This chapter grapples with a major tension in interdisciplinary Turkish/Middle Eastern area studies, comparative politics, and the study of religion and politics: namely, how to deal with the persistence of Orientalist explanations despite their explanatory poverty. It does so via an intellectual history, identifying three “waves” or logics via which analysts and practitioners have sought to reckon with Orientalist binaries and their limitations. The chapter argues that today, a third wave within which this project is situated, seeks to dispense with Orientalism and Occidentalism alike toward making clear-eyed sense of the complex, interacting forces that shape politics in Muslim-majority countries, like anywhere else.

Artists, natural philosophers, and architects in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century northern Europe regarded images and image-making as sources of knowledge. Diverse practitioners of art, architecture, and natural philosophy – from artists Albrecht Dürer and Martin Schongauer to medical practitioner Walther Hermann Ryff and natural historian Conrad Gessner – used images to revive Vitruvius’s vision of architecture as both art and science, for instance in collaborating to complete the Strasbourg Astronomical Clock in 1574. Architectural ornament came to act as a model for visualizing nature’s regular forms and systems, playing a vital role in the revival of such Vitruvian interdisciplinarity. That process, in turn, prompted early modern architects and designers of architectural ornament to combine artistic and scientific techniques of visual research, a phenomenon exemplified in Dietterlin’s Architectura treatise.

This chapter provides an introduction to the Cambridge Handbook of Bilingual Phonetics and Phonology, and emphasizes the interdisciplinarity of the scholarship included in the Handbook, which contributes to the diversity of approaches, to theory-building, and to the collaborative connections that are enhancing the field. The abstracts of each of the thirty-five chapters are also included and are followed by concluding remarks providing a roadmap for the future of research on bilingual phonetics and phonology.

The introduction articulates the topic of the book, explains the book’s methodology and interdisciplinary approach, and introduces the chapter contents.

By arguing for an earlier development of the research university, this book questions previous accounts that have seen the state or the corporation as the main drivers of the making of research. Whereas other accounts see a turn toward useful knowledge as a corrective to the overly bookish or pedantic knowledge of professors, academics themselves reformed scholarly approaches both in opposition to their academic forebears and to the entanglement of knowledge with use. Both theory and practice could be a bias. This book highlights the research university as a place to cultivate and protect critical thinking from political and economic pressure. Even proponents of useful knowledge adopted academic techniques because by improving the quality of knowledge they made it more useful. The early modern development of dynamic epistemic superstructures suggests approaches to interdisciplinarity and continuing knowledge change today. The book encourages academics to participate in knowledge reforms from a position of epistemic humility and a self-critical search for biases. It proposes how curation of knowledge still represents a viable approach, but one that could be reformulated to address the biases of the past.

In this introduction to the Handbook of DOHaD and Society, we provide an overview of the biosocial research field of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). We first trace the evolution of this interdisciplinary field over the past two decades, charting the historical conditions that have brought DOHaD to a critical moment when the field is at a threshold of interdisciplinary innovation across both life and social sciences. We then discuss the biosocial perspective that DOHaD offers as its central premise and promise, allowing for questions of socio-environmental justice, discrimination, and equity to be centred in science and biomedicine. We explore the challenges that complicate this biosocial agenda in practice and attend to questions of research translation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the socio-cultural dimensions of DOHaD-based health interventions. We end by highlighting the transformational potential of the DOHaD research paradigm and how this handbook offers a toolkit for robust interdisciplinary research in this field.

This chapter, written by a founder of the field and a historian with a long-term interest in DOHaD, examines the key (long) decade in the history of DOHaD, bookended by two conferences: one in 1989 and the other in 2003. At the 1989 workshop, David Barker presented his retrospective epidemiological research to an audience of fetal physiologists and clinicians. Discussions about the plausibility and underlying mechanisms of Barker’s findings fostered new research collaborations, methodologies, and projects, which over the next decade produced a new field. By 2003, DOHaD had grown sufficiently in both numbers and ambitions to host a major global conference. This chapter argues that to understand the objectives, methods, research questions, and intellectual networks making the field of DOHaD, the reactions that it provoked, and how it responded to them, we must understand the historical and geographical context in which it was created, first in Europe, especially the United Kingdom, and then globally. Here we identify and explain three key drivers that shaped the field: interdisciplinarity, the history of social class and attempts to address health inequalities in the United Kingdom, and the globalisation of the 1990s informing the intellectual underpinnings of the global health agenda.

Demystifying Treaty Interpretation doesn’t just tell you how treaties are commonly interpreted. It helps you understand the process of treaty interpretation and its outcomes. The idea that rules of treaty interpretation can guide us to the meaning of treaty provisions, in a simple and straightforward manner, is a myth to be dispelled. This book aims to capture some of the complex and nuanced processes involved in treaty interpretation. It spurs further reflection about how interpretation takes place against the background of concepts, categories, and insights from other disciplines. A useful tool for scholars, practitioners, and researchers engaging with treaty interpretation at all levels, the book aims to enhance the reader’s knowledge and mastery of the interpretive process in all its elements, with a view to making them more skilled and effective players in the game of interpretation.

The relationship between academic freedom and knowledge production is examined in in this chapter. Various contested constructions of knowledge within and across the different geographical contexts and by discipline are critically interrogated, and the implications of these constructions are considered for pedagogy, research, and understanding of academic freedom. As such, conceptions of knowledge invoke particular conceptions of the value of education and its aims. This is examined in relation to neoliberal discourses of skills, impact and marketability, positionality, and decolonisation of knowledge initiatives. The temporal and geographical positionality of knowledge is critically interrogated, recognising the Western hegemony of knowledge and its production, calling for the need to situate knowledge sociopolitically and historically. This necessitates the recognition that academic freedom is similarly situated in space and time, with discussions of examples across the four national contexts. Debates surrounding the organisation and gatekeeping of knowledge through the disciplines and the rise of interdisciplinarity are also addressed in this chapter.

What might the medical humanities be capable of doing?’ asked Viney, Callard, and Woods in their 2015 call for a critical medical humanities. This chapter endeavours to answer that question by investigating how ‘the literary’ is mobilized in health-focused projects whose commitment to interdisciplinary entanglement renders them exemplary of the field’s critical turn. We interviewed seven UK-based literary studies scholars about their work in two or more such projects in order to understand how ‘the literary’ (as discipline, approach, and praxis) features within project design and delivery, the roles taken up by the literary studies scholar, and the consequent effects on shared understandings about the functions of the literary text. One of the most striking findings of this exploratory study was the interviewees’ determination for the literary text to be considered in non-representational terms and concurrent commitment to championing novel articulations of the value and ‘use’ of literary endeavour.

This chapter revisits Thomas Kuhn’s argument about an essential tension between tradition and innovation as a driver of scientific progress. It shows that Kuhn’s argument builds on a number of assumptions about the practices of science that held for past science conducted by individuals working within isolated disciplines, and argues that it does therefore not necessarily hold for the increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary science we see today. Examining different types of organization into teams, the chapter discusses how changes in the granularity of collaboration affect Kuhn’s essential tension argument.