Interdisciplinary Research Manual - Units.muohio.edu

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the challenges they face differ, depending on the state of scholarly understanding of the
topic. Those topics that the disciplines are just starting to address present you with the
challenge of inventorying and organizing fragments of insights from various scholars to
take away some of their randomness and identify some preliminary patterns, maybe even
developing some theory of your own. Topics that scholars have mulled over for years
present the challenge of reassessing well-established ways of understanding in light of
insights emerging from your new, more comprehensive understanding. Topics early in
the academic lifecycle are likely to start from preliminary, low-level theory at best, and
there may be no agreement in the professional literature on the definitions of terms;
topics later in the lifecycle are more likely to be understood through theory that has taken
on the status of unassailable truth expressed in terms whose definition has become selfevident.
One location in the lifecycle is not preferable to another; the challenges for your
project are merely different. The earlier in the life cycle you encounter the topic, the
sketchier your new understanding will be, and the more it will focus on defining concepts
and developing a new theoretical framework. Later in the life cycle, the more developed
and nuanced your understanding can become, and the more it will focus on modifying
existing concepts and theories. No matter where you are in the life cycle, the essential
challenge to the interdisciplinarian remains the same, to come up with a new way of
thinking that draws on the insights of contributing disciplines.
Fourth, you need to identify the relevant “contexts” for your project. The context
of your topic can take a number of different forms. It might refer to placing social
behavior in economic, political, cultural, geographical, historical context; to placing
chemical phenomena in geological, biological, and evolutionary context; or to placing
theatre in the context of film, art, and music. It might involve placing individual behavior
in the context of family, peer-group, community, nation, race, gender, and culture;
placing phenotypes or species in the context of eco-systems; or placing characters in the
context of comparative literature or other media. It can place the study of a particular
social phenomenon such as raves in the context of other sub-cultures, youth cultures,
countercultures, music scenes, drug scenes, social deviance, or minority groups. In
general, to identify the relevant contexts for your topic, ask what larger categories or
groups it is a part of, an instance of, an example of. Start with those larger categories—
e.g., sub-cultures in general—before trying to apply the concepts and theories,
approaches, questions, underlying values, and strategies you find in the literature to the
particular sub-culture you are interested in. In general, all interdisciplinarians face the
problem of taking something written for one context and applying it to another context.
The difference is one of degree—just how much you need to alter a concept or theory to
fit the new context.
Fifth, size up the likely appeal and mission of your project. Is its appeal to
readers—its distinctive contribution—likely to be intellectual and academic, or emotional
and personal? Is the mission of your project likely to be persuasion or exploration? Your
answers to these questions will obviously depend in part on your intentions, but they will
also be determined by where your topic is in the academic lifecycle and on the contexts in
which you can place it.
Once those five tasks are completed, you are ready to come up with an outline
that lays out a tentative structure for your project. In your outline you need to identify the
overall focus of each chapter and the order of the chapters. Then you need to go back and