Undisciplining Knowledge

Undisciplining Knowledge PDF Author: Harvey J. Graff
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421417464
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
The first critical history of interdisciplinary efforts and movements in the modern university. Interdisciplinarity—or the interrelationships among distinct fields, disciplines, or branches of knowledge in pursuit of new answers to pressing problems—is one of the most contested topics in higher education today. Some see it as a way to break down the silos of academic departments and foster creative interchange, while others view it as a destructive force that will diminish academic quality and destroy the university as we know it. In Undisciplining Knowledge, acclaimed scholar Harvey J. Graff presents readers with the first comparative and critical history of interdisciplinary initiatives in the modern university. Arranged chronologically, the book tells the engaging story of how various academic fields both embraced and fought off efforts to share knowledge with other scholars. It is a story of myths, exaggerations, and misunderstandings, on all sides. Touching on a wide variety of disciplines—including genetic biology, sociology, the humanities, communications, social relations, operations research, cognitive science, materials science, nanotechnology, cultural studies, literacy studies, and biosciences—the book examines the ideals, theories, and practices of interdisciplinarity through comparative case studies. Graff interweaves this narrative with a social, institutional, and intellectual history of interdisciplinary efforts over the 140 years of the modern university, focusing on both its implementation and evolution while exploring substantial differences in definitions, goals, institutional locations, and modes of organization across different areas of focus. Scholars across the disciplines, specialists in higher education, administrators, and interested readers will find the book’s multiple perspectives and practical advice on building and operating—and avoiding fallacies and errors—in interdisciplinary research and education invaluable.

Undisciplining Knowledge

Undisciplining Knowledge PDF Author: Harvey J. Graff
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421417464
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first critical history of interdisciplinary efforts and movements in the modern university. Interdisciplinarity—or the interrelationships among distinct fields, disciplines, or branches of knowledge in pursuit of new answers to pressing problems—is one of the most contested topics in higher education today. Some see it as a way to break down the silos of academic departments and foster creative interchange, while others view it as a destructive force that will diminish academic quality and destroy the university as we know it. In Undisciplining Knowledge, acclaimed scholar Harvey J. Graff presents readers with the first comparative and critical history of interdisciplinary initiatives in the modern university. Arranged chronologically, the book tells the engaging story of how various academic fields both embraced and fought off efforts to share knowledge with other scholars. It is a story of myths, exaggerations, and misunderstandings, on all sides. Touching on a wide variety of disciplines—including genetic biology, sociology, the humanities, communications, social relations, operations research, cognitive science, materials science, nanotechnology, cultural studies, literacy studies, and biosciences—the book examines the ideals, theories, and practices of interdisciplinarity through comparative case studies. Graff interweaves this narrative with a social, institutional, and intellectual history of interdisciplinary efforts over the 140 years of the modern university, focusing on both its implementation and evolution while exploring substantial differences in definitions, goals, institutional locations, and modes of organization across different areas of focus. Scholars across the disciplines, specialists in higher education, administrators, and interested readers will find the book’s multiple perspectives and practical advice on building and operating—and avoiding fallacies and errors—in interdisciplinary research and education invaluable.

Rethinking Knowledge within Higher Education

Rethinking Knowledge within Higher Education PDF Author: Jan McArthur
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441120858
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Rethinking Knowledge within Higher Education argues for a higher education that is neither a romantic idyll of learning for its own sake nor an instrumental institution designed to train a willing workforce for the prevailing economic system. Instead, using analysis informed by critical theorist Theodor Adorno, this book argues that higher education should have social and economic roles at its heart, and that these should encompass the needs of all society. The key to achieving this purpose without privilege lies in the ways in which knowledge is understood and engaged with in higher education. Higher education has a special role in society as a place in which complex, contested and dynamic knowledge is engaged with, challenged and created. The realization of this purpose challenges traditional dichotomies between economic and social purposes, liberal and vocational education, and theory and practice. Jan McArthur shows that by interpreting and adapting some of Adorno's most complex ideas, the nature of knowledge and the pursuit of social justice within higher education is feasible and aspirational.

