Openness across disciplines: Reflecting on a multiple disciplinary summer school

Abstract

In this book chapter, we observe an exceptional example of addressing messy and ill-defined problems through several disciplinary lenses during the ColLaboratoire 2016 Summer School (https://collaboratoire.cognovo.eu). We discuss the requirements and conditions under which this approach is an effective and appropriate alternative to mono-disciplinary research.This chapter is structured as follows: first, we critically reflect on the role of openness in multiple disciplinary research. Because ColLaboratoire was modelled heavily on the organisers’ experiences of working across the disci- plinary boundaries within CogNovo, we subsequently review selected features, activities, and outputs of this doctoral training programme. We then discuss the organisation of ColLaboratoire, including how its decisions drew on the experience from CogNovo as a multiple disciplinary work environment. Following this, we reflect on the experiences of the ColLaboratoire participants and evaluate the outcomes of individual projects and the summer school as a whole. Within this chapter, we define openness as ‘an accommodating attitude towards new, unconventional, and useful ideas and experiences,’ and we reflect on the key factors that contributed to the realisation of ColLaboratoire. We conclude that these were enabled by what we identify as three forms of openness: multi-perspective, inter-perspective, and trans-perspective openness.