Browsing by Subject "Interdisciplinary"
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Item Open Access Ambiguously Human: Questioning the Dichotomy between Human and Object(2016-04-25) Henderson, Kaitlin*Designated as an exemplary master's project for 2015-16*
How can bringing together different investigations of defining “human” as opposed to “object” generate new ideas and questions? I looked at a small group of publicly accessible explorations to examine this question from my own perspective and what I could learn of others’. I curated an installation at the Nasher, “Humanized Objects,” looking at objects featuring the human figure and questioning whether they thereby occupy an intermediary position between fully human or object, and gave several gallery talks. I also organized a film series showing “Wall-E,” “Ghost in the Shell,” “The Stepford Wives,” and “Ex Machina,” each of which contributed a unique angle on the question. The website, sites.duke.edu/AmbiguouslyHuman, framed the project and served as a central hub for information. It also hosted the blog where I offered more extended analyses of the components and highlighted other connections to the question. My findings have been informed by readings across several areas, particularly posthumanism and critical disability studies, as well as connections participants brought. The project met my hopes; I saw a reshaping of my understanding and sharpening of my questions. The generic human-object separation across investigations in this project, which I looked at largely through the body, is hierarchical as well as dichotomous, which contributes to the false insistence on a clean conceptual separation between the two categories. I had focused narrowly on the separation of “human” and “object,” but I found that boundary to be more overlapping than independent from other ones I excluded, such as human versus animal or the dehumanization of particular groups within humanity. The human-object boundary is indeed ambiguous, in many ways.Item Open Access Developing a Language for Applied Causal Analysis: The Assessment of Causal Networks in Interdisciplinary Research(2018) Turpin, Kyle JosephIntegration of disparate research fields has become a major concern in recent years due to the increasing complexity of the issues that face policy makers and researchers. Concerted efforts have therefore been initiated to remove the traditional barriers between research fields to allow for greater cooperation between policy makers and researchers, particularly in the fields of health, the environment, and development. The Bridge Collaborative is one such organization dedicated to facilitating this process through the use of results chains. However, because of a lack of experimental data or observational datasets traditionally endemic to interdisciplinary policy research, they lack an effective mechanism for analyzing causal dependence among network variables. The purpose of this thesis is therefore to create a method of analyzing causal relationships using expert knowledge that can still pass the rigorous tests necessary to assert causality in the traditional experimental and observational data approaches. Building upon previous work of statisticians, philosophers, and computer scientists, I create a question template that will allow a researcher to easily check and refine a causal network and explore alternatives to that network based on experience and elicited expert judgement alone. I then perform a case study using this template based on the work of the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) Catalyst project, a group initiative within the Bridge Collaborative, to review a causal network based on a systematic literature search. I conclude that a causal network can indeed be constructed, explored, and adjusted using logical reasoning and expert judgement—a finding that has implications for researchers seeking to create reliable models using causal networks as their base.
Item Open Access DISI: A Model for Practical Interdisciplinary Education and Social Impact(2014-04-25) Heller, DanielIntroduction Duke Interdisciplinary Social Innovators (DISI) is a model for organizing graduate students at universities to do interdisciplinary, problem-oriented projects for non-profit clients. In its first year, 149 students from eight different Duke graduate schools will complete 24 projects for North Carolina social organizations. Eighty-five percent of students and 100 percent of clients expressed satisfaction with their first semester DISI project experience. As a result, The Scholar Strategy Network (SSN) is exploring the possibility of expanding the model to other Universities and has asked me to answer the following question. Policy Question How can graduate students set up an interdisciplinary, client-oriented service organization? Recommendations: The MP analyzes the steps DISI’s Co-Founders took to set up DISI at Duke and their successes and failures. It is too early to tell if the model will work in the long term. However, others who want to set-up similar organizations at other universities should use the following steps: 1. Analyze the graduate education structure of their school, determine if interdisciplinary collaboration is possible, what form it will take, and who are the key stakeholders to invest in the idea. 2. Recruit student leaders, have student leaders meet with key university and community stakeholders to solicit funds, student recruiting relationships, and non-profit project relationships. 3. Visualize an organization structure and a project team structure, using information provided here as a guide. Consider the academic calendar and the student culture of all graduate schools. 4. Create initial branding material. Recruit a few initial projects and determine initial Skill Share events to entice student participation and help. 5. Have initial investment meeting to recruit student volunteers to help over the summer. These students are potentially the first executive board members. 6. Use summer to plan and begin to plan and execute student recruitment, partner recruitment, fund solicitation, and skill share events as possible. This could include creating materials, outreaching to orientation leaders to plan recruitment events, and e-mailing non-profits. 7. When the school year begins, execute student recruitment and project matching processes. This includes interviewing project managers. 8. Monitor progress, execute Skill Share events and social events. 1.3 Methodology My strategy for answering the policy question included the following four major components. 1. Background research and a review of the relevant literature. 2. Review of the interdisciplinary landscape at Duke and other schools. 3. Review of the steps DISI’s Co-founders took to start the organ Duke. 4. Review of preliminary DISI data.