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Collaborative Processes in Transdisciplinary Research

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Converging Disciplines

Abstract

It has been widely acknowledged in recent years that if we are to achieve a coherent comprehension of the world and its enormous social, environmental, and public health problems we must make linkages between bodies of scientific knowledge and the social and political realities that generate them. Nearly eight decades after Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset noted the limits of specialization and the organization of knowledge into rigidly defined disciplinary boundaries, transdisciplinary (TD) collaboration is coming to be recognized as an essential strategy for understanding and resolving the complex urban public health challenges of our time (e.g., health disparities, AIDS, and heart disease).

The specialization, then, that has made possible the progress of experimental science during a century, is approaching a stage where it can no longer continue its advance unless a new generation undertakes to provide it with a more powerful form of turnspit …. For science needs from time to time, as a necessary regulator of its own advance, a labour of reconstitution, and as I have said, this demands an effort towards unification, which grows more and more difficult, involving, as it does, ever-vaster regions of the world of knowledge.

– José Ortega y Gasset (1930/1932) “The Barbarism of Specialization,” The Revolt of the Masses

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the editors for the helpful comments on earlier versions of the chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA

    Shalini Misra

  2. School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Shalini Misra, Kara Hall, Annie Feng, Brooke Stipelman & Daniel Stokols

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  1. Shalini Misra
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Correspondence to Shalini Misra .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Ontario Tobacco Research Unit, College St. 155, Toronto, M5T 3M7, Ontario, Canada

    Maritt Kirst

  2. Centre for Research on Inner City Health, St. Michael's Hospital, Bond Street 30, Toronto, M5B 1W8, Ontario, Canada

    Nicole Schaefer-McDaniel

  3. St. Michael's Hospital, Bond Street 30, Toronto, M5B 1W8, Ontario, Canada

    Stephen Hwang

  4. St. Michael's Hospital, Bond Street 30, Toronto, M5B 1W8, Ontario, Canada

    Patricia O'Campo

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Misra, S., Hall, K., Feng, A., Stipelman, B., Stokols, D. (2011). Collaborative Processes in Transdisciplinary Research. In: Kirst, M., Schaefer-McDaniel, N., Hwang, S., O'Campo, P. (eds) Converging Disciplines. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6330-7_8

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