SHAPE-ID member Prof Catherine Lyall was a keynote speaker at the University of Bologna's international…
SHAPE-ID at the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies Conference 2019
SHAPE-ID partners, Bianca Vienni, Jack Spaapen and Catherine Lyall, together with Expert Panel member Julie Klein, recently represented the project at the international Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (AIS) conference in Amsterdam. Hosted by the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies (24-26 October), the sold-out event attracted 30 different nationalities from five continents to exchange knowledge about interdisciplinarity in global contexts. This 41st annual meeting of the Association provided an invaluable vehicle for networking with world-leading scholars of interdisciplinary research and teaching and for disseminating information about emerging findings and future plans for the SHAPE-ID project.
Dr Vienni convened a panel titled Shaping interdisciplinary practices: integration and best practices for research and policy, which attracted a lot of attention. The panel included SHAPE-ID’s Jack Spaapen and Olga Pombo from the Philosophy of Science department of the University of Lisbon, and focused on the too often neglected topic of failure in collaborative research endeavours. The discussion explored the deeper meaning of the concept of failure in research, and also how to deal with this in funding and evaluation procedures. While failure is generally seen as having a negative impact on projects, it has also been recognised as a positive force that elucidates difficulties and obstacles and can help participating actors to find ways to overcome these.
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SHAPE-ID partners were also able to take advantage of the conference venue’s excellent workspace facilities to meet face-to-face to discuss and finalise some of the project’s early outputs.
Videos and presentations from the conference’s plenary sessions are now available on the AIS conference website.