Promoting Interdisciplinarity in Knowledge Generation and Problem Solving

Promoting Interdisciplinarity in Knowledge Generation and Problem Solving PDF Author: Al-Suqri, Mohammed Nasser
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1522538798
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Interdisciplinary research is a method that has become efficient in accelerating scientific discovery. The integration of such processes in problem solving and knowledge generation is a vital part of learning and instruction. Promoting Interdisciplinarity in Knowledge Generation and Problem Solving is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly research on interdisciplinary projects from around the world, highlighting the broad range of circumstances in which this approach can be effectively used to solve problems and generate new knowledge. Featuring coverage on a number of topics and perspectives such as industrial design, ethnographic methods, and methodological pluralism, this publication is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on the promotion of interdisciplinarity for knowledge production.

The Ends of Knowledge

The Ends of Knowledge PDF Author: Rachael Scarborough King
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350242306
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Bringing together an exciting group of knowledge workers, scholars and activists from across fields, this book revisits a foundational question of the Enlightenment: what is “the last or furthest end of knowledge”? It is a book about why we do what we do, and how we might know when we are done. In the reorganization of knowledge that characterized the Enlightenment, disciplines were conceived as having particular “ends,” both in terms of purposes and end-points. As we experience an ongoing shift to the knowledge economy of the Information Age, this collection asks whether we still conceptualize knowledge in this way. Does an individual discipline have both an inherent purpose and a natural endpoint? What do an experiment on a fruit fly, a reading of a poem, and the writing of a line of code have in common? Focusing on areas as diverse as AI; biology; Black studies; literary studies; physics; political activism; and the concept of disciplinarity itself, contributors uncover a life after disciplinarity for subjects that face immediate threats to the structure if not the substance of their contributions. These essays – whether reflective, historical, eulogistic, or polemical – chart a vital and necessary course towards the reorganization of knowledge production as a whole.

The Interlopers

The Interlopers PDF Author: Vera Keller
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142144593X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
A reframing of how scientific knowledge was produced in the early modern world. Many accounts of the scientific revolution portray it as a time when scientists disciplined knowledge by first disciplining their own behavior. According to these views, scientists such as Francis Bacon produced certain knowledge by pacifying their emotions and concentrating on method. In The Interlopers, Vera Keller rejects this emphasis on discipline and instead argues that what distinguished early modernity was a navigation away from restraint and toward the violent blending of knowledge from across society and around the globe. Keller follows early seventeenth-century English "projectors" as they traversed the world, pursuing outrageous entrepreneurial schemes along the way. These interlopers were developing a different culture of knowledge, one that aimed to take advantage of the disorder created by the rise of science and technological advances. They sought to deploy the first submarine in the Indian Ocean, raise silkworms in Virginia, and establish the English slave trade. These projectors developed a culture of extreme risk-taking, uniting global capitalism with martial values of violent conquest. They saw the world as a riskscape of empty spaces, disposable people, and unlimited resources. By analyzing the disasters—as well as a few successes—of the interlopers she studies, Keller offers a new interpretation of the nature of early modern knowledge itself. While many influential accounts of the period characterize European modernity as a disciplining or civilizing process, The Interlopers argues that early modernity instead entailed a great undisciplining that entangled capitalism, colonialism, and science.

New Directions of STEM Research and Learning in the World Ranking Movement

New Directions of STEM Research and Learning in the World Ranking Movement PDF Author: John N. Hawkins
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331998666X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
This volume analyzes the dominance of STEM fields in various university rankings and the reasons why many governments in the world disproportionately give value to STEM fields. Secondly, although there is general agreement that STEM fields are important, chapter authors also examine the role of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches for a revised STEM education as well as implications for the future. The book presents examples from the United States, Canada, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.

