Podcast: Travelling Concepts on Air
Travelling Concepts on Air is a podcast series, launched in October 2021, which explores the promise and ideal of interdisciplinarity. With over 7000 downloads worldwide, the podcast is currently in its third season.
Interdisciplinarity is increasingly projected as an objective goal within academia, framed as something that both encourages and facilitates collaboration across fields and disciplines. In this podcast series, we are questioning some of these underlying assumptions by focusing on the idea of travelling concepts. Travelling concepts refers to concepts that ‘travel’ across disciplines and often act as the focal point for interdisciplinary efforts.
Within this podcast series, we are posing the following questions:
- Why and how do concepts travel across disciplines?
- How do concepts change across disciplines?
- Why do particular concepts travel when others don’t?
- What are the benefits and limitations of travelling concepts?
- Do such concepts allow scholars to ‘speak’ across disciplines?
Every month, dr. Tessa Diphoorn and dr. Brianne McGonigle Leyh host and interview two scholars, addressing the above questions by asking the guest speakers to unpack a particular concept, asking them to delineate how they use this concept in their disciplines and to discuss what this entails for interdisciplinary scholarship.