CFP - Interdisciplinarity: The New Discipline?

School of Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Glasgow, Crichton Campus, Dumfries, DG1 4ZL

Tuesday 3rd September - Thursday 5th September 2019

Conference Description

The School of Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Glasgow, will mark 20 years of the University of Glasgow's presence at its Dumfries campus with a conference examining interdisciplinarity, its evolving interpretations, histories and uses. Amongst the key themes the conference will consider is the normalisation of interdisciplinarity methods, perspectives and discourses within research and educational contexts. Participants will address the drivers, challenges and opportunities of integrating approaches from different disciplines offered by funding bodies, academic journals and REF panels. Practitioners from teaching and learning are invited to address the processes by which the difficulties and benefits of teaching mixed disciplinary groups, with their own distinctive discourses and regimes of truth, have been negotiated, embraced and/or abandoned.

As well as keynote and plenary sessions, the conference will also have break-out sessions based on examining interdisciplinarity within discipline-specific, specialist and/or niche research and teaching groups. Each of these will feed back via a convenor at a roundtable event during the conference to explore questions to explore what changes have occurred and to what extent has the discourse of interdisciplinarity provided not new approaches to intellectual discovery but a cover for the continuation of existing disciplinary methods.

The types of key points we hope the participants on the specialist sessions will address and the co-ordinator will feedback on are:

• What do you mean by 'interdisciplinarity', how far does it differ or concur with interpretations within your discipline/subject area and how is it manifested? 
• What do different parties view as the strengths and weaknesses of interdisciplinarity as it is practised in your research or in relation to pedagogical approaches and teaching methods? 
• To what extent is interdisciplinarity occurring and how do the demands of attracting funding, achieving publication, meeting REF, managerial and institutional demands shape the forms of interdisciplinarity? 
• How are external pressures shaping interdisciplinarity resisted or transcended? 
• What other factors shape the promotion, marginalisation, configuring and normalisation of interdisciplinarity? 
• How, if at all, has 'interdisciplinarity' changed your discipline/subject area in general and your practice in particular? 
• What might others from outside your discipline/subject area learn from your experience of interdisciplinarity?

Please submit abstracts of 200 words (maximum) proposing paper, presentation or poster by Thursday 4th April 2019 to either: Dr Sandy Whitelaw or Dr Benjamin Franks.