Our History Clips: Collaborating for the Common Good

This case study reveals how middle school social studies teachers within a professional development program are encouraging their students to use multiple disciplinary literacies to create Our History Clips as they also work toward developing a classroom community of engaged student citizens

Still minding the gap? Reflecting on transitions between concepts of information in varied domains

This conceptual paper, a contribution to the tenth anniversary special issue of information, gives a cross-disciplinary review of general and unified theories of information. A selective literature review is used to update a 2013 article on bridging the gaps between conceptions of information in different domains, including material from the physical and biological sciences, from the humanities and social sciences including library and information science, and from philosophy. A variety of approaches and theories are reviewed, including those of Brenner, Brier, Burgin and Wu, Capurro, Cárdenas-García and Ireland, Hidalgo, Hofkirchner, Kolchinsky and Wolpert, Floridi, Mingers and Standing, Popper, and Stonier. The gaps between disciplinary views of information remain, although there has been progress, and increasing interest, in bridging them. The solution is likely to be either a general theory of sufficient flexibility to cope with multiple meanings of information, or multiple and distinct theories for different domains, but with a complementary nature, and ideally boundary spanning concepts

Default Penalty as a Disciplinary and Selection Mechanism in Presence of Multiple Equilibria

Closed exchange and production-and-exchange economies may have multiple equilibria, a fact that is usually ignored in macroeconomic models. Our basic argument is that default and bankruptcy laws are required to prevent strategic default, and these laws can also serve to provide the conditions for uniqueness. In this paper we report experimental evidence on the effectiveness of this approach to resolving multiplicity: society can assign default penalties on fiat money so the economy selects one of the equilibria. Our data show that the choice of default penalty takes the economy to the neighborhood of the chosen equilibrium. The theory and evidence together reinforce the idea that accounting, bankruptcy and possibly other aspects of social mechanisms play an important role in resolving the otherwise mathematically intractable challenges associated with multiplicity of equilibria in closed economies. Additionally we discuss the meaning and experimental implications of default penalties that support an active bankruptcy-modified competitive equilibrium.Bankruptcy penalty, Financial institutions, Fiat money, Multiple equilibria, Experimental gaming

Science vs. science: the complexities of interdisciplinary research

Human-Computer Interaction and Web Science are radically interdisciplinary fields, but what does this mean in practical terms? Undertaking research (and writing papers) that encompass multiple disciplinary perspectives and methods is a serious challenge and it is difficult to maintain conferences that fairly review and host contributions from multiple disciplines. The colocation of the ACM WebSci conference with CHI in Paris, offers an unusual opportunity to bring these two communities together. Previous discussions have considered how to conduct interdisciplinary work that bridges HCI/WebSci with specific areas. Our objective is to provide a space for interested researchers from both communities to share their views and approaches to tackling the tensions and complexities associated with interdisciplinary work, whatever fields are being bridged

Tourism supply chain & strategic partnerships for managing the complexity in tourism industry

The paper aims to investigate the possible relationship between Tourism Supply Chain and Strategic Partnership, read as a way to reduce and better manage the complexity in Tourism Industry. This last has been analysed under multi-disciplinary approaches (economic, sociological, psychological, anthropological and geographic) to better understand its main components. A synthesis of origin of Tourism Supply Chain term was provided. VRIO framework and PEST analysis was used with the aim to better understand the strategic decision of integration the chain with a single or multiple rings. Starting from this, a theoretical framework from a holistic analysis is provided

Livelisystems: a conceptual framework integrating social, ecosystem, development and evolutionary theory

Human activity poses multiple environmental challenges for ecosystems that have intrinsic value and also support that activity. Our ability to address these challenges is constrained, inter alia, by weaknesses in cross disciplinary understandings of interactive processes of change in socio-ecological systems. This paper draws on complementary insights from social and biological sciences to propose a ‘livelisystems’ framework of multi-scale, dynamic change across social and biological systems. This describes how material, informational and relational assets, asset services and asset pathways interact in systems with embedded and emergent properties undergoing a variety of structural transformations. Related characteristics of ‘higher’ (notably human) livelisystems and change processes are identified as the greater relative importance of (a) informational, relational and extrinsic (as opposed to material and intrinsic) assets, (b) teleological (as opposed to natural) selection, and (c) innovational (as opposed to mutational) change. The framework provides valuable insights into social and environmental challenges posed by global and local change, globalization, poverty, modernization, and growth in the anthropocene. Its potential for improving inter-disciplinary and multi-scale understanding is discussed, notably by examination of human adaptation to bio-diversity and eco-system service change following the spread of Lantana camera in the Western Ghats, India

Developing cross-disciplinary education by facilitating collaboration within and between diverse teams

There is currently substantial interest within Higher Education in providing modules or courses that are interdisciplinary, or cross disciplinary boundaries in one way or another. A cross-disciplinary education may benefit both the student and the educator. Yet, developing such a cross-disciplinary offer is challenging when it requires collaboration between academics more familiar working within their own silos. Particularly so, when these colleagues are also dispersed across multiple sites. This article addresses this issue by offering a personal reflection on such an educational development at the University of Westminster

Norden, reframed

This paper calls for Norden to be understood as a metaframe. Related formulations like “Nordic art” or “Nordic welfare” function as mesoframes. These trigger multiple framing devices. A cache of related framing devices constitutes a framing archive. Framing devices work best when operating unobtrusively such that inclusions, exclusions and inconsistencies are condoned or naturalised. Their artifice, however, becomes apparent whenever a frame is questioned. Questioning or criticising a frame gives rise to a framing dispute. The theoretical justification for these typologies is provided at the outset. This schema is then applied to a select range of empirical examples drawn largely from the disciplinary frames (Ernst 1996) of art history and museum studies. Despite this specificity it is envisaged that the general principles set out below can and will be used to address a variety of devices, disputes and archives in Norden and beyond