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Our team has three members. Rosalind Beaumont is the Interdisciplinary Training Lead at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) of Durham University. Chung-Yen Cheng and Zander Simpson (joining at the end of March) are the PGR interns. This team is supported by NINE DTP and IAS, with the goal of designing training courses for doctoral students and their supervisors who are doing interdisciplinary research.

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Today we are gathering NINE DTP students' experience with interdisciplinary research. Whether or not you are an interdisciplinary scholar is completely up to self identification and we are not going to judge you. You can think about three things.

1. your motivation for doing interdisciplinary research

2. your expectations for interdisciplinary research

3. The success and challenges of doing interdisciplinary research

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(You can use this format to create your profile)

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(You can use this format to create your profile)

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Pathway and Intitution: Human Geography at Durham University. 2nd year PhD student. NINE DTP 3.5 (started in 2023)

My research: I explore people's experience with qi-based holistic medicine in Taiwan and Northeast England. Qi is 'life force energy' in Chinese. Holistic therapies that are based on this concept include Tai Chi, acupuncture, cupping, reiki, shiatsu, Chinese herbal medicine, etc.

My experience doing interdisciplinary research: People ask me a lot how this topic is related to geography, so I guess my research is inherently interdisciplinary. My research took this direction by accident to be honest. My initial interest was the philosophical theories around qi, but then I realized to make qi feel more tangible it needs to be pinned down in real life practices, such as holistic medicine. So that is why I started to appear more as a medical anthropologist.

I am lucky to have found Insitute of Medical Humanities and some medical anthropologists at Durham who share similar interest. However, I am still struggling to 'sell' this research to medical reesarchers. Or maybe there isn't a need to cater to everyone's taste? We will find out.

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I'm an Interdisciplinary Training Lead and Project Lead for this ESRC-funded project between Durham's Institute of Advanced Study and NINEDTP.

I am also a Senior Lecturer in Education and Researcher Development at Newcastle University.

Having worked across disciplines and contexts in the area of academic and researcher development for a number of years, I'm fascinated by interdisciplinary learning and research, and how it can be best supported - and that's why I'm leading this project!

Much of my practice in recent years has focussed on the co-creation of learning experiences with students and how valuable co-creation can be in different ways. It's why we have recruited two PGR interns and also are seeking your views to inform and guide what we create. Thank you in advance for your contribution - it is greatly appreciated.

You can read more about my work, scholarship and professional interests:

https://www.ncl.ac.uk/school-x/staff/profile/rosalindbeaumont.html

and

https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/rosalind-m-beaumont/

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Pathway & Institution:
I am pursuing an MRes PhD funded by the NINE DTP scholarship at Ulster University. My research follows an interdisciplinary pathway, integrating psychology and health sciences to address critical issues in mental health.

My Research:
My PhD focuses on prolonged grief, utilising quantitative data analysis from large Irish and UK datasets. I examine the psychological mechanisms underlying grief/ prolonged grief disorder and its associations with somatisation, sleep disturbances, and other effects, contributing to a deeper understanding of mental health outcomes.

My Experience Doing Interdisciplinary Research:
Engaging in interdisciplinary research has allowed me to integrate psychological theory with advanced quantitative methods. This approach has enriched my perspective, enabling me to address complex mental health challenges through a multifaceted lens.

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Name: Anas N. Almassri

Pathway and Institution: Education at Durham University; 3.5 scheme (2021-2025)

Research: I work with critical realism to explore how international higher education scholarships may be relevant to peace in Palestine. My broader research interests are in the political sociology of international higher education.

Interdisciplinary Research Experience: My research synthesizes stances, theories, and concepts drawn from the fields of International Relations and International Education. For example, my doctoral research works out the dynamic interaction between educational impact generated through international scholarships and the forces of peace and conflict in Palestine. This interaction is first explored through the lens of International Education and then theorized through the lens of International Relations. Like Chung-Yen, I am still to persuade colleagues in the field of International Relations of the significance of this research to their work on issues of peace and conflict.

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Pathway and Institution: Psychology at Northumbria University, 1st year.

My Research: I'm looking into how theories of joint action [cognitive psychology] can explain and predict pedestrian yielding behaviour ('giving way') to inform microscopic crowd simulations [computer science].

My experience doing interdisciplinary research: I'm fairly new to doing interdisciplinary research. Currently, the biggest lesson I've learned is that different disciplines emphasise different aspects of research, some of which were a surprise to me. For example, in psychology we'd like our models to be as true to life as possible and a lot of our work is grounded in explaining behaviour. When you take this idea to a computer science context like crowd simulation, there has to be a computational trade off, and so thinking about how to shape my work so that both disciplines benefit from the research equally is challenging.

