Best Practices for Interdisciplinarity

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The purpose of this project is to advance interdisciplinarity in the social and behavioral sciences by identifying, examining, and recommending best practices for its development. The potential for transformative results from innovative interdisciplinary initiatives across the social and behavioral sciences, if they could be implemented and sustained, is widely noted. There are specific examples of success, but the challenges of mounting or expanding interdisciplinary work have too infrequently been met -- whether for research administrators, for scholars and teachers, and for graduate students.A Task Force, itself interdisciplinary, will be formed to collect and disseminate best practices for promoting interdisciplinary research and teaching. The task force will focus on the procedural side of best practices at universities - including incentives (and disincentives) for faculty to engage in this work, the organizational structures that are effective in sustaining it, ways to disseminate resulting scholarship across and within the disciplines, processes that help to sustain interdisciplinary work, techniques to educate students and scholars to work effectively in an interdisciplinary approaches, and collaborate alliances with disciplinary associations. Results will be widely disseminated through disciplinary associations, to academic departments, and through societies such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science and networks of research vice-presidents, such as that at the American Association of Universities.A key merit of this project is its emphasis on interdisciplinary practices that are successive, can be implemented by the institutions addressed, and are compatible with building sustained research careers. Broader impacts will follow from the active program to disseminate what is learned in this effort, and of course then from improved interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching that will flow from their adoption.