Interdisciplinary Research Manual - Units.muohio.edu

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Thesis and Argument Presentations
Your thesis is your “take” on the overall problem or issue or question of the
project. You probably started last semester with a topic area that you hopefully narrowed
down to a problem, issue, or question that is now the focus of your project. You can have
a thesis on a topic only if you problematize it—if you address an issue (i.e., a question
with more than side) related to that topic. Lay out in your presentation not so much the
topics you will cover but the line of argument that links them together. Reveal not what
the argument flows through, but the argument itself. Point B follows Point A because…
If you have trouble identifying your line of argument and you have an outline, especially
if it’s a fairly detailed outline, ask yourself what the rationale is for that sequence of
topics. What was the line of reasoning that led you to put them in those categories and
place the categories in that sequence and not some other sequence?
State your thesis in every day language, removing all jargon. Otherwise, your
understanding of the issue or problem will be unduly influenced by the discipline through
which the jargon was developed. As you write individual chapters, feel free to show how
that discipline or interdiscipline restates the issue or problem in more technical terms. But
when you do so, you should be clear about how the generic problem or issue has been
narrowed or focused in the process. If you cannot state it in jargon-free language or if you
are doing no more than translating jargon into everyday language, then you should ask
yourself if you really have an interdisciplinary project (or if your project is dominated by
the discipline in which the jargon was developed).
Keep in mind that you should treat your thesis as a hypothesis and its supporting
argument as preliminary. As you research for each chapter, it is terribly important to be
open to information that challenges them. You need some sort of thesis to guide your
research and you need a line of argument to determine what to include and what to
exclude. But your emotional investment needs to be in understanding the problem in its
full complexity, not in a particular solution to it—in understanding the issue not in a
particular position on that issue. If your hypothesis is fully supported by the data, then
you can feel vindicated, and it will be relatively easy to revise the complete rough draft
because you won’t need to reconceptualize the project. But if you find evidence that
challenges your hypothesis, you should feel excited: you are on your way to a novel way
of thinking about the problem and the prospect of a genuine contribution to the literature.
As you attempt to construct an interdisciplinary argument about the phenomenon
that is the focus of your project, you are likely to encounter a variety of disciplinary
explanations of it. For a project examining the up-turn in the diagnosis of attention
deficit/hyperactive disorder, you will find at least half a dozen candidates for the
precipitating factor: drug companies wishing to sell a new drug, psychiatrists wishing to
supplant clinical psychologists, educators seeking ways to control disruptive classroom
behavior so they can respond to reduced funding by ‘doing more with less’, a change in
the cultural construction of childhood, a change in the demands placed on children in an
increasingly competitive society, or parents who feel they both need to work to meet their
target lifestyle and thus who have less time to devote to children with problematic
behavior. Your challenge as an interdisciplinarian is not to select one and reject the rest,
but to array them in a way that makes sense. Do some logically precede others, so that
one is an initiating cause while others are intervening or intermediary causes; i.e., is there
a logical chain of causation? Do they operate on different levels, such that the same cause