Practicing Interdisciplinarity

In interdisciplinary projects and research collaborations, participants face multiple demands. However, these expectations encounter a reality that is characterized by time pressure, high demands in one's own discipline, and often increasingly administrative tasks. What can meaningful interdisciplinary work look like in an academic environment? What tasks and constraints do researchers face? And, considering the range of disciplines involved, how can interdisciplinary research projects be designed in a meaningful way? How does one meaningfully bring different disciplines, their methods and theories into conversation with each other across the spatial and temporal distance of their subjects? And all that in a way in which the yield is effective and visible in all subprojects?

This publication sheds light on this issue by way of example. It reflects on and formulates the experiences and yields of interdisciplinary work of a humanities and social science research training group with disciplinary breadth as well as historical depth. The disciplines involved are ancient history, archaeology, art history, music didactics, North American history, patristics, philology (Latin/Greek studies), religious studies, sociology, and theology with the subjects Old and New Testament. In pairs of experienced and young scholars, individual experiences and identifiable results of interdisciplinary work in the respective contribution or research project are recorded as well as discipline-specific results and problems and, on a third level, collective experiences with joint interdisciplinary research. The contributions take a variety of forms: reflections, dialogues, experience reports as well as perspective observations.

Rafael Barroso Romero, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, Elisabeth Begemann, Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt, Germany, Enno Friedrich, University of Rostock, Germany, Elena Malagoli, Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt, Germany, Anna-Katharina Rieger, University of Graz, Austria, Jörg Rüpke, Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt, Germany, Ramón Soneira Martínez, Austrian Archaeological Institute Vienna, Austria, Markus Vinzent, Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt, Germany.