Another year has gone by very fast and Ideas in ALL is now a lively three year old “toddler”! The blog was set up on 3 December 2020, amidst the pandemic, to support the dissemination of the Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute’s multi- and interdisciplinary research. Since the outset, Ideas in ALL has grown significantly, offering ALL members and collaborators opportunities to showcase their projects in an accessible and reader-friendly way. It also engages a range of stakeholders to help make their voices heard, to reflect on current issues and highlight their lived experiences.
Author:Eva Krolla, Research Assistant in the ERC-funded DANCING Project at the School of Law and Criminology and Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute, Maynooth University
DANCING Mid-Term Academic Conference speakers
The European Research Council (ERC) funded research project ‘Protecting the Right to Culture of Persons with Disabilities and Enhancing Cultural Diversity in EU Law: Exploring New Paths – DANCING’ based at the ALL Institute and the School of Law and Criminology under the lead of Principal Investigator Prof. Delia Ferri marked its halfway point by hosting the DANCING Mid-Term Academic Conference on Monday, 4 September 2023 at Maynooth University.
Author: Dr Nicola Mountford, Assistant Professor, School of Business, Maynooth University
Nicola Mountford
Opening Doors is a collaborative, interdisciplinary, intersectoral and international learning experience for early career researchers in Open Science and Open Innovation – applicable to all academic disciplines. As the project to develop and pilot this learning experience draws to a close, I reflect on my own learning experience as one of the principal investigators within the consortium.
Opening Doors, is an EU-funded co-ordination action aimed to research and develop a learning experience and networking opportunity for early career researchers using open, online resources. Specifically, our proposal said that we would focus on open science and open innovation. The first time our consortium met – Maynooth University (MU),Aarhus University (Denmark), the National Training Fund (Czech Republic), and UCD (Lead) – we spent a surprising amount of time discussing what open science and open innovation meant to the various partners. Coming from the School of Business, I had a good sense of what was meant by open innovation – as Chesbrough put it, “a more distributed, more participatory, more decentralized approach to innovation”. When it came to defining open science, however, I struggled. Following the definition of open innovation, open science presumably indicated a more distributed, more participatory, more decentralized approach to science. But, when we speak of open innovation, we tend to see industry-based innovators reaching into academia and across the general public. Open science seemed to require that we academics return the favour.
Authors: Kate Rochford, 3rd Year Undergraduate Intern, Department of Psychology, Maynooth University & Mac MacLachlan, Co-Director of the Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute, Maynooth University and Clinical Lead for Disability Services, Irish Health Service (HSE).
This figure illustrates the concept of disciplinary capture whereby one way of thinking (represented by one single text here) determines how people think about an issue. Like a whirlwind, it can often powerfully funnel thinking, ignoring the range of ideas available within the group, which otherwise may provide useful alternatives or additions to proposed actions. Image by Kate Rochford
Introduction An interdisciplinary approach to research has become increasingly popular when dealing with different topics (Aboelela et al., 2007). Such an approach can offer a more comprehensive or holistic perspective and is most suited to addressing real-world complex issues (Repko et al., 2017). However, while interdisciplinary collaboration may be appealing in theory, it is often difficult in practice (Cummings and Kiesler, 2007). In that regard, we believe that the concept of ‘disciplinary capture’ can supplement an enhanced interdisciplinary approach. It can also help to transpose academic thinking into practice. Particularly, in relation to disability, and services for persons with disabilities, this concept can translate into more effective integration of services.
Disciplinary capture involves thinking about problems from only one perspective (Brister, 2016). Disciplinary capture can determine what sort of ideas, facts, interventions or causal explanations, are depicted as permissible. For instance, a disease-model approach to mental health may only accept pharmaceutical interventions as being legitimate for a range of mental health problems, while a more psychological, social or human rights approach may not accept this (MacLachlan et al, 2021). In this scenario, if proponents of the disease model are positioned in such a way that other professions are expected to be deferential towards them, then this is likely to inhibit truly interdisciplinary practice. Moreover, this can impede the empirical merit of such a position through the preclusion of an open discussion which would allow for full exploration of all the possible alternatives. The result may manifest in poorer decision-making processes and sub-optimal interventions.
