Articles by ZF

Nash, J. M. (2008). Transiciplinary training: Key components and prerequisits for succcess. American Journal of Preventitive Medicine, 35, p. 133-140.  Special issue on transdisciplinary research.

Read it.

A friend of my recently gave me this book, The Common Sense of Science by J. Brownoski.  It is a compact recitation of the history of ideas from the last few centuries and quite powerful.  A favorite quote of mine (p. 43):

As a result, the real science of the eighteenth century was practised by social oddities: by eccentrics like the Cavendish or the Oxford antiquaries, by Unitarians and Quakers from the midlands, and by untaught mechanics like James Brindley who designed the whole system of English waterways, but never leared to spell “navigation.”

Maybe it is because I am coming to the end of my graduate experience, or maybe it is because I have spent the last 6 years longing to have this experience bound in a specific physical space that would serve to narrate this path – but I find myself very focused on the idea of the university.  But more and more I have come to understand that the trappings of the university are meaningless in someways (although I am not discounting the importance of the university structure).  What I am driving at is that the real university is in the mind and in the mind’s relation with others who occupy this non-space.

Yesterday, I received an email from a German colleague, a PhD student from Berlin who I met at SIPP in 2005.  He noted that he was also nearing the end of his program, and that his dissertation was about to be reviewed by his committee.  He attached the manuscript to the email – all 118 pages of text.  In this moment – what my wife would call a liminal space – after years of journeying toward the end of the doctoral process, and after the stifling of our social being in order to produce research that is hopefully novel and interesting, I think there is a need for recognition and communion.  To share what we have produced.  And yet most people beyond the committee either do not have the time or interest to engage deeply with us in this final mile of the process.

I was flattered that my acquaintance from Europe felt strongly enough to send me his manuscript.  In a few years – with any luck – neither of us will have the time to spend reviewing a manuscript that doesn’t pertain directly to our own subdiscipline.  But at this moment, I find joy in walking with him toward his path of completion, honoring the document itself, and recognizing the sacrifices that each of us makes as part of this process — even though most remain unspoken.

Most of the research for my dissertation was done in the DDD lab at PGSP, but the final touches on the manuscript happened primarily at the Milwaukee VA Hospital.  I think for clinical psychology students in general, the experience can be somewhat atypical in that we are usually on internship when the final lap of the dissertation is coming to a close — often far from our home institution.  For several people in my cohort, this has meant flights back to the home institution to collect additional data, wrangle with committees, and finally to defend.

UW Milwaukee Library

For me this was brought home as I inserted the final changes recommended by my committee — I was sitting in Roast Coffee Shop and then moved to the UWM libraries for the final details to work on some faster machines.  The last leg was actually completed in the halls of an entirely different institution.  This felt comforting to me in some ways as I listened to the chatter of undergraduates about their papers – arguing about the meaning of the word “plurality” – thinking about the last 10 years of higher education, the process of transformation into a scholar and (hopefully) a healer.  In spite of the 2,000 miles between me and my home institution and advisor, the work of the university was going on around me.

It is fairly typical for one member of the committee join during the defense by phone — particularly consulting faculty.  However, I am wondering if and when the day will come for virtual or  tele-presence dissertation defense proceedings?  It would be interesting to hear if anyone has done this yet.  I don’t think it would be for me, but particularly for highly specialized topics, I can imagine this becoming common place in the future.

One of the things that I found most frustrating at the beginning of my career as a graduate student was that there were many interesting classes being offered at other institutions (or even through different programs within my institution) that I could not easily take if I wanted them to 1. Show up on my transcript and 2. Count toward graduation.

There are clearly important academic reasons for this:  First, institutions have different entrance requirements and they may want to ensure that all students in a particular class meet that standard; second, classes are typically approved by faculty senate or other governing body to ensure that the syllabus meets acceptable standards within the institution — accepting an other institution’s classes means that the quality of the class must be taken on some level of faith; third, even if a student were able to easily take a graduate level course at another institution, there would have to be some grade reconciliation between the two schools.  There are also substantial financial disincentives to simplified articulation systems between institutions — and by preventing students from seeking extramural course work, universities are able to monopolistically control tuition fees.

