Interdisciplinarity Beyond the Buzzword:A Guide to Academic Work Across Disciplines

Interdisciplinarity has recently been lavished with considerable hype in academia. A large proportion of calls for funding, new shiny projects and educational endeavours mention the concept. In Amsterdam, many research and education initiatives – academic and non-academic alike – seem to incorporate interdisciplinarity in some way. But what is interdisciplinarity? What is it good for? And how can a researcher best conduct interdisciplinary research? Very little hands-on guidance is currently available, particularly for those who are just starting out with interdisciplinary research or teaching. The Amsterdam Young Academy (AYA), founded by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the University of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam University Medical Centers, is an independent platform where talented researchers from different disciplines meet to develop views on research and science policy. Within AYA’s Interdisciplinarity Working Group, we aim to advance interdisciplinary research and teaching in Amsterdam, to provide a community particularly for early career interdisciplinary research and to learn from one another. In many of our discussions we noted the lack of guidance and of the sharing of best practices within the different interdisciplinary communities across Amsterdam’s academic institutions. Through our interdisciplinary lunch events, we learned that many researchers want to team up with colleagues working in other fields but often do not know where to start. Obviously, discipline-specific information is widely available for each institute and department. But cross-domain and cross-institute initiatives and opportunities are difficult to discover via Google without knowing what exactly to enter in the search box. Moreover, every interdisciplinary collaboration is different, so it is impossible to create a canonical guide to interdisciplinarity. However, academics working interdisciplinarily can share similar attitudes and interests, and they do stumble upon similar organizational and infrastructural hiccups. That is why we interviewed 20 people with various backgrounds, roles and experiences on the topic of interdisciplinarity. You will find the biographies of these players in the interdisciplinary field listed in the concluding section of this guide. Discussing our various insights, we discovered common threads in our interviewees’ interdisciplinary practices. We grouped these threads into our five main themes here: goal, person, community, education, and system. By sharing the diverse insights of these interviewees as well as our own, we hope to inspire those interested in (beginning) interdisciplinary research and teaching

Politici zonder partij. Sociale zekerheid en de geboorte van het neoliberalisme in Nederland (1945-1958)

Although most political historians presumably acknowledge the vital importance of ideas in politics, the relation between political ideas and power relations remains a remarkably neglected topic in political history. This article assesses the role of political ideas in times of deep political crisis, focusing on the Dutch neoliberals, who fiercely opposed the emerging welfare state in the aftermath of the Second World War. As the early neoliberals did not establish parties of their own, political historians have overlooked this particular political movement. Nevertheless, the early neoliberals provide a fascinating departure point for a closer examination of the political power of ideas.As this article demonstrates, neoliberals departed from social liberalism and classical liberalism in the late 1930s, and established an influential, transnational political network. After the Second World War, they managed to gain substantial publicity for their ‘battle of ideas’ against social security, without establishing parties of their own. Due to their fierce opposition to social democrats, neoliberals would play a fundamental role in the establishment of a new left-right division in Dutch politics. In doing so, they caused an internal division of the mainstream Christian democratic parties over socio-economic issues and delayed the development of the Dutch welfare state.   Hoewel de meeste politiek historici het belang van ideeën in de politiek niet zullen ontkennen, is de invloed van ideeën op politieke machtsvorming nauwelijks onderzocht. Dit artikel behandelt de rol van politieke ideeën in crisistijd, en vestigt daarbij de aandacht op de Nederlandse neoliberalen. Kort na de Tweede Wereldoorlog voerden zij een felle ideeënstrijd tegen de oprukkende verzorgingsstaat. Omdat deze neoliberalen geen eigen partijen oprichtten, maar streefden naar invloed binnen gevestigde partijen, zijn zij in de politiekegeschiedschrijving tot nu toe onopgemerkt gebleven. Juist door hun afwijkende organisatievorm bieden zij echter een interessant aanknopingspunt om de relatie tussen ideeën en politieke machtsvorming nader te onderzoeken. Uit de analyse blijkt dat de neoliberalen, die zich sinds het late interbellum afkeerden van het sociaal-liberalisme én het klassiek-liberalisme, na de beurskrach van 1929 een invloedrijk, internationaal netwerk opbouwden. Na de oorlog zochten zij de publiciteit met hun felle ideeënstrijd tegen sociale zekerheid, zonder daarbij tot partijvorming over te gaan. Met hun strijd tegen de sociaaldemocraten stonden de neoliberalen aan de basis van de naoorlogse links-rechtstegenstelling in de Nederlandse politiek, die de confessionele middenpartijen ernstig zou verdelen op sociaaleconomisch terrein. De verzorgingsstaat kon in Nederland dan ook pas worden opgebouwd nadat deze neoliberale weerstand in de jaren vijftig werd gebroken

Phrasing history: Selecting sources in digital repositories

In recent years, mass digitization has opened up voluminous text corpora to human interpretation. Full-text search lets historians now find new sources that can change their understanding of thoroughly studied historical episodes. At the same time, it forces scholars to access historical sources in a new way: through specific words. This article analyses the consequences of this new way of accessing sources and investigates which search technologies are best suited for historical source selection in digital repositories. It argues that to seize the opportunities that digitization offers, historians must refine their search technologies so that they are based on words but are less dependent on exact phraseology

Friedrich Hayek: Ideoloog van de Vrije Markt

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Behoud de Bijdragen, vernieuw de vorm

In the past fifty years the bmgn has prevailed amid a fragmenting journal landscape and rapidly internationalising historical scholarship and has even done pioneering work in digitisation. Successive editorial boards established the raison d’être of the bmgn by initiating historical debate. They have succeeded in this endeavour, although those participating in the discussions may have been overly homogeneous. The bmgn has not been a trailblazer in historiographic innovation, nor should it aim to be, in our view, as a geographically defined journal. The bmgn would benefit in the future from focusing on three form innovations. First, by revising the publication process to make the peer review more useful and appealing. Second, by digressing from article formats, doing more to promote discussion and debate and encouraging experimental contributions. Third, by accepting the primacy of digital publishing and making better use of the opportunities it offers

Behoud de Bijdragen, vernieuw de vorm

In the past fifty years the bmgn has prevailed amid a fragmenting journal landscape and rapidly internationalising historical scholarship and has even done pioneering work in digitisation. Successive editorial boards established the raison d’être of the bmgn by initiating historical debate. They have succeeded in this endeavour, although those participating in the discussions may have been overly homogeneous. The bmgn has not been a trailblazer in historiographic innovation, nor should it aim to be, in our view, as a geographically defined journal. The bmgn would benefit in the future from focusing on three form innovations. First, by revising the publication process to make the peer review more useful and appealing. Second, by digressing from article formats, doing more to promote discussion and debate and encouraging experimental contributions. Third, by accepting the primacy of digital publishing and making better use of the opportunities it offers