Interdisciplinary Workshops - What is IDR and Why do it? (First date)

The University of Birmingham considers interdisciplinary research to be of critical importance, and breaking down the barriers is one of the University's strategic priorities.  Drawing both on recent research into interdisciplinary working undertaken at the University, and on the wider body of international scholarship, this year, the Institute for Global Innovation and the Institute for Advances Studies (IGI-IAS), led by Professor Dominique Moran, are running a series of Interdisciplinary Research Workshops focused on addressing these barriers. 

This workshop is all about the benefits of interdisciplinary research and an exploration of the characteristics of Inter/Multi/Cross/Trans-disciplinary research.  It is designed for people who have not yet undertaken a significant amount of interdisciplinary work, but who are curious about doing it, or about doing more. It covers the relationship between challenge-led research and interdisciplinarity, considers when an interdisciplinary approach might be advantageous, and also discusses the commonly-encountered barriers to IDR – which are then covered in more depth in later workshops.

Although we use ‘interdisciplinary’ as a shorthand here, there are considered to be (at least) four types of research collaboration between disciplines. We will discuss the characteristics of these ‘types’, considering their comparative advantages and drawbacks, with a view to enabling participants to best characterise the work they (intend to) do, and to more effectively design and deliver their collaborative projects.

Other topics to be coveredin the series:

• Funding Interdisciplinary Research
• Building Interdisciplianry Teams
• Dialogue in the interdisciplinary research process and publishing interdisciplinary research
• Interdisciplinary research and career development