At once a slogan and a vision for future scholarship, interdisciplinarity promises to break through barriers to address today's complex challenges. Yet even high-stakes projects often falter, undone by poor communication, strong feelings, bureaucratic frameworks, and contradictory incentives. This new book shows newcomers and veteran researchers how to craft associations that will lead to rich mutual learning under inevitably tricky conditions. Strikingly candid and always grounded, the authors draw a wealth of profound, practical lessons from an in-depth case study of a multiyear funded project on cultural property. Examining the social dynamics of collaboration, they show readers how to anticipate sources of conflict, nurture trust, and jump-start thinking across disciplines. Researchers and institutions alike will learn to plan for each phase of a project life cycle, capturing insights and shepherding involvement along the way.

At once a slogan and a vision for future scholarship, interdisciplinarity promises to break through barriers to address today's complex challenges. Yet even high-stakes projects often falter, undone by poor communication, strong feelings, bureaucratic frameworks, and contradictory incentives. This new book shows newcomers and veteran researchers how to craft associations that will lead to rich mutual learning under inevitably tricky conditions. Strikingly candid and always grounded, the authors draw a wealth of profound, practical lessons from an in-depth case study of a multiyear funded project on cultural property. Examining the social dynamics of collaboration, they show readers how to anticipate sources of conflict, nurture trust, and jump-start thinking across disciplines. Researchers and institutions alike will learn to plan for each phase of a project life cycle, capturing insights and shepherding involvement along the way.

Enhancing Communication & Collaboration in Interdisciplinary Research, edited by Michael O'Rourke, Stephen Crowley, Sanford D. Eigenbrode, and J. D. Wulfhorst, is a volume of previously unpublished, state-of-the-art chapters on interdisciplinary communication and collaboration written by leading figures and promising junior scholars in the world of interdisciplinary research, education, and administration. Designed to inform both teaching and research, this innovative book covers the spectrum of interdisciplinary activity, offering a timely emphasis on collaborative interdisciplinary work. The book’s four main parts focus on theoretical perspectives, case studies, communication tools, and institutional perspectives, while a final chapter ties together the various strands that emerge in the book and defines trend-lines and future research questions for those conducting work on interdisciplinary communication.

This book is the fourth in the series on leadership, interprofessional education and practice, following on from Leadership Development for Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice (2014), Leadership and Collaboration: Further Developments for IPE and Collaborative Practice (2015) and Leading Research and Evaluation in Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice (2016). Along with policy changes around the globe, these three books have stimulated experts in this area to consider not only the ways in which they introduce and develop interprofessional education and collaborative practice, but also how they evaluate their impacts. In this 4th book, the focus is on the sustainability of these initiatives, sharing insights into factors that promote sustainability including leadership approaches and organisationsal resilience, as well as frequently encountered difficulties, and ways to overcome them.

Interprofessional Education and Collaboration offers a comprehensive guide to interprofessional education (IPE) and interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP). Written by a team of health care experts, this text is shaped by research and provides tools for interdisciplinary collaboration.

This Handbook approaches sustainable development in higher education from an integrated perspective, addressing the dearth of publications on the subject. It offers a unique overview of what universities around the world are doing to implement sustainable development (i.e. via curriculum innovation, research, activities, or practical projects) and how their efforts relate to education for sustainable development at the university level. The Handbook gathers a wealth of information, ideas, best practices and lessons learned in the context of executing concrete projects, and assesses methodological approaches to integrating the topic of sustainable development in university curricula. Lastly, it documents and disseminates the veritable treasure trove of practical experience currently available on sustainability in higher education.

This book introduces the concept of Water Diplomacy as a principled and pragmatic approach to problem-driven interdisciplinary collaboration, which has been developed as a response to pressing contemporary water challenges arising from the coupling of natural and human systems. The findings of the book are the result of a decade-long interdisciplinary experiment in conceiving, developing, and implementing an interdisciplinary graduate program on Water Diplomacy at Tufts University, USA. This has led to the development of the Water Diplomacy Framework, a shared framework for understanding, diagnosing, and communicating about complex water issues across disciplinary boundaries. This framework clarifies important distinctions between water systems - simple, complicated, or complex - and the attributes that these distinctions imply for how these problems can be addressed. In this book, the focus is on complex water issues and how they require a problem-driven rather than a theory-driven approach to interdisciplinary collaboration. Moreover, it is argued that conception of interdisciplinarity needs to go beyond collaboration among experts, because complex water problems demand inclusive stakeholder engagement, such as in fact-value deliberation, joint fact finding, collective decision making, and adaptive management. Water professionals working in such environments need to operate with both principles and pragmatism in order to achieve actionable, sustainable, and equitable outcomes. This book explores these ideas in more detail and demonstrates their efficacy through a diverse range of case studies. Reflections on the program are also included, from conceptualization through implementation and evaluation. This book offers critical lessons and case studies for researchers and practitioners working on complex water issues as well as important lessons for those looking to initiate, implement, or evaluate interdisciplinary programs to address other complex problems in any setting.

This stimulating open access volume details the innovative work of the Pan Institution Network for Global Health in creating collaborative research-based answers to large-scale health issues. Equitable partnerships among member universities representing North America, Africa, Asia, and Europe reverse standard cross-national dynamics to develop locally relevant responses to health challenges as well as their underlying disparities. Case studies focusing on multiple morbidities and effects of urbanization on health illustrate open dialogue in addressing HIV, maternal/child health, diabetes, and other major concerns. These instructive examples model collaborations between global North and South as meaningful steps toward the emerging global future of public health. Included in the coverage: Building sustainable networks: introducing the Pan Institution Network for Global Health Fostering dialogues in global health education: a graduate and undergraduate approach Provider workload and multiple morbidities in the Caribbean and South Africa Project Redemption: conducting research with informal workers in New York City Partnership and collaboration in global health: valuing reciprocity Global Health Collaboration will interest faculty working within the field of global health; scholars within public health, health policy, and cognate disciplines; as well as administrators looking to develop international university partnerships around global health and graduate students in the areas of global health, health administration, and public health and related social sciences (e.g., sociology, anthropology, demography).

Collaboration across boundaries is widely recognized as a vital requisite for the advancement of innovative science to address problems such as environmental degradation and global change. This book takes collaboration across boundaries seriously by focusing on the many challenges and practices involved in team science when spanning disciplinary, organizational, national and other divides. The authors draw on a shared framework for managing the challenges of collaboration across boundaries as applied to the science of understanding complex social-ecological systems. Teams working across boundaries on diverse social-ecological systems in countries around the world report their challenges and share their practices, outcomes and lessons learned. From these diverse experiences arise many commonalities and also some important differences. These provide the basis for a set of recommendations to any collaborators intending to use science as a tool to better understand social-ecological systems and to improve their management and governance.

Interdisciplinarity has become a buzzword in academia, as research universities funnel their financial resources toward collaborations between faculty in different disciplines. In theory, interdisciplinary collaboration breaks down artificial divisions between different departments, allowing more innovative and sophisticated research to flourish. But does it actually work this way in practice? Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration puts the common beliefs about such research to the test, using empirical data gathered by scholars from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. The book’s contributors critically interrogate the assumptions underlying the fervor for interdisciplinarity. Their attentive scholarship reveals how, for all its potential benefits, interdisciplinary collaboration is neither immune to academia’s status hierarchies, nor a simple antidote to the alleged shortcomings of disciplinary study. Chapter 10 is available Open Access here (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK395883)