This book offers a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities. Rooting itself in the authors' own experiences, the book establishes a radical agenda for collaboration across these disciplines. This book is open access under a CC-BY license.

This book offers a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities. Setting itself against standard accounts of interdisciplinary 'integration,' and rooting itself in the authors' own experiences, the book establishes a radical agenda for collaboration across these disciplines. Rethinking Interdisciplinarity does not merely advocate interdisciplinary research, but attends to the hitherto tacit pragmatics, affects, power dynamics, and spatial logics in which that research is enfolded. Understanding the complex relationships between brains, minds, and environments requires a delicate, playful and genuinely experimental interdisciplinarity, and this book shows us how it can be done. This book is open access under a CC-BY license and funded by The Wellcome Trust.

This edited volume aims to better understand the multifaceted phenomenon we call health. Going beyond simple views of health as the absence of disease or as complete well-being, this book unites scientists and philosophers. The contributions clarify the links between health and adaptation, robustness, resilience, or dynamic homeostasis, and discuss how to achieve health and healthy aging through practices such as hormesis. The book is divided into three parts and a conclusion: the first part explains health from within specific disciplines, the second part explores health from the perspective of a bodily part, system, function, or even the environment in which organisms live, and the final part looks at more clinical or practical perspectives. It thereby gathers, across 30 chapters, diverse perspectives from the broad fields of evolutionary and systems biology, immunology, and biogerontology, more specific areas such as odontology, cardiology, neurology, and public health, as well as philosophical reflections on mental health, sexuality, authenticity and medical theories. The overarching aim is to inform, inspire and encourage intellectuals from various disciplines to assess whether explanations in these disparate fields and across biological levels can be sufficiently systematized and unified to clarify the complexity of health. It will be particularly useful for medical graduates, philosophy graduates and research professionals in the life sciences and general medicine, as well as for upper-level graduate philosophy of science students.

Social policy and human geography are intimately intertwined yet frequently disconnected fields. Whilst social policies are always conceived, implemented and experienced in and through geography, the role of place in social policy scholarship and practice is frequently overlooked. Bringing together experts from both fields, this collection illuminates the myriad of ways that human geography offers rich insights conceptually, empirically and methodologically into the neglected spatialities of policy scholarship, practice and experience. By building the necessary bridges towards a spatial social policy, this book enables the enhanced design, performance and understanding of social policies once properly rooted in their multiple spatialities.

Introduction chapter is available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This groundbreaking reader is designed to lower the barriers to interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in research. Edited by experienced researchers from a range of different fields, it paves the way for future scholarship and effective research collaborations across disciplines. Chapters offer extracts from key academic texts on topics such as the design, funding, evaluation and communication of research, providing those new to the field with a thorough grounding. They highlight examples of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary triumphs – and challenges. Concluding each chapter is a commentary provided by practitioners from diverse backgrounds, many of whom are themselves developing new approaches to inter- and transdisciplinarity. The book is: • the first ever comprehensive reader for interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity; • essential reading for those seeking to become effective collaborative researchers; • complete with concise introductions, extracts, commentary and further reading in each chapter. This is a much-needed primer that improves our understanding of the characteristics of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, unlocking their exciting potential in research and teaching within and beyond academia.

Unlike other volumes in the current literature, this book provides insight for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary researchers and practitioners on what doesn’t work. Documenting detailed case studies of project failure matters, not only as an illustration of experienced challenges but also as projects do not always follow step-by-step protocols of preconceived and theorised processes. Bookended by a framing introduction by the editors and a conclusion written by Julie Thompson Klein, each chapter ends with a reflexive section that synthesizes lessons learned and key take-away points for the reader. Drawing on a wide range of international case studies and with a strong environmental thread throughout, the book reveals a range of failure scenarios for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects, including: • Projects that did not get off the ground; • Projects that did not have the correct personnel for specified objectives; • Projects that did not reach their original objectives but met other objectives; • Projects that failed to anticipate important differences among collaborators. Illustrating causal links in real life projects, this volume will be of significant relevance to scholars and practitioners looking to overcome the challenges of conducting interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.

