A researcher’s perspective

Paula Gardner

Associate Professor, Communication Studies and Multimedia, Faculty of Humanities

On MIRA and interdisciplinary research

"With an interdisciplinary approach, you try to find a common language across your methods, common objectives and goals. But a transdisciplinary method is when you combine all of your assumptions, objectives and desired outcomes to create a new method that integrates all of your disciplinary practices together. That’s a really tall order. For most of us, we’re simply not trained to do that.

A lot of times people see interdisciplinarity as an encumbrance because it slows you down as a researcher, and it will slow you down. It takes a lot of emotional labour; it takes extra time and very often that time spent can’t be quantified as an outcome on your CV, but it’s worth it.

Your methods become improved because you’re creating innovative methods that aren’t possible if you stay in a disciplinary practice. I do hear administrators discussing procedures to reward the extra time and labour that comes with this kind of collaboration, so I am hopeful that this kind of work is going to be better supported and rewarded at the university level in the future.

MIRA doesn’t just accommodate interdisciplinary research, they cultivate it. They’re leading the conversation on the benefits of interdisciplinary research, and how to create transdisciplinary methods."