By Gabriele Bammer
As more and more researchers, educators, universities and research organisations, funders, and policy makers become interested in interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, the demand for clear unequivocal definitions of these terms grows. Why is agreeing on such definitions so hard? And what’s the way forward?
The late Julie Thompson Klein’s work tracking typologies of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity over time (Klein, 2017) is revealing and provides the basis for this i2Insights contribution.
Klein pointed out that in the latter half of the twentieth century, the classification of the Western intellectual tradition “into specialized domains within a larger system of disciplinarity” was “supplemented and challenged” by an increasing number of activities that involved disciplinary interactions.
