Interdisciplinarity: a recipe for curiosity
What do cooking and academia have in common? In this Utrecht Young Academy blog, dr. Karin Jongsma, Assistant Professor of Bioethics, discusses how exploring interdisciplinary research might require learning new ‘recipes’.
“Just like cooking, much of what we do in academia strongly depends on preparation, ensuring you have the right amount and mix of ingredients, following the right methods, a lot of waiting involved between being semi-finished and done and the excitement is greater when shared with nice company. Being trained in a specific discipline may, when following this analogy, mean that you are specialized in the cuisine of a specific region or tradition. By following the described steps repeatedly, and after some failed experiments, you eventually become familiar with how science is conducted within a discipline, school or study field and how you should ‘bake’ your work to get published, secure grants and/or be respected by your peers.
How can we know that moving between different cuisines isn’t going to be as awful as pineapple on pizza?
Some may be happy to stick to those steps that have proven successful. Yet, for others there is a bunch of exotic ingredients, different cuisines and methods outside of the familiar cooking book to explore. Similar to cooking new cuisines, exploring interdisciplinary work may be scary: how do you work with methods that aren’t ‘yours’ and how can we know that moving between different cuisines isn’t going to be as awful as pineapple on pizza? The honest answer is: you never know upfront, and surely it is an investment to learn how other study fields work and how they may fit to yours.
Yet, interdisciplinarity also involves trying out other methods, learning new concepts and theories that can help to improve your scientific skills, may help to reflect critically on (the boundaries) of your own study field, or may simply stimulate your curiosity. And the best thing is: exploring such new cuisines often result in being in good company.”
Karin Jongsma, PhD. Member of the Utrecht Young Academy. Assistant Professor Bioethics.