Interdisciplinary research

This article discusses the ‘lessons learned’ from an attempt to establish an interdisciplinary education research group. The growth, development and dissolution of the group are treated as an instrumental case study. Current literature on interdisciplinary collaboration is synthesized in order to provide a frame for analysis. Data was collected over several years and included three rounds of written participant reflections and documentation of group activities and meetings. Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress. Based on these themes, a number of ‘lessons learned’ are discussed which will likely be of great interest to those considering similar interdisciplinary initiatives.

Inscribing Environmental Memory in the Icelandic Sagas (IEM) is a major interdisciplinary research initiative examining environmental memory in the medieval Icelandic sagas. The initiative brings together teams of historians, literary scholars, archaeologists and geographers, as well as specialists in environmental sciences and medieval studies, to investigate long-term human ecodynamics and environmental change from the period of Iceland’s settlement in the Viking Age (AD 874-930) through the so-called Saga Age of the early and late medieval periods, and well into the long period of steady cooling in the Northern hemisphere popularly known as the Little Ice Age (AD 1350-1850). In her 1994 volume inaugurating the field of historical ecology Carole Crumley argued in favor of a “longitudinal” approach to the study of longue durée human ecodynamics. This approach takes a region as the focus for study and examines changing human-landscape-climate interactions through time in that particular place. IEM involves multiple frames of inquiry that are distinct yet cross-referential. Environmental change in Iceland during the late Iron Age and medieval period is investigated by physical environmental sciences. Just how known processes of environmental change and adaptation may have shaped medieval Icelandic sagas and their socio-environmental preoccupations is of great interest, yet just as interesting are other questions concerning how these sagas may in turn have shaped understandings of the past, cultural foundation narratives, environmental lore, local ecological knowledge etc. Enlisting environmental sciences and humanities scholarship in the common aim of framing and thereby better understanding nature, the IEM initiative excludes nothing as “post- interesting” or “pre-interesting.” Understanding Viking Age first settlement processes informs understanding of 18th century responses to climate change, and 19th century resource use informs understanding of archaeological patterns visible at first settlement a millennium earlier. There is much to gain from looking at pathways (and their divergences) from both ends, and a long millennial scale perspective is one of the key contributions that the study of past “completed experiments in human ecodynamics” can make to attempts to achieve future sustainability. IEM is a case study of the Integrated History and future of People on Earth initiative (IHOPE) led by the international project AIMES (Analysis, Integration and Modeling of the Earth System), a core project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme; the initiative is co-sponsored by PAGES (Past Global Changes) and IHDP (The International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change). This talk brings together two of the main coordinators from IEM’s sponsoring organizations, NIES and NABO, to reflect on the particular challenges, innovations and advances anticipated in this unprecedented undertaking of integrated science and scholarship, a new model for the scientific framing of nature.

""Corruption has become one of the most popular topics in the social scientific disciplines. However, there is a lack of interdisciplinary communication about corruption. Models developed by different
academic disciplines are often isolated from each other. The purpose of this paper is to review several major approaches to corruption and draw them closer to each other. Most studies of corruption fall
into three major categories: (i) rational-actor models where corruption is viewed as resulting from cost/benefit analysis of individual actors; (ii) structural models that focus on external forces that determine corruption; and (iii) relational models that emphasize social interactions and networks among corrupt actors. Focusing on actors’ behavior and the social context, this article explains corruption concepts taken from sociology, economics, organization studies, political science, social anthropology, and social psychology.""

"EXPLORING THE MATHEMATICS IN TEXTILES
Mathematical thinking is any thinking of a quantitative, spacial, or pattern-related nature. Such thinking may be largely tacit in everyday use, and thus may be more pervasive and influential than is commonly appreciated. It is abundantly present in the design and creation of constructed textiles. Mathematical thinking can be broken down into five modes: Spatial thinking in 2D, Spatial thinking in 3D, Arithmetic thinking, Algebraic thinking, Stochastic thinking
Each of these modes can be found in textile construction practices, both traditional and contemporary. In some cases they are consciously applied, but in many other cases the practitioners are using them tacitly. We are inventorying and analysing the mathematical thinking intrinsic to the creation of textiles. The approach is based on combining methods from a variety of practices, including: mathematics research methods, such as generating and classifying cases, induction, deduction, conjecturing, proving, etc.; artistic practices; reflective crafting with a focus on intrinsic mathematical elements, by means of strategies derived from experimental archaeology, reverse engineering, critical making, primary creative practices."

