Social background

  Reflecting the emergences of multifaceted problems worldwide, such as human security, environment and natural disaster, there are currently a lot of collaborative research projects which aim for “inter-discipline” or “integration” among humanities, natural and social sciences. Most of their actual collaborations or “integrations”, however, have not academically examined yet.

Objectives

  Applying project documentation method to several collaborative interdisciplinary research projects, this study tries to examine how the researchers from different backgrounds confront, struggle and overcome the difficulties during the process of interdisciplinary research projects which try to collaborate humanities, natural and social sciences.

Future plan and expected results

  I have already finished data collection of one collaborative research project, and prepare for publications of the result. In the study of environment and society in Indonesian forest area, for example, we found that the impeding factors for collaboration was not based on the difference of scientific disciplines but on the differences in background knowledge and attachment to the research fields. As a next step, I would like to focus on different type of research collaboration projects for opening up new insights. In addition, I will try to expand the focus into interdisciplinary education by similar attempts and providing practical guidelines for project design. I hope that this project will contribute to propose how to design the project for more meaningful research and educational collaborations.