Travelling Concepts on Air Season 2 has started

Season 2 of the podcast series Travelling Concepts on Air has started! In this podcast series, UYA members Dr. Brianne McGonigle Leyh and Dr. Tessa Diphoorn explore the promise and ideal of interdisciplinarity by looking at travelling concepts: concepts that travel within and across disciplines.

Every month, two scholars are invited to discuss a particular concept and explore how, if, and why such concepts have travelled. Season 1 contained 9 episodes, in which scholars from a wide range of disciplines discussed concepts such as time, war, diplomacy, heritage, and sustainability. In their first season, which has already been downloaded over 2600 times, Brianne and Tessa learned a lot about interdisciplinarity, and what is needed for interdisciplinarity to work. For example, an open-minded attitude to travelling and accepting different approaches to a particular concept is crucial. Furthermore, people need to have the time and space to engage in dialogues with scholars from other disciplines. In the introductory episode of Season 2, Brianne and Tessa elaborate on these issues and discuss their experiences from Season 1, such as the episodes they particularly enjoyed, the things that surprised them, and what they expect from Season 2.

Season 2 of Travelling Concepts on Air promises a great line-up of travelling concepts, including: sea level, surveillance, equilibrium, youth, and many more. The new season also features more guests from physical (beta) science. More importantly, Brianne and Tessa want to use the episodes from both seasons for educational purposes and find out what students learned from this, both about the understanding of the concept itself, but also about how interdisciplinarity works. In the first episode of Season 2, Dr. Peter Bijl and Dr. Paolo Stocchi discuss the concept of ‘sea level’: how complex is the concept and how differently is it used?

Listen to the introduction of Season 2 here, and listen to the first episode here.