"The Book is in Polish, but chapter summaries and figure captures are given in English - some of them available also at: http://www.fizyka.umk.pl/~przeciu/
The book is accompanied by CD with sound recording of Tuba Dei and other bells.

Contents:

Preface,
by bishop Andrzej Suski

Introduction,
by T. Jaworski, M. Nasieniewski, K. Przegiętka

I. The bells of medieval Toruń,
by Waldemar Rozynkowski

II. Bells in the Town Hall of Toruń,
by Katarzyna Kluczwajd

III. The bells of Chełmno and their importance in the life of the town, by Anna Soborska-Zielińska

IV. Musical aspects of bells,
by Rev. Mariusz Klimek

V. “Vivos voco, mortuos plango, fulgura frango” – an essay on bells, by Marek Grzegorz Zieliński

VI. On old and modern bell founding,
by Bogumiła Felczyńska

VII. The sad fate of Tuba Dei’s companions during the Nazi occupation recalled by the witness of those times,
by Zdzisław Klemp

VIII. The bells of the Old and the New Town of Toruń - their present state of preservation,
by Tomasz Jaworski, Marek Nasieniewski, Krzysztof Przegiętka 


Spis treści

Słowo wstępne,
ks. bp. Andrzej Suski

Wprowadzenie,
T. Jaworski, M. Nasieniewski i K. Przegiętka

I. Dzwony średniowiecznego Torunia,
Waldemar Rozynkowski

II. Dzwony w toruńskim Ratuszu Staromiejskim,
Katarzyna Kluczwajd

III. Dzwony w Chełmnie i ich znaczenie w życiu miasta,
Anna Soborska-Zielińska

IV. Muzyczne aspekty dzwonów,
ks. Mariusz Klimek

V. „Vivos voco, mortuos plango, fulgura frango” - rzecz o dzwonach,
Marek Grzegorz Zieliński

VI. O dawnej i współczesnej sztuce ludwisarskiej,
Bogumiła Felczyńska

VII. Smutne losy towarzyszy Tuba Dei podczas okupacji we wspomnieniach świadka tamtych czasów,
Zdzisław Klemp

VIII. Dzwony Starego i Nowego Miasta Torunia - stan obecny,
Tomasz Jaworski, Marek Nasieniewski, Krzysztof Przegiętka

Dzwony są szczególnym dziełem rąk ludzkich. Zwykle wiszą zamknięte w wieżach, gdzieś wysoko ponad naszymi głowami i poza zasięgiem wzroku. Dzwonnicy TUBA DEI – największego średniowiecznego dzwonu w Polsce, w 500-tną rocznicę jego ulania, zorganizowali w 2000 roku interdyscyplinarną sesję naukową poświęconą także innym starym dzwonom Torunia i Chełmna. Niniejsza publikacja zawiera materiały z tej sesji, a także płytę CD z jedynym nagraniem dźwięku dzwonu Tuba Dei oraz innych opisywanych dzwonów."

