This article examines the main ideas presented in Newell's groundbreaking article, published in "Issues in Integrative Studies" in 2001, "A Theory of Interdisciplinary Studies": that complexity is a precondition for interdisciplinary research, that interdisciplinary research utilizes disciplinary perspectives, and that…

A project to invite experts in various disciplines to converse with literacy professors and teachers with over 30 participants resulted in several insights about disciplinary literacy and student learning in the disciplines and professions. The authors suggest that such conversations or partnerships strengthen student learning for college, career,…

This report discusses the answer to the question: What might comic studies learn from the slightly older field of composition and rhetoric? The author asks the question as a member of both fields. It is clear that both disciplines struggle for legitimacy within the academy. While comics studies strives for respectability given the popular nature…

Wiljan van den Akker is a university professor, a respected academic administrator, and a published poet and writer. From a base at the Utrecht University, in the Netherlands, his three-decade long career spans three continents and includes one-on-one associations with Berkeley, UCLA and Oxford. Currently, he is the Vice-Rector for Research at…

The goals of this article are to appraise second language acquisition's (SLA) disciplinary progress over the last 15 years and to reflect on transdisciplinary relevance as the field has completed 40 years of existence and moves forward into the 21st century. I first identify four trends that demonstrate vibrant disciplinary progress in SLA. I then…

Scholars and teachers have long struggled to respond to the growing demand for interdisciplinary approaches to complex social issues. They come to the table with their own disciplinary perspectives (scholars more rigidly than students, perhaps), but they also recognize the limitations of investigating social issues through a single disciplinary…

The course proposed is planned as an undergraduate Human Sexuality course within a Women and Gender Studies program. Teaching a course on Human Sexuality with an interdisciplinary approach allows for students to gain knowledge from several different academic disciplines. This course would teach from a sex-positive and holistic view of sexuality as…

In this short paper, avowedly personal, partial and pointillist in nature, I (i) sketch the early days of (mainly Anglo-American) information studies and the field's gradual institutionalization, (ii) describe its maturation, as both an academic discipline and a domain of professional practice, and (iii) speculate on its future in the light of oft…

Much has changed over the past generation in the academic acceptance and even appreciation of the role food plays in the world. Students now flock to specialized degree programs in gastronomy, pursue food-oriented tracks at the doctoral level, seek out programs and careers in the hospitality industry, and elect courses on food and wine as a way of…

As new ways of creating and interpreting texts complicate ideas of how and why writing happens, the field of rhetoric and composition needs to be more conscious of how our institutional responsibilities and scholarly attention to college writing has limited its vision of writing and literacy. It is time to move beyond consolidating our identity as…

Various discussions at the March 2010 Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Commons in Statesboro, GA, led this author to reflect on the relationship between academic development, e-learning, and SoTL. Throughout the conference, she felt a nagging suspicion that each professional community may have created a silo, with a discourse so tightly…

Shifts in the ways that science is being undertaken and marshaled toward social change argue for a new kind of professional competence. Taking the view that the science of social work is centrally about the relationship of research to social impact, the authors extend Fong's focus on transdisciplinary and translational approaches to science,…

This essay will discuss the need for the humanities to address visual culture studies as part of its interdisciplinary mission in today's university. Although mostly unnoticed in recent debates in the humanities over historical and theoretical frameworks, the relatively new field of visual culture has emerged as a corrective to a growing…

This article talks about disciplinary fudging. The author points out that one fudges for complex and comprehensible reasons. However, she wonders at what point one becomes enough of an insider in a discipline to know how to gloss over the nuances of a complicated, inconvenient, or controversial topic.

Given the centennial of the publication of the first two textbooks in social psychology, the one by William McDougall and the other by Edward Alsworth Ross, the author stresses that it is an auspicious time for reflection. It is a time to reconsider the movements into which these volumes were secreted, and the resulting trajectories of…