March was a big month for me! I traveled for a talk to the University of Cincinnati, and two articles were published that completed a major research effort.
“We don’t win the game by quitting in the middle” was one of my big points about Technology for Good during my talk at the University of Cincinnati‘s UC Center for Humanities and Technology. As I told the audience, there may be many bad things happening, but we don’t get to good things by quitting in the face of bad things. It’s hard to stay the course in the face of many headwinds, but it’s worth it. It was a great talk with a really engaged audience.
Thank you to Chenxing Xie for inviting me to speak, Kyle Yrigoyen for taking the above picture (and driving me around!), and the very engaged audience members who asked all sorts of great questions. Finally, thanks to Arizona State University and College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University, whose commitment to assuming fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural, and overall health of the communities we serve gives me the ability to pursue and maintain projects like these.
I also published two articles this month! Some articles speed out of the blocks and make their way quickly. Some articles are a marathon. Some cannot be categorized as anything but an epic journey across difficult terrain. The two articles in my collaboration with Ed Nagelhout have been the latter. Ed gathered an incredible data set of interviews with faculty and administrators about how interdisciplinary research succeeds or struggles.
In this first article called “Faculty and Administrator Perceptions of Interdisciplinary Collaborative Writing: Practices, Challenges, and Support Structures,” he, I, and several collaborators studied this huge amount of data in a lot of ways (including corpus analysis; hooray!) and came up with some suggestions about how universities and administrators can support faculty (especially early-career faculty) in conducting interdisciplinary research and writing.
As a born-interdisciplinary researcher, this article is very near and dear to my heart. I am very glad that Ed and I crossed intellectual paths and were able to collaborate on this longterm project. Thanks to Written Communication (Journal) for working with us to make this article a published work!
Ed and I’s second article on institutional interdisciplinary research practices focuses on how institutions can support interdisciplinary work. The tl;dr on “Bridging disciplinary divides: insights and recommendations for fostering interdisciplinary research“: “These findings lead to strategies for supporting researchers in boundary-crossing collaborations: developing faculty skills for cross-disciplinary research, customized tools and scaffolds, clearer guidelines with examples, and specialized mentorship. These strategies can be applied differently for early career, mid-career, and late career faculty members.”
Thank you to Ed for including me in this huge project, and thank you to Higher Education Research and Development for publishing this article!