What Makes the Humanities Socially Relevant?
As humanists engage with human environment, past and present and with contemporary life they:
· explore diverse ways of being in the world and thinking about the world;
· analyze the relationship between language and reality;
· contextualize social issues;
· interpret and translate cultures across divides;
· test the limits of interpretation;
· investigate the “historicity” of every moment ;
· probe what it means to know something;
· ask “riskful” questions;
· and perhaps most importantly, produce complexity.
What Is Transdisciplinarity?
The term transdisciplinarity as used in the IHR mission statement connotes integrative, reciprocal interdisciplinary scholarship that does not simply juxtapose knowledge from traditional disciplines (multi-disciplinarity) but rather transforms the knowledge-seeking process in order to achieve new results. Transdisciplinarity can be achieved by individual researchers or collaborative teams who address innovative questions, solve intractable problems, create new knowledge frameworks or domains, model more complex phenomena than the current state of knowledge allows, and/or restructure conventional idea systems and practices. Transdisciplinary mechanisms include the collaborative development of new paradigms, discourses, generative grammars, and collective mentalities. Ideally, IHR sponsored scholarship uses those mechanisms to examine and address socially significant issues from a humanistic perspective.
Traditional disciplinary and multidisciplinary “handshake” scholarship, in which participants borrow tools, data, results, and methods from one another, develop hybrid interests, or solve technical problems, can play a vital role in the transdisciplinary process. But multidisciplinarity alone cannot typically provide the new mechanisms necessary for rearranging and renaming observations and data that transdisciplinarity offers.