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Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Research: Choosing a Committee

If you are proposing interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary research, assess your options carefully. Committee 15 (Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Studies) may be your best choice, but one of the other committees may offer the best reception for your research. If you require help in deciding which adjudication committee is best placed to evaluate your proposal, please contact a program officer.

Note: If you wish to have Committee 15 evaluate your research proposal, you must include with your application a one-page letter explaining your reasons.

The academic community's sense of intellectual opportunity, together with the natural complexity of questions asked in the social sciences and humanities, means that research today is increasingly interdisciplinary (or multidisciplinary) in nature. Such research often requires expertise and information that go well beyond what one discipline can provide.

Interdisciplinary research may be undertaken by teams of researchers drawn from different disciplines or by one researcher working beyond his or her discipline in order to engage intellectually with another discipline. Such research can range from a challenging encounter between intellectual traditions and approaches, to the full integration, across diverse fields of enquiry, of concepts, methodologies, theory, terminology, data and organization of research and training.

Committee 15 was established to evaluate proposals that involve a range of disciplines not represented on any of the other committees. The committee's members themselves represent a diverse range of disciplines and are active promoters of interdisciplinary scholarship. However, after the 2002 Standard Research Grants competition, the committee concluded that a number of the applications it received could and should be handled by other adjudication committees (e.g., innovative proposals rooted substantially in a single discipline and team proposals that include only some interdisciplinary features).

Accordingly, SSHRC encourages all committees to adjudicate interdisciplinary research proposals—with flexibility and within a broad intellectual framework. Indeed, a number of committees already support multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary research. For example, Committee 9 evaluates proposals in geography, urban planning, and environmental studies; Committee 23 handles law, socio-legal studies and criminology; and Committee 26 evaluates proposals in communication, cultural studies and women's studies.