A New Dawn in Academics
‘Econophysics’, ‘Biostatistics’, ‘Computational biology’ and so on! It seems a bit surprising that two subjects or disciplines, formally having no connection between them are now being conjugated or allied to form a newer discipline, a newer branch of knowledge. During the early days of human civilization and even during the medieval era there were academicians and researchers, who were at the same time philosophers and mathematicians or biologists as well as physicists. But as science and the humanities have progressed, especially after the renaissance, the question of specialization in academics has become profound and dominant. But again, after a long period of three-four hundred years, situations have come, where collaboration amongst different disciplines has become a demand of time for a more fundamental and epistemological contribution to the theory of knowledge.
Collaboration amongst several disciplines, thus, has now become a major issue in top-notch institutions all over the globe.
What are the core purposes and perspectives for this sort of study? What future do these have? Let’s have an eye on this:
Flexibility: Mitigating barriers among the institutions and the departments
Institutional elitism or sectarianism is a large barrier to the progress of academia. A faculty or a researcher of the top-notch department of a prestigious institution might have an elitist feeling of being intellectually superior, and thus may have a slight insolence towards a different discipline of the same or any other institution. Initiatives of integrating different disciplines, thus, require great flexibility among the teachers, students and researchers of different departments to work together.
Innovations: Attracting students and scholars
Interdisciplinary studies, although, sound very attractive, it is hard to make people interested in these. A student or scholar of any department having no idea of another discipline would only be attracted to collaboration if the faculties design such a curriculum (might be a syllabus or a research project) that attracts the students/ scholars from both disciplines. For example, one may take a research project on the Covid-19 pandemic that might attract scholars from both the biological science and the social sciences.
Developing Interdisciplinary Research & Thinking
Newly emerging problems, in both the spheres of the natural and the social sciences and even in the humanities sphere, have multi-dimensions; they are concerned about different disciplines, which have no connection at all. Herein lies, the relevance of interdisciplinary research and interdisciplinary thinking. Different subjects have different philosophies and thought processes, which are required to be integrated for addressing practical problems, the problems which retain the future of the progress of the civilization and even the human race.
