The Interdisciplinary Nature-Induced Disaster Index: Eldgjá, Laki, and How to Evaluate Historical Sources in an Interdisciplinary Framework

The integration of archives of society with archives of nature has helped scholars to date extreme events precisely. This approach has led to collaboration between the natural sciences and the humanities. While it has helped to highlight the dimensions of nature-induced disasters and their societal consequences, it has often led to rather monocausal explanations, promoting nature as the prime agent in history. The field is currently experiencing a shift away from monocausal explanations. Cultural factors need to be examined as well in order to analyze their contribution to disasters properly. To aid in this endeavor, we introduce the “Interdisciplinary Nature-Induced Disaster index” (INID-index), a tool to successfully integrate historical material into research on natural extreme events and their impacts on past societies. Eldgjá (ca. 934–940 CE) and Laki (1783–1784 CE)—the two major Icelandic eruptions of the Common Era—will be used as case studies to demonstrate the benefits of the index. A third contrasting study on a volcanic event in around 913 CE highlights the desiderata that the index can indicate, and its limitations. We consider this paper an offer to make transparent the questions that historians ask themselves and an example of a way to increase understanding across disciplinary cultures.

Ruptures and Wrong-Footings: Destabilizing Disciplinary Cultures

In this transcribed conversation, three artists from the research group The Cultural Negotiation of Science (UK) consult each other on the different generational perspectives they bring to the contested field of arts-science research. Traversing territories between art-practice, physics, genetics and critical theory, their practice-based strategies actively destabilize the binary nature of cross-disciplinary dialogue in productive ways, allowing the spaces between artistic and scientific modes of enquiry to become sites of learning, both within and beyond academic institutions.

The Writing Mentoring Program:

In 2013, the University of Vienna’s Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) implemented a pilot project, which has since grown to become the core of the university’s academic writing services for students. The writing mentoring programme was designed with the goal to create a means for disseminating knowledge about writing processes amongst students in earlier stages of their studies. The programme’s organisational structure is based on the experience that, to ensure scalability, an institution as large as the University of Vienna (approx. 90.000 students) needs to rely on multipliers and on the cooperation of stakeholders in its many academic departments. Regarding the writing mentoring programme, this translates into a focus on the processes of academic writing and sensitivity towards disciplinary cultures. In this position paper, we aim to demonstrate how writing mentoring can be implemented to provide structures which allow advanced Bachelor and Master-students to support other students’ academic writing in meaningful ways. In this way, a programme like ours can help in transforming organisational practices.

Disziplinäre Entdifferenzierung durch Leistungsbewertung? Der Fall Geschichtswissenschaft in Großbritannien

The contribution examines whether systematic research assessments go hand in hand with a dedifferentiation of disciplinary cultures. The case of application for this question is the British Research Excellence Framework (REF). The analysis reveals that history departments in the upper rank groups of the REF publish first and foremost articles in high impact journals, while those departments that are not rewarded by the assessment publish mainly contributions to edited volumes. The contribution concludes that research assessments that are generically applied across disciplines and that are both symbolically and materially efficacious go hand in hand with a dedifferentiation of disciplinary cultures in terms of publication activities.

Ensuring Equity: Graduate Education as a Site of Strategic Intervention in Disciplinary Cultures

Despite targeted recruitment efforts, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) remain severely underrepresented in STEM graduate programs in the United States. As a result, the pool of scientists eligible to hold faculty positions remains overwhelmingly white. Increasing recruitment without addressing the underlying aspects of disciplinary cultures that reproduce systems of oppression is insufficient and short-sighted. Graduate programs socialize the next generation of scholars into disciplinary cultures by implicitly and explicitly communicating racialized and gendered ideas about what it means to be a good scientist. As a result, graduate education offers a critical opportunity to disrupt and transform science by interrogating disciplinary norms and values that guide decision-making, expanding definitions of scientific excellence, and providing scientists with holistic mentorship and varied forms of social support. Graduate programs must be intentionally retooled to support the persistence and well-being of BIPOC graduate students in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University.

The Influence of Tertiary Education Disciplines on Self-Construals and Conflict Management Tendencies

While cultural difference on self-construal are well-documented, how acculturation to a new cultural environment could change an individual’s self-construal remains under-explored. In this research, how tertiary education disciplines could be associated with the endorsement of self-construals which, in turn, affect students’ conflict management tendencies were explored. Study 1 revealed that across the United States and Singapore, college students from business and social science disciplines exhibited the trend of endorsing more independent and interdependent self-construal respectively, regardless of the different dominant self-construals in the two countries. Study 2 explored how tertiary education disciplines is associated with individuals’ conflict management tendencies via the endorsement of different self-construals among Singaporeans. Findings showed that individuals from business discipline possess a more independent self-construal and in turn endorsed more of a competing conflict management style than those from social sciences. Different disciplinary cultures could link to conflict management tendencies via the endorsement of self-construals, yielding significant theoretical and practical implications.

The intertextual nature of embedded email communication for contract negotiation activities

Emails have become the institutionalised communication medium for many discourse activities in work contexts. Sociolinguistic research in this area has mainly focused on the textual and communicative conventions of emails, as defined by disciplinary cultures and practices. This study is the first to analyse the intertextual nature of email communication for commercial contract negotiation purposes, with a particular focus on the communicative function of embedded emails. This concept relates to a genre of email discourse, which embeds the meaning of a series of messages generated by different participants in response to the original email, hence the name ‘embedded emails’. This study uses discourse and genre analysis to examine how a geographically dispersed team of legal and business professionals in Europe exploited the dialogic nature of embedded emails to negotiate amendments to contracts pertaining to an international Merger & Acquisition (M&A) transaction in English. The findings of this study show that embedded emails facilitate transparent collaboration between the individual professionals, by enabling them to monitor the exchange of proposals and counter-proposals during the negotiation process. This documented ability to trace and participate in contract negotiation activities through intertextual chains of embedded email communication is a key feature of professional communicative competence.

5. Opposing Cultures

Marianne Høyen and Mumiah Rasmusen explore C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ perspective of education through interviews with four newly trained teachers about to enter the profession for the first time. They ask what professionalism means within their disciplines and examine how childhood and family influences shape the desire to teach. It is clear that disciplinary cultures are firmly embedded, because the humanity students offer ‘why’ responses to questions, the scientists ‘how’ responses.