The Communicative Construction of Interdisciplinarity: Group Discussions with Climate Scientists
Interdisciplinarity in research and teaching has been intensively discussed. How scientists define interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary collaboration can be influenced by their disciplinary backgrounds. Using Bohnsack’s documentary method, we conducted group discussions to answer the following research questions: 1. What do communicative constructions of the term interdisciplinarity within different groups of professors look like? 2. How are group-specific (inter)disciplinary contexts involved in the communicative construction of interdisciplinarity? The discussions took place in one interdisciplinary and three disciplinary groups. While all groups understood interdisciplinarity as a collaboration of scientists, they each put a different focus on where interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary collaboration begin. The groups with a disciplinary self-understanding referred to discipline-specific logics and habitus to define interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary collaborations. The openness to different conceptualizations of the terms depended on the internal interdisciplinarity of the groups.
Keywords: communicative constructivism; documentary method; group discussion; interdisciplinarity; scholarly communication; science communication
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: 01 January 2018
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