John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

hybridization of cultural categories. She indicates that transdisciplinary
research requires the development of a common conceptual framework and a
common vocabulary among contributors. However, she warns against the
creation of self-imposed borders or the promotion of comprehensive worldviews
which she states risk becoming monolithic projects or closed systems.
Kerne (2006) argues the use of ‘trans’ in relation to disciplinarity is still lacking
a sense of how processes of disciplinary recombination are a formula for
creating new knowledge. Nicolescu (1993) states that use of the prefix ‘trans’
indicates concerns which are at once between the disciplines, across the
different disciplines, and beyond all discipline. Kerne continues to point out the
structures and processes that catalyse this type of integration are still largely
undefined and argues for a structure of metadisciplinarity that connects theory
and practice and creates hybrid forms. Dr. Wendy Russell of the Department of
Biological Sciences at the University of Wollongong states that transdisciplinary
research involves the
“…integration of different bodies of knowledge, the synthesis of new
approaches and techniques of inquiry and the communication of
specialised knowledge across disciplinary boundaries and beyond.”
(Russell, 2000)
Attfield (2000, p.1) goes even further in her study of the material culture of
everyday life stating that to go beyond conventional design studies she takes a
‘post-disciplinary’ approach which allows her to draw upon social history,
anthropology, archaeology, sociology, geography, psychoanalysis and general
cultural studies.
There are obviously a plethora of approaches to research that claim to be across,
beyond, and over disciplinary boundaries. Mansilla and Gardner (2003) have
identified several challenges to interdisciplinary work. They point out that
individual disciplines often adhere to contradictory standards of validation to
those of interdisciplinary work that draws upon them. Their research indicates
that for new areas of study with no existing precedents (such as in the present
study) that developing validation criteria is part of the investigation process
itself. Correspondingly, an aim of this study is to establish a clearer
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