Interdisciplinary Discourse: Communicating Across Disciplines

by Seongsook Choi, Keith Richards

This book uncovers exactly what is involved when researchers from different disciplines engage with one another in research projects. The authors identify the opportunities and difficulties involved in interdisciplinary engagement, and challenge current claims about where the greatest difficulties are to be found. The first part of the book introduces interdisciplinarity and identifies key issues that influence our understanding of it. The second part of the book presents the findings of research based on over 50 hours of recording and nearly 450,000 words of transcript drawn from a number of university faculties, concluding with a discussion of how this might inform interdisciplinary practice. The book is accessible to the non-specialist reader while also being of interest to social scientists working in professional and academic communication.

311 pages, Hardcover

Published April 10, 2017

Reviews

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a surprising and welcome book. Interdisciplinary discourse offers innovative definitional work, probing the meanings and interpretations of interdisciplinarity. This research is conducted historically, epistemologically, methodologically, and politically.

But what makes the book so unusual is that Choi and Richards then take the show on the road. They conduct a careful - unbelievably granular - analysis of communication events between scholars, to understand how interdisciplinarity is deployed and negotiated in and through research.

A fascinating book. My only critique is that greater connectivity between the robust definitional discussions and the applications of interdisciplinarity by researchers would have been useful.