Organizing Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue in Academia:
Debating Complexity and Organic Development at Singapore Management University
Markus Karner
Summary

Here I describe the experience of setting up a discussion group involving members from a wide range of disciplines in the social and natural sciences. The overarching theme of the group is complexity theory, and the debates take place at Singapore Management University. In bi-weekly meetings, researchers from the fields of economics, management, political sciences, philosophy, religion, physics, and biology, discuss issues related to complexity, chaos, dynamical systems, evolution, and organic development.

To foster cross-disciplinary understanding, the group chooses one scholarly article for each meeting to debate the oftentimes diverse meanings ascribed to both vocabularies and concepts across the research cultures. I describe our experience with the format of the group discussions, their challenges, and how to overcome them.

Cross-disciplinary approaches often meet practical limits because participants have to “step out” of their original fields of expertise and risk exposure to easy criticism when venturing into subject areas unfamiliar to them. At the same time, knowledge of analogous approaches across disciplines is essential for maximum knowledge distribution.