At one end of the spectrum, loose articulation standards create one of the avenues for diploma mills to function.  However, at the other, the lack of efficient, flexible, yet academically rigorous articulation systems is one of the drags on innovation within the modern university system. 

While I do not fully agree with the sentiment offered by David Wiley that “Universities will be irelevant by 2020″,  the ability to rapidly integrate course work from multiple IHEs into a customized learning experience — that also meets home institution academic standards — seems like an achievable and necessary step.

From Dr. Turoff’s homepage:

The State of Transdisciplinary Affairs

HASTAC: Mapping the Digital Humanities – http://www.hastac.org/forums/hastac-scholars-discussions/mapping-digital-humanities

While conducing interdisciplinary research is becoming increasingly commonplace and transdisciplinary work may seem like second nature to many students, deep questions remain about how to evaluate educational and research quality.  These questions become more complex as the traditional departmental evaluation of graduate student work has less and less relevance to the actual research being conducted.  There are some long-standing approaches to accommodate research that does not completely fit within one established discipline — for example, providing for consulting faculty or specialists from other institutions to sit on PhD committees in varying roles.

The defense of the dissertation is inherently a liminal space¹ — the candidate stands at the dividing line between being a student and entering the professional space occupied by his or her advisors. At the close of a successful defense, the student is in a small way transformed. The student also stands at the edge of their own knowledge, and if it is “done right” the student and committee have been brought to the edge of what is know in the field of study.

The metaversity concept suggest that another layer of liminality is added to this mix. In the process of defining and exploring the transdiscipline, the graduate student may come to posses an understanding of the disciplinary interesection that significantly exceeds the understanding of the committee (in terms of this narrow field of study), in effect inverting the structure of the committee. The student may have to use the committee members not so much in a pedagogical role, but rather as guides — using their accumulated knowledge and experience to structure lines of inquiry designed to address the developing transdisipline in a rigorous way, using established modes of inquiry while simultaneously working to integrate these approaches and innovating where necessary.

Interests

I study clinical psychology at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology in Redwood City, California.  My interests have always been broad and I wanted to do more than treat individuals, but also address systemic problems by applying psychology more broadly to social problems.  I’ve been particularly interested in the psychosocial impact of disaster and the application of psychological science to improve the performance of large scale disaster management efforts.

Problem

In 2003 when I went to graduate school there were very few psychology programs that emphasized the relationship between the disaster events (natural or terror related), the application of clinical psychology, and a broader policy perspective.  There was one program in South Dakota, the Disaster Mental Health Institute, but at the time I was looking for something that also addressed terrorism and related international policy issues.  Many of the graduate programs I applied to in clinical psychology just did not seem to understand the interest in public policy or see a direct relationship between their research agendas and the policy implications.  Discussing those interests with faculty members usually felt fruitless — policy interests were seen as ancillary to or a distraction from research — rather than a fundamental part of the research process.

Creating a Customized Learning Experience

I finally realized that I wasn’t going to be able to get what I wanted at any one institution.  Instead, what I looked for was an educational foundation that could provide some of the research structure I was looking for, while also pursuing related training experiences that would broaden my expertise outside of this setting.  During the interview process for graduate school, I met Dr. Bruce Bongar at Pacific Graduate School who was in the process of setting up a center to study terrorism and mass disaster in collaboration with faculty at Stanford University, the Naval Post Graduate School, and the Palo Alto Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center.  After being accepted there, I heard that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had just set up a graduate fellowship program.  I was able to secure one of these fellowships and my work as a DHS Fellow was a defining process for the first several years of graduate training.

National Center on the Psychology of Terrorism

I began training in clinical psychology and conducting research at the National Center on the Psychology of Terrorism (NCPT) in 2003.  At that time, the NCPT was doing work on the psychology of terrorism and it housed the first Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) that focused exclusively on disaster mental health. 

DHS Fellowship Program

During the first 3 years of graduate training, I was supported by the DHS Fellowship program.  At the first meeting of DHS Fellows and scholars, I was struck by the very small number of behavioral science majors involved in the Fellowship program.   During this meeting I made connections with three other Fellows, and despite the fact that we were studying at different institutions and we met only infrequently after that, those personal connections with others doing national security related work helped to alleviate the feelings of social isolation I felt at my home institution — where most graduate students were focused more exclusively on clinical training.

ANSER Internship

One of the requirements of the DHS Fellowship program was that Fellows had to intern for their first summer at a national laboratory, a federal agency, or with a DHS contractor.  I interned at ANSER, Inc. in Arlington, VA.  Although it would have made sense to place DHS interns in the Homeland Security Institute (HSI) at ANSER, HSI was so new at that time that they weren’t prepared to accept interns without security clearance.  Instead, I worked with an intern advisor from the Joint War Fighting & National Strategies divisions.  While the internship wasn’t particularly well set up for behavioral scientists, it did offer me several months to work without distraction on some interesting ideas.

A Diminished Sense of Place

UC, Riverside

One of the things I have struggled with the most is feeling that I don’t belong any place.  During undergraduate, I was affiliated with a single university, I enjoyed the sense of the campus itself — the library had 78 volumes of José Martí’s work, there were quiet spots on the campus where the trees seemed to dance in the spring, and the bell tower soared above the campus — there is something about structures that are much larger than us that give the sense that the scholarly work one is engaged in is part of a much greater whole.

When I entered graduate school, this sense was gone.  I was shuttling between a small clinical school, several VA hospitals, spending time in the DC area for internship, and occasionally showing up at a University of California campus, Stanford, or some private universities my wife was associated with.  In point of fact, much of the work I was doing was being carried out from my apartment and a couple of local coffee shops rather than at any given campus (the idea of the Penny University is alive and well).  I felt at times that I belonged to all of these institutions and none of them simultaneously.  Each had strengths I was drawing from, but no single institution housed all of the elements I was trying to integrate.  But at the same time, I longed for that feeling of belonging to a specific program, a particular physical space – to come to know, and perhaps even haunt, particular halls of a building.  To have a specific physical structure to contain the intellectual ungrounding and expansion that comes with graduate training. 

ISCRAM Conference

ISCRAM '07, Delft, The Netherlands

For me, some what to my surprise, the answer to the problem of place created by my “instance” of the metaversity was to become even more virtual.  In my third year of graduate school I attended a conference called Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), held that year at the New Jersey Institute of  Technology.  This was a breakthrough moment for me.  For the first time, I was surrounded by people who shared my language, vision, and areas of interest.  They were technologists with a strong interest in supporting human performance in the midst of disaster.  I was a behavioral researcher in training with a strong interest in disasters and technology.  Moreover, the conference started out from its inception as a transdisciplinary event that was designed and managed by others who had not felt their academic needs were being served in more traditional conference settings.  The participants had literally found each other at other conferences and started talking about filling this gap.  At the 2006 ISCRAM, I participated in the PhD student colloquium and met Dr. David Mendonça – a professor who has been examining improvisation in the context of disaster.  His papers and period advice over the years that followed served to orient my own dissertation research.  This single conference deeply impacted my understanding of my own work, situated it in a way that had not felt achievable prior to this point, and also began to provide the social support I need to feel as though I was functioning in a specialized, transdisciplinary department — even though there were no formal relationships between the institutions I was involved with and the laboratories the other attendees were from.

A map of this Metaversity Instance

I am hoping to find a more efficient mapping system that allows for deeper annotation, but for the moment, here is a google map that shows the primary locations where this work has been conducted or where substantial parts of my graduate education have been drawn from.

View this Metaversity instance in a larger map