Mapping Interdisciplinary Expertise
Complex real-world problems do not align neatly with academic disciplines.
Many advances in knowledge production and application depend on high-trust interdisciplinary collaborations requiring sustained interactions between academic researchers and the many other people and organisations involved in designing, making and testing systems, services and products.
Working across disciplinary boundaries is very challenging, requiring capabilities that are often ill-defined and learnt by trial and error.
- Prof Lina Markauskaite
- Prof Peter Goodyear
- Prof Cara Wrigley
- Dr Celina McEwen
- Dr Natalie Spence
Our goals
With a focus on research in Multidisciplinary Research Centres, this project seeks to better understand:
- What exactly constitutes the expertise needed to work across disciplinary boundaries
- How researchers and university students learn to work across disciplines and develop this expertise
- How to better support the development of interdisciplinary expertise in research teams and university courses
What we do
We study interdisciplinary work and learning holistically at three interconnected levels:
- At macro sociocultural level we investigate how interdisciplinary cultures form and function
- At meso socio-material level we study how interdisciplinary teams co-create shared practices and environments for joint work
- At micro socio-cognitive level we research how individual team members develop the personal resourcefulness needed to contribute productively to interdisciplinary work
This project builds on our earlier work researching professional learning for knowledgeable action and innovation—the outcomes of which were summarised in the book “Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education”.
We also use innovative co-design methods to co-create, test and disseminate practical resources that capture successful practice.
Funding and support
This research has been funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project “Developing interdisciplinary expertise in universities: Learning to co-create knowledge across disciplinary boundaries in laboratories and courses" (DP200100376), 2020-2024. This research is also part of Sydney Nano Catalyst projects.