Transdisciplinarity - Philosophy & Practice Breaking the Shackles of Time

In response to complex contemporary problems & the limitations of siloed specializations in solving them, a new boundary-crossing approach is actively being developed by researchers.
Episode transcript:
Marcus Weakley:
This is Breaking the Shackles of Time. I have two wonderful guests with me. I am Marcus Weakley. The first guest, who has already introduced himself, is Dr. Andy Vosko. Would you like to say something about yourself?
Dr. Andy Vosko:
Sure. I am an associate provost, and I direct the transdisciplinary studies program at Claremont Graduate University. I come from a lot of different academic backgrounds, but I’d say that I studied East Asian language and literature and then went on to become a neuroscientist. So I liked to mix and match a lot of different perspectives into what I’m doing.
Marcus Weakley:
Great, welcome.
Dr. Andy Vosko:
Thank you.
Marcus Weakley:
And the other guest has been a guest before. Will you re-introduce yourself?
Troy:
Yeah, I’m Troy [McKanovich 00:00:46]. I’m a PhD student studying religion in American politics. Before that I was doing religion and social theory, and before that astrophysics.
Marcus Weakley:
Great. So we have two transdisciplinary folks in personal experience with us today.
Marcus Weakley:
One of the things that I wanted to do to kind of set a lay of the land for the audience a bit was to try to see if we could talk a bit and maybe figure out some of the problems and agreed-upon areas of what transdisciplinary is or how it’s defined let’s say, more specifically. So I jumped on Google. I Googled transdisciplinarity definition. I clicked on the top three results, and I’m going to read them okay for our audience.
Marcus Weakley:
Number one, our good friend, Wikipedia, transdisciplinarity, connotes, connotes, a research strategy that crosses many disciplinary boundaries to create a holistic approach. It applies to research efforts focused on problems that cross the boundaries of two or more disciplines, such as research on effective information systems for biomedical research, and can refer to concepts or methods that were originally developed by one discipline but are now used by several others, such as ethnography, a field, research method, originally for anthropology now widely used.
Marcus Weakley:
Okay. So we have crosses disciplinary boundaries towards a holistic approach, focuses on problems across two or more disciplines, are taking something from one discipline and applying it to others.
Marcus Weakley:
Second was from Purdue university. It’s a blog. What is transdisciplinarity? I had to dig a bit on the second page. We’ve got, quoting someone named Petrie, “The notion of transdisciplinarity exemplifies one of the historically important driving forces in the area of interdisciplinarity, namely, the idea of the desirability of the integration of knowledge into some meaningful whole. The best example, perhaps, of the drive to transdisciplinarity might be the early discussions of general systems theory when it was being held forward as a grand synthesis of knowledge. Marxism, structuralism, and feminist theory,” as well other examples. “Essentially, this kind of interdisciplinarity represents the impetus to integrate knowledge, and, hence, is often characterized by a denigration and repudiation of the disciplines and disciplinary work as essentially fragmented and incomplete.”
Marcus Weakley:
So again, we have integration of knowledge into a meaningful whole, so that vibes off the holistic approach of the last one. But we have a strong definition here of it being a force, an impetus, of a desire or a push, right? It’s historical, and it’s a kind of interdisciplinarity.
Marcus Weakley:
And finally, we have the Harvard Transdisciplinary Research in Energetics and Cancer Center. Their definition is more straightforward. Transdisciplinary research, so it’s not transdisciplinarity, b