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Big issues: a job for boundary-spanners
1 November 2006
A new report released today details the benefits to Australia of encouraging big collaborative research projects, to provide solutions to the big problems the country faces.
These 'big issues' include caring for an aging population, maintaining water supply, cyber crime, and aboriginal health and welfare.
The report - Collaborating across the Sectors - is published by the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS).
CHASS President Stuart Cunningham said that a new breed of researcher was needed to find the answers.
"Australia needs what I call 'boundary spanners', researchers willing to stretch out over the normal boundaries to work with people from other disciplines," he said.
"It's where surgeons go to art school to sharpen up their technique. Or scientists work with historians and lawyers to work out the best way to use available water."
Professor Cunningham said the way researchers are organised by disciplines hampered efforts to bring them together to work on the pressing national issues.
"It's all the biologists in this building, the economists over there, and the historians and lawyers somewhere else," he said. "We need them to work together on big problems, because no single discipline has all the answers."
He said the physical separation is mirrored in funding systems. Applications for research grants are considered by the social sciences panel, or the biological sciences panel, or creative arts or physics panels.
"But who considers applications when a mathematician wants to work with an artist and a doctor, on medical issues? Or an economist with environmental scientists on water supply?
"It's always the 'boundary-spanners' who are disadvantaged, and they are the very people who have the key to some of our most promising research," he said.
Professor Cunningham said the report makes five key recommendations, which serve to remove the institutional and funding impediments to conducting this research.
The report Collaborating across the Sectors was funded by the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training.
- For more information, please contact:
- Toss Gascoigne
- Executive Director
- Council of the Humanties, Arts and Social Sciences
- Phone: +61 2 6249 1995
- director@chass.org.au
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