these subjects and scrutinising novel topics and domains of interest in bibliometric analysis.

The qualitative embedded case study method: Exploring and refining gerontological concepts via qualitative research with older people

This article argues that a tailored version of the qualitative embedded case study method can be used to build strong conceptual and inclusive insights from qualitative research with older people, and, in doing so, advance theoretical scholarship in social and critical gerontology. Gerontology has often been described as “data-rich and theory-poor” (Birren & Bengtson, 1988). It is a field which draws heavily on post-positivist traditions of quantitative research and notions of prediction, generalization, and statistical significance. While critical qualitative approaches have gained ground through interdisciplinary scholarship in the social sciences and humanities, few attempts have been made to articulate the relationship between research questions designed to understand older people's experiences and concept- or theory-building in gerontology. This piece makes a case for engaging with the theoretical/methodological interface by drawing on an evolving approach entitled the qualitative embedded case study, as it was used in three qualitative studies on the concepts of frailty, (im)mobility, and precarity. It suggests this is an evolving approach with the potential to develop conceptually sound, meaningful research from older people's experiences, including diverse, underrepresented, and marginalized groups, and to draw on these insights to direct change.

Analyse the Protection of Human Rights in Informatization Investigation in China

Criminal proceedings are required to be conducted in accordance with the law. The law stipulates that the protection of human rights is one of the basic principles of criminal proceedings. At the same time, the exclusion rules of illegal evidence established after the revision of the criminal procedure law in 2012 pay more attention to the protection of human rights. The concept of information-based investigation can be traced back to the construction of "national public security information project - Golden Shield Project" proposed by the State Council in 1998. Up to now, more than 20 years of changes in the times and the development of investigation means have made information-based investigation an indispensable part of the investigation organ in discovering crime, preventing crime and solving cases. Although the concept of information-based investigation has been put forward for more than 20 years, at present, there is no specific law to authorize the investigation organ to exercise, and the laws and regulations for its implementation and supervision still need to be improved. Especially when some investigation behaviors in information-based investigation will infringe on citizens' personal and privacy rights, the protection of human rights in information-based investigation has to attract the high attention of legal circles and interdisciplinary scholars. This paper will focus on the analysis and suggestions on the regulation of information-based investigation from the perspective of human rights protection in criminal procedure.