Overview
Welcome to the Transdisciplinary Studies program at Claremont Graduate University.
Real world problems involve many actors, are often ill-defined, and are unique to each context. In order for universities to best connect to the problems/situations of the real-world, departmental and disciplinary boundaries need to be blended, transcended, and re-imagined.
Transdisciplinary approaches emphasize community, common ground, and conjunction. In order for universities to collaborate with scholars from different fields and outside stakeholders, transdisciplinarity is the framework guiding this role.
Disciplinary and department boundary crossing can take on many different forms including multi-, inter-, and trans-, all of which are support by the TNDY program at CGU. With the creative potential of cross-disciplinary research increasing as one moves from multidisciplinary to transdisciplinary, differentiating between multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary collaboration:
- Multidisciplinary: process in which researchers in different disciplines work independently or sequentially, each from his or her own discipline-specific perspective, to address a common problem.
- Interdisciplinary: process in which researchers work jointly, but from each of their respective disciplinary perspectives, to address a common problem.
- Transdisciplinary: process by which researchers work jointly to develop and use a shared conceptual framework that draws together discipline-specific theories, concepts, and methods to address a common societal problem.
We embrace the creative potential and integration that blending, transcending, and re-imagining disciplinary/departmental boundaries, perspectives, and research can provide a university.
What We Do
Our program fosters an environment where faculty, students, and staff serve as the conduits for transdisciplinary development. We are a resource for creating facilitative spaces and supporting transdisciplinary scholarship, serving as the intellectual hub of CGU’s community. Through the Transdisciplinary Studies program, we provide a platform for the CGU community to transform education to meet challenges that are deeply entrenched, constantly evolving, and excitingly complex.
Transdisciplinarity at CGU is a way of seeing the world that promotes finding intellectual connections everywhere. It’s a way to get deep conversations going across the University campus as well as outside of it, taking the fruits of these collaborative efforts outside University walls and into the world.
Our world transcends disciplines because it is complex. We are complex. In CGU’s Transdisciplinary Studies program, we embrace this complexity. You’re joining a community of curious collaborators committed to enriching society and human life through transdisciplinary innovation. We look forward to working with you.
Our Vision
To build an adaptive, creative and transcendent CGU community that will transform and continually innovate graduate education.
Our Mission
The Transdisciplinary Studies Program blends, transcends, and re-imagines disciplinary boundaries to support CGU’s community by:
- offering innovative, collaborative transdisciplinary courses designed around real-world problems each semester,
- administering, developing, and advising interfield and dual degree pathways,
- providing dissertation fellowships and other awards to promote disciplinary boundary-crossing work,
- partnering with institutional offices to provide academic professional development,
- offering co-curricular, boundary-crossing programs and resources, and
- developing cutting-edge academic programs.
Our Values
The Transdisciplinary Studies Program values:
- being community-minded;
- leading responsibly;
- supporting self-reflection;
- embracing complexity;
- practicing adaptive thinking;
- imagining creative solutions and their consequences;
- fostering collaboration that blends, transcends, and re-imagines disciplines;
- promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Our Goal
To foster and create the pathways and tools that allow faculty and students the ability to boundary cross by embracing the complexity that a diverse disciplinary community offers.