Theory and Practice in the Interdisciplinary Production and Reproduction of Scientific Knowledge

Theory and Practice in the Interdisciplinary Production and Reproduction of Scientific Knowledge PDF Author: Olga Pombo
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031204050
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
This book addresses the urgent need for a large and systematic analysis of current interdisciplinary (ID) research and practice. It demonstrates how ID is essentially a cognitive phenomenon, something different from the frivolous and inconsequential attempt of trying to overcome the disciplinary competencies and exigencies. By ID, the authors show that it is a manifestation of the transversal rationality that underlies current scientific activity. It is the very progress of specialized disciplines that requires interdisciplinary new research practices and new forms of articulation between domains, something that has a strong impact on the traditional disciplinary structure of scientific and educational institutions. Divided into two parts, the book presents a conceptual framework as well as several case studies on ID practices. The book aims at covering three main themes. It contributes to the stabilization of ID meaning and characterizes the main ID theorizations which have been proposed until now. It builds an innovative and broad understanding of the several ID determinations as an essentially cognitive phenomenon and of its institutional implications at the level of disciplinary structures and curricular organization. Finally, it distinguishes and maps the diversity of ID procedures and practices which are being used and tested by contemporary scientific and educational institutions. This book is addressed to philosophers, scientists and every one interested in science production and reproduction, including science teaching.

The Synergistic Classroom

The Synergistic Classroom PDF Author: Corey Campion
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978818432
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
Among the many challenges confronting the liberal arts today is a fundamental disconnect between the curricula that many institutions offer and the training that many students need. Discipline-specific models of teaching and learning can underprepare students for the kinds of interdisciplinary collaboration that employers now expect. Although aware of these expectations and the need for change, many small colleges and universities have struggled to translate interdisciplinarity into programs and curricula that better serve today’s students. Written by faculty engaged in the design and delivery of interdisciplinary courses, programs, and experiential learning opportunities in the small college setting, The Synergistic Classroom addresses the many ways faculty can leverage their institutions' small size and openness to pedagogical experimentation to overcome the challenges of limited institutional resources and enrollment concerns and better prepare students for life and work in the twenty-first century. Taken together, the contributions in this volume invite reflection on a variety of important issues that attend the work of small college faculty committed to expanding student learning across disciplinary boundaries.

Undisciplining Dance in Nine Movements and Eight Stumbles

Undisciplining Dance in Nine Movements and Eight Stumbles PDF Author: Carol Brown
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527522385
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
If much of what we teach and come to know from within the disciplinary regime of Dance Studies is founded on a certain kind of mastery, what scope is there to challenge, criticize and undo this knowledge from within the academy, as well as through productive encounters with its margins? This volume contributes to a growing discourse on the potential of dance and dancers to affect change, politics and situational awareness, as well as to traverse disciplinary boundaries. It ‘undisciplines’ academic thinking through its organisation into ‘movements’ and ‘stumbles’, reinforcing its theme through its structure as well as its content, addressing contemporary dance and performance practices and pedagogies from a range of research perspectives and registers. Turbulent and vertiginous events on the world stage necessitate new ways of thinking and acting. This book makes strides towards a new kind of research which creates alternative modes for perceiving, experiencing and making. Through writings and images, its contributions offer different perspectives on how to rethink disciplinarity through choreographic practices, somatics, a reimagining of dance techniques, indigenous ontologies, choreopolitics, critical dance pedagogies and visual performance languages.

Performing Interdisciplinarity

Performing Interdisciplinarity PDF Author: Experience Bryon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317192249
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
Performing Interdisciplinarity proposes new ways of engaging with performance as it crosses, collides with, integrates and/or disturbs other disciplinary concerns. From Activism and Political Philosophy to Cognitive Science and Forensics, each chapter explores the relationships between performance and another discipline. Including cross-chapter discussions which address the intersections between fields, Performing Interdisciplinarity truly examines the making of meaning across disciplinary conventions. This is a volume for performance practitioners and scholars who are living, learning, writing, teaching, making and thinking at the edges of their specialisms.