Nowadays, ‘cross-disciplinarity’ practices, namely multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity (Barry & Born 2013, p. 8) are so widely deployed, offering responses to the multiple complexities of the modern age. While multidisciplinarity signals an accumulation of disciplinary perspectives to address a single object, with the anticipation that this approach will provide a richer analysis, adding insights that could not be generated from the application of a single discipline, interdisciplinarity comes to describe the ‘aggregation’ process of disciplinary perspectives with the intention of producing a ‘synthesis’ between them. Seen as an ‘inventive’ process, because its outcomes are innovative and deliberately reconstructive, transdiciplinarity overtly seeks to ‘transcend’ or ‘transform’ existing disciplinary structures. (Thomson 2016, p. 323)
For the complexity of the modern world, interdisciplinarity depicts a mode of analytical thought that challenges the ubiquity and solidity of traditional disciplinarity. The interdisciplinary approach aims at trespassing the artificial borderlines between disciplines, representing a strict requirement in a world prone to constant change and cognitive accumulation in various fields of knowledge. Proactive focusing, blending, and linking of disciplinarity inputs foster a more holistic understanding of an issue, question, topic, theme or problem.
Based on bridge building between disciplines, or restructuring parts of disciplines to form a new whole, the purpose of interdisciplinary research is actually a pragmatic one: to solve a problem, to resolve an issue, to raise a new question, to explain a phenomenon, to create a new product, or to address a topic, all these being too complex for the methodological inventory of a single discipline and requiring thus an interdisciplinary approach (Klein 2010).
Transgressing certain epistemological and methodological barriers between various disciplines has resulted in a re-assessment of the research object, which is no longer regarded from the unique perspective of a single discipline, but rather placed under the magnifying glass of the interdisciplinary approach. The research object is studied from all angles, while the analysis is performed with methodological and epistemological tools belonging to several disciplines, aimed at rendering the research deeper and more extended.
PHSS conference highlights the need for more interdisciplinary debate in different fields of research and calls for more critical approaches to bring various topics to the forefront of research in humanities and social sciences.
We invite you to join us for the 7th edition of PHSS conference to explore interdisciplinarity and how interdisciplinary collaboration can help us to study complex social phenomena. We warmly invite proposals that focus on theoretical approaches, and also applied studies. Submitted presentations can include descriptions of accomplished work or work in progress.
Please send your title and a short abstract at phssconference2021@gmail.com.
There is no participation fee for this year’s edition.
The conference languages are Romanian and English.
Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences, 8th Edition: Conflict in European Time and Space 