This book originates from the idea to adapt biomedical engineering and medical informatics to current clinical needs and proposes a paradigm shift in medical engineering, where the limitations of technology should no longer be the starting point of design, but rather the development of biomedical devices, software, and systems should stem from clinical needs and wishes. Gathering chapters written by authoritative researchers, working the interface between medicine and engineering, this book presents successful attempts of conceiving technology based on clinical practice. It reports on new strategies for medical diagnosis, rehabilitation, and eHealth, focusing on solutions to foster better quality of life through technology, with an emphasis on patients’ and clinical needs, and vulnerable populations. All in all, the book offers a reference guide and a source of inspiration for biomedical engineers, clinical scientists, physicians, and computer scientists. Yet, it also includes practical information for personnel using biomedical equipment, as well as timely insights that are expected to help health agencies and software firms in their decision-making processes.

A fascinating ethnography of microbes that opens up new spaces for anthropological inquiry The trillions of microbes in and on our bodies are determined by not only biology but also our social connections. Gut Anthro tells the fascinating story of how a sociocultural anthropologist developed a collaborative “anthropology of microbes” with a human microbial ecologist to address global health crises across disciplines. It asks: what would it mean for anthropology to act with science? Based partly at a preeminent U.S. lab studying the human microbiome, the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University, and partly at a field site in Bangladesh studying infant malnutrition, it examines how microbes travel between human guts in the “field” and in microbiome laboratories, influencing definitions of health and disease, and how the microbiome can change our views on evolution, agency, and life. As lab scientists studied the interrelationships between gut microbes and malnutrition in resource-poor countries, Amber Benezra explored ways to reconcile the scale and speed differences between the lab, the intimate biosocial practices of Bangladeshi mothers and their children, and the looming structural violence of poverty. In vital ways, Gut Anthro is about what it means to collaborate—with mothers, local field researchers in Bangladesh, massive philanthropic global health organizations, with the microbiome scientists, and, of course, with microbes. It follows microbes through various enactments in scientific research—microbes as kin, as data, and as race. Revealing how racial categories are used in microbiome research, Benezra argues that microbial differences need transdisciplinary collaboration to address racial health disparities without reifying race as a straightforward biological or social designation. Gut Anthro is a tour de force of science studies and medical anthropology as well as an intensely personal and deeply theoretical accounting of what it means to do anthropology today. Cover alt text: Black background overlaid with a pink organic path suggestive of a human digestive system. Title appears within the guts as if being processed.

This book highlights the importance of interdisciplinarity in the academic landscape, and examines how it is understood in the context of the modern university. While interdisciplinarity is encouraged by research funders, academics themselves receive mixed messages about how, when and whether to follow this route. Building upon a series of career history interviews with established interdisciplinary researchers, the author reveals fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of interdisciplinary knowledge, how this is shared, and the skills these researchers bring. The book addresses these issues on both a personal and systemic level, identifying how a resilient researcher can craft their own research trajectory to view interdisciplinarity as a truly embedded approach.

This volume features new findings by nine interdisciplinary teams of researchers on the topics of self, motivation, and virtue. Nine chapters bringing together scholars from the fields of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and sociology advance our substantive understanding of these important topics, and showcase a variety of research methods of interdisciplinary interest. Essays on Buddhism and the self in the context of romantic relationships, the development of personal projects and virtue, the notion of self-distancing and its moral impact, virtues as self-integrated traits, humility and the self in loving encounter, the importance of nation and faith in motivating virtue in western and non-western countries, roles for the self and virtue in eudaimonic growth, overcoming spiritual violence and sacramental shame in Christian communities, and an investigation into the moral self highlight the range and diversity of topics explored in this volume. The concept of deep integration also characterizes this work: each member of the interdisciplinary teams was fully and equally invested in their project from inception to completion. This approach invites teams to examine their disciplinary assumptions, rethink familiar concepts, and adjust methodologies in order to view their topics with fresh eyes. The result is not only new findings of substantive and methodological interest, but also an interesting glimpse into the thinking of the researchers as they sought interdisciplinary common ground in their research. Self, Motivation, and Virtue will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, moral psychology, neuroscience, and sociology who are working on these topics.