Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration

Abstract

This chapter describes the things and people that facilitate collaboration across disciplines: shared items, shared objectives, and shared agents. (These concepts draw from literature on collaboration in the sciences and from research on intercultural communication.) Shared items function differently from discipline to discipline, while being identifiable across disciplines. Shared objectives comprise activity objects, the prospective outcomes of collaboration, and epistemic objects, knowledge sought. Shared agents function within and across two or more disciplines. In this book, shared items are represented primarily by scores (and recordings), activity objects by