The Symposium

The symposium Interdisciplining Knowledge proposes to become a regular forum for interrogating the unpredictability of knowledge creation and the way it is variously shaped by institutions, research initiatives, disciplinary competencies, and resource allocations. Interdisciplining Knowledge intends to examine how modes of research implicated in interdisciplinary relations are themselves understood as complex and emergent phenomena. The opening up of the symposium to inquiry modes in the humanities, the sciences, and in culture (beyond academia) also intends to expose the complementarities and tensions between different paradigms, methodologies and premises cultivated by diverse traditions of knowledge.

Confirmed keynote speakers at the symposium include Georgina Born (University College London), Nicholas Evans (Australian National University), Olga Pombo (University of Lisbon), and Andrew Barry, (University College London).

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies is a major research centre in Portugal (funded in 1998) committed to the contemporary production of interdisciplinary knowledge. Our research community comprises 140 integrated researchers and 150 research associates who teach and carry work primarily in the arts, humanities and the social and natural sciences. The centre’s research activities are anchored by three overarching and partly overlapping key concepts. Specifically, we study complex processes emerging from and acting upon the domains of the Human, Society, and Artefact, through the interactive transformations of time and the environment (both culture and nature). The dense webs of knowledge engaged by these three concepts rely on inquiries that explore the reciprocal relations between the agency of human-driven acts of knowledge (incorporating and being mediated by conditioning environments) and the emergent properties and interactions of resulting complex adaptive processes.