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Amy Oke (Oke = pronounced like the tree)

Pathway and Institution: Environmental planning, with a secondary pathway in human geography at Queen's University Belfast. 1+3 student (started 2022).

My research: I look at how planners in Northern Ireland engage with religious groups (Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Muslim and Orthodox Christian) when planning for deathscapes. Deathscapes in this context includes cemeteries, crematoriums, and scattering grounds.

My experience doing interdisciplinary research: My research is classified as interdisciplinary by the DTP as I draw together debates and perspectives from geography and planning. But it goes beyond even that! In addition to planning and geography literatures, I'm synthesising material from politics, cultural studies, economics, and sociology. A lot of people assume I'm in archeology too, given my focus is the dead.

I really love the interdisciplinary nature of my research, I love seeing things in new ways and learning from other disciplines. However, I find people are skeptical on how my research fits into their discipline. Preconceptions of what a discipline should 'be' can be limiting, especially for training opportunities.

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Pathway: Conflict, Security and Justice, Newcastle University

Emily Faux is a PhD Candidate at Newcastle University, UK.  Her thesis, Telling Stories: Imagining Nuclear Weapons and War, seeks to understand popular imaginaries of nuclear weapons and war. Fictional narratives are largely ignored in the study of nuclear weapons and war, yet fictional narratives provide a source of knowledge about nuclear weapons and war and -more importantly, she argues - can shape the future of nuclear weapons and war. Telling stories advances creative research methodologies in Security Studies and deepens interdisciplinary understandings of narratives and fictionality. Her published articles navigate popular film, television, memes and social media posts in relation to nuclear weapons politics. In addition to her PhD research, Emily teaches Visual Communication at the University of Leeds, UK, and is working as a research assistant on a project which investigates the relationship between sport and popular geopolitics.

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Pathway: Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work. 1st year PhD candidate in Sociology and Social Policy at Durham University.

My research: My research focuses on the collective protection of women human rights defenders in Brazilian traditional communities, using participatory action research.

My experience doing interdisciplinary research: I have been doing interdisciplinary research since my masters. I am a Brazilian lawyer with experience in human rights law, who has been working with human rights defenders/activists. Since starting my PhD, I have been engaged in events and discussions in my department, particularly those centered on participatory research, qualitative methods, and community engagement. While I appreciate the sociological focus, I would like to engage more with legal discussions, as my research is interdisciplinary. I understand this also comes from "physical" departmental barriers. I am trying to find ways to integrate the legal aspects of my research question, making it more ‘socio-legal’.

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I'm a first-stage PhD student in Politics at Newcastle University with Nine Dtp scholarship. My Nine pathway is Children, Youth and families.

My project examines genital mutilation in non-consenting minors: female genital mutilation, male circumcision and intersex surgery. I'm investigating the legal and moral distinction made by western societies that denounce FGM in other countries but accept the other two practices.

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Orla Kerrigan

Institution and pathway: I am a second year PhD student funded by the NINE DTP scholarship at Ulster University Belfast.

My research: I research conflict related sexual violence (CRSV) during the Troubles 1964-1998 in Northern Ireland (NI) and its long-term impacts for survivors and the wider community. It is unique in that it includes state and non-state perpetrators, and it challenges the framing and conceptualisation of what constitutes CRSV and NI’s position as ‘post-conflict’.

My experience doing interdisciplinary research: whenever I talk about my research, one of the first questions I usually get is “and which department are you in again/what discipline are you doing this in?” So like many others in the group, it feels like my work is inherently interdisciplinary. I have found that by crossing the boundaries between (mostly) criminology, sociology and social policy, I have been able to take examples of best practise throughout the social sciences and weave it into my ethics and methodology to create the best possible research.  I’m definitely still learning though!

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Our team has three members. Rosalind Beaumont is the Interdisciplinary Training Lead at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) of Durham University. Chung-Yen Cheng and Zander Simpson (joining at the end of March) are the PGR interns. This team is supported by NINE DTP and IAS, with the goal of designing training courses for doctoral students and their supervisors who are doing interdisciplinary research.

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We have held an information gathering session with supervisors near the end of last year. Using the data gathered in that session, we created a workshop in early March this year to train the supervisors to become better supporters for interdisciplinary research. This was a trial workshop, which means the results will be evaluated then we will revise the content and potentially make it something regular that NINE DTP can provide for their students.

So we are going to do the same to PGRs -- information gathering first, then workshops.