Being transdisciplinary is the way of the future for researchers, especially for public relations professionals. So, you ask what exactly does it mean to be transdisciplinary? Transdisciplinary means that there needs to be a unity of knowledge that is integrated across disciplines. There have been many scholars and professionals that have said that it is best to stay in your respective discipline and only do research in that particular area. While I think that it is very important to have an established presence in your discipline, it is also important to collaborate and work with other professionals in other disciplines on research projects. Not only does it establish a stronger research and scholarly community, but it also gives you the researcher different perspectives on the phenomenon that you are researching and ideas for future research projects.
In the three years that I have been at Tennessee, I have presented at several conferences, including some that are not in Public Relations or Communications. For example, I presented a poster session last year at the Association for Psychological Science on Loneliness and Social Networking sites (ex. Facebook). I had the wonderful opportunity to work with exceptional professionals and researchers on this project and it was a very rewarding learning experience for me. It gave me a chance to work with researchers and graduate students from not only another university, but also from a different discipline. Psychology has influenced Public Relations in so many ways, and they are doing some amazing research particularly when it comes to social media and computer mediated communication.
Psychology is not the only discipline I have had projects in. For example, I had the wonderful opportunity to work with my friend and fellow doctoral student Monica Colon-Aguirre (University of Tennessee) in Information Sciences on several projects this year. We did a case study on the impact of Google Books on the reputation of Google the corporation (reputation management) and how it has impacted the reputation of academic libraries as the ultimate source of knowledge (Information Science and one of Monica’s research interests). We presented a paper together at the Research Symposium at Tennessee, but Monica also went to Boston for the ALISE Conference in January to present our case study. It was a great project to work on!
My friends Lei and Monica presenting our Google Books Case Study at ALISE 2010
So, in summary – in order for a discipline such as Public relations to evolve and continue to grow – we need to be transdisciplinary. If we just focus on what is going on in our discipline, we will miss numerous opportunities to explore new elements about particular phenomena and collaborations with other researchers. This is what I have tried to do in my research, particularly this year. I have had projects now in Information Science, Reputation Management, and Psychology conferences as well as in Public relations and Communications conferences. In addition, I have collaborated with other researchers and scholars from different disciplines such as Psychology, Information Science, and Systems Engineering. It has been really great and fun to work on various research projects with fellow graduate students and research scholars! 🙂
Hope you all are having a great day!
Best Wishes,
Karen
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