academy for irish cultural heritages - Research - University of Ulster

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1. Foreword by the Pro Vice Chancellor (Research and Innovation) I am delighted to welcome readers to our annual reports from University of Ulster Research Institutes. We have had an excellent year marked by great achievements in recruiting superb researchers to academic and research posts, attracting external income and completing work that has led to highly prestigious papers, books and other outputs. There has been a very strong flow of research findings as new disclosures to our Office of Innovation. These are being managed as promising new intellectual property and that Office also ensures that the expertise of our staff is accessed by external organisations through consultancy contracts. Overall our Institutes provide high quality research environments that are strongly supportive of research. Our achievements point to improved research capacity and capability amongst the University’s staff – the best possible training environments for our increasing number of research students. We are very proud of every student who graduates with a doctoral degree and delighted that our statistics for successful completion rank very highly in UK national comparisons. This past year was marked by final preparations for the forthcoming UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). The work to be submitted for RAE has been underway since 2001, so some of it is detailed in the current Annual Reports. The University is proud of the quality of its RAE submission and looks forward confidently to the announcement of outcomes at the end of 2008. The enhanced research performance of recent years is in line with that planned for in our Strategy and Action Plan for Research, Research Training and Innovation, entitled SUPPORTIVe 1 . Developed through comprehensive, university-wide consultation, SUPPORTIVe articulates our commitment to ensuring that research at the University of Ulster fully supports our goals summarized as ‘excellence, innovation and regional engagement’. I commend this report to you as a demonstration that University of Ulster research ranks proudly amongst UK institutions; documents, analyses and shapes the modern Northern Ireland and attracts international recognition and awards. Professor Bernie Hannigan Pro Vice Chancellor (Research & Innovation) 1 http://research.ulster.ac.uk/office/supportive.pdf
2. Foreword by the Research Institute Director 2004-2009 Interdisciplinary research is the primary focus of the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages (AICH), which was established with SPUR funding in December 2000. In setting up the Academy, the University of Ulster was making a key commitment to originality and innovation in scholarship and research in the field of cultural heritages, both Irish and international. But how is interdisciplinary research defined, and why is it so confusing Many established researchers find it difficult to cope with terms such as ‘inter-’ and ‘multidisciplinarity’, but clearly they are not the same. A multidisciplinary project draws on several disciplines, but it does not radically re-define the theoretical canon of any single discipline. A multidisciplinary research team may involve researchers from several different disciplines. However, each researcher may continue to operate with rigour within his or her own disciplinary framework. In such circumstances, it is the combination of single-disciplinary skills and insights that generates a multidisciplinary outcome, but usually one can recognize distinctive disciplinary contributions in the end product. In contrast, an interdisciplinary project works across disciplines and breaks down traditional subject boundaries. An interdisciplinary assignment can, in theory, be completed by a single individual who works across different disciplines and combines methodologies in a radically new manner. The result, however, may be very difficult to attribute to any single-disciplinary framework. Interdisciplinary research may eventually generate new fields of research which cannot be easily classified within the current disciplinary framework. The difference between the two approaches was noted in the Academy report last year. I drew attention to a response in the post-RAE 1996 consultation process which pointed out that many projects described as interdisciplinary in the previous assessment would ‘more properly be termed “multidisciplinary”, since they bring together researchers from different subject disciplines on projects which essentially do not re-draw the subject map.’ That response identified other characteristics of interdisciplinarity: ‘where researchers work between and across disciplines, drawing innovatively on the subject matter and methodologies of more than one subject, or where a larger body of work which is similarly based has claims to be treated as a discrete emerging discipline in its own right’. Generally speaking, clearly defined disciplines have institutional status and privilege. They are easy for institutions to cope with. Interdisciplinary research is more difficult to characterize and support institutionally – although ultimately such research may generate entirely new and paradigm-shifting results. The Irish geographer Anne Buttimer, in her analysis of the life-cycles of various disciplines, once characterized the early stages of an emerging field of research as the Phoenix period ‘when new life emerges from the ashes with prospects for a fresh beginning’. This emancipatory movement can involve a cry for freedom from oppression or constitute an attempt ‘to soar to new heights of understanding, being and becoming’. It is usually followed by a ‘Faustian’ disciplining of the field in the process of gaining legitimacy in academic circles. Energies are directed towards ‘the building of structures, institutions and legal guarantees for their autonomous existence and identity.’ (Buttimer 1992: 43)
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