“How to evaluate interdisciplinary research? Conceptual, methodological and empirical challenges”

The importance of communities for the creation and evaluation of knowledge claims has been widely discussed among philosophers of science. With the rise of interdisciplinary research, communities where knowledge is produced may no longer be expected to be united in any way they used to be in disciplinary research. Given the importance of the shared background for the evaluation of knowledge claims, this development raises a number of interesting questions. Do participants of interdisciplinary projects experience problems related to evaluating other participants’ contributions, having their own contributions evaluated by other participants or their overall project being evaluated from the outside? How does interdisciplinary work influence one’s self-conception and perception of one’s competence as a researcher? Do interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects offer new robust criteria for evaluation thanks to, for example, their greater practical impact? Or does their practical successfulness raise new problems for evaluation? If interdisciplinary research may indeed be expected to face certain problems, why does it remain attractive and what does it say about our understanding of traditional disciplines? The presentations in this workshop address these questions from a variety of perspectives, helping to understand the present practice and the potential possibilities of interdisciplinary research.

Programme:

11.00 Opening

11.15 – 11.45 Inkeri Koskinen (University of Helsinki) “Epistemic success and societal impact in extra-academic collaboration”

11.45 – 12.15 Jaana Eigi & Katrin Velbaum (both University of Tartu) “Plurality of self-perceptions among interdisciplinary researchers and its implications for taxonomies of interdisciplinarity”

12.15 – 12.45 Hauke Riesch (Brunel University London) „Inter-Discipline and Punish“

12.45 – 14.15 Lunch

14.15 – 14.45 Edit Talpsepp-Randla (University of Tartu) „Looking for essentialist thinking in interdisciplinary research”

14.45 – 15.15 Michiru Nagatsu (University of Helsinki) & Miles MacLeod (University of Twente) “What does successful ID research look like? understanding ID research from a methodological perspective”

15.15 – 15.45 Coffee

15.45 – 16.15 Julie Mennes (University of Ghent) “The difficult status of multi-disciplinarity in university research policy: a case study of Flanders, Belgium”

16.15 – 16.45 Henrik Thorén (University of Helsinki) “Interdisciplinarity as assessment: ‘interdisciplinarity as validity check’ revisited”

16.45 – 17.15 Endla Lõhkivi (University of Tartu) “Metaphors, analogies and figurative speech in the studies of interdisciplinary research”

17.15 – 17.30 Coffee

17.30-18.30 Roundtable about the methods applied in empirical research

For registration and further information, please contact Endla Lõhkivi [email protected].

The event is supported by the University of Tartu ASTRA Project PER ASPERA (European Regional Development Fund), IUT 20-5 Estonian Ministry of Education and PUT 732 Estonian Research Council.