During the last Century multiple lines of converging evidence indicated the existence of a dynamic plasmatic energy existing within living organisms and water, and also as a background medium filling the atmosphere and vacuum of space. Experimenters such as Jacque Benveniste (memory of water), Frank Brown (external biological clock mechanism), Harold Burr (electrodynamic fields), Dayton Miller (cosmic ether of space), Bjorn Nordenstrom (bio-electrical circuits), Giorgio Piccardi (physical-chemical fields), Wilhelm Reich (bio-energy) and Viktor Schauberger (living water) independently measured a similar and unique cosmic-biological energy phenomenon. Their experiments frequently indicated water was a carrier for this previously unknown energetic force, which typically showed significant solar-terrestrial and meteorological components. Each of these scientists rested their claims upon experimental proofs, with many independent replications. Their works integrate with astrophysical findings on an interstellar medium, variously termed cosmic plasma, dark matter, or even cosmic ether. These and other natural scientists undertook decades of careful experimental work indicating the presence of a water-affecting cosmic medium, typically being more active at higher altitudes, often tangibly interacting with dielectrical matter and being reflected by metals. All were marginalized or maligned by the scientific orthodoxy of their day. I successfully replicated some of the anomalous biological, physical and meteorological experiments of Reich, among others, and so have been able to ascertain important similarities in their diverse findings. Taken together these studies are suggestive of a major scientific breakthrough, of a unitary cosmic-biological energy phenomenon, ignored or dismissed prematurely during the 20th Century.

This volume on the relationships between decadent literature and anthropology in late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe studies the unnoticed connection between, on the one hand, a purposeless and ephemeral beauty, and, on the other hand, the disinterestedness and the spontaneity ascribed by anthropologists to the ceremonial expenditure of “primitive” civilizations. The book highlights how, in those two apparently opposed discourses, prodigality and uselessness challenge the Western cult of profit by working in two directions: beauty is a form of lavishness, and lavishness is a source of beauty. An innovative theoretical and cultural framework at the crossroads of aesthetics, anthropology, and philosophy allows me to reexamine the works of O. Wilde, G. D’Annunzio, and J.-K. Huysmans, and to claim the crucial role of neglected authors like Paolo Mantegazza and Vernon Lee in what I trace as the emergence of a proto-theorization of gift-exchange in the European fin de siècle culture. The pervasiveness of symbolic economy in those writers establishes a new dynamic relationship between decadence and modernism, and also exposes the limits of the allegedly disinterested forms of expenditure that will soon lure the modernists to go “primitive”.

"Abstract

Communication is fundamental in scientific practice and an integral part of academic work. The practice of communication cannot be neglected by those who are trying to advance scientific research. Effective means should continuously be identified in order to open channels of communication within and among disciplines, among scientists and between scientists and the general public. The increasing importance of interdisciplinary communication has been pointed out by an increasing number of researchers and scholars, as well as in conferences and roundtables on the subject. Some authors even estimate that “interdisciplinary study represents the future of the university.”  Since interdisciplinary study is “the most underthought critical, pedagogical and institutional concept in modern academy”  it is important to think and reflect, and even do some research, on this concept or notion. Research and practice based reflections with regards to this issue are important especially because the increasing complexity and proliferation of scientific research is generating countless specialties, sub-specialties and sub-sub-specialties, with their respective special languages; which were “created for discrete local areas of research based upon the disconnected branches of science.”  On the other hand, scientific, technical and societal problems are requiring multi- or inter-disciplinary consideration. Consequently, interdisciplinary communication channels are being needed with urgency, and scientific research should be integrated, not just in the context of its discipline, but also in the context of related disciplines. Much more reflection and research should be done on this issue. Research on adequate research integration and communication is urgently required, i.e. meta-research efforts should be done in order to relate research results in an adequate and more useful way. This meta-research effort might be done in the context of each particular research, and/or in the more general context of research methodology or philosophy. The purpose of this initial draft is 1) to foster informal conversations and possibly formal research, and 2) to give a very modest first step in this general context, making some reflections on the subject, reviewing some related literature and providing a very initial framework for the generation of more reflections and research on this important subject. We will try to achieve this purpose by means of presenting the most important characteristics of inter-disciplinary communication and contrasting them with intra-disciplinary communication. This essay is a short version of a larger one which will be completed in the future. Consequently, we will present a scheme summarizing the characteristics and the contrasts identified in this version of the essay and those which details are being worked out for an expanded version of this essay to be released in the near future. Our purpose in this first short version is to give a modest step in the direction of exploring the importance and the ways of inter-disciplinary communication, in order to foster more similar steps by other researchers, scholars or practitioners. This is an evolving working essay, where the process of writing it is as much a part of the object as the object, itself.
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