Workshop 3: Interdisciplinary field and fashions: making new agendas

26th & 27th May 2005

The third workshop focused on initiatives designed to produce interdisciplinary research agendas in response to questions of contemporary concern, for example, nanotechnology or genomics. The method here was to focus on one such case and show how the selected topic was established as a field of interdisciplinary enquiry and how it is positioned as a priority within each of the disciplines involved. The selected case provided a focus for wider ranging discussion about how academic 'fashions' develop and how research topics acquire priority status.

Participants of this workshop included representatives of social and natural scientific research communities, persons from relevant funding agencies and government departments, and those directly involved in designing interdisciplinary research programmes relating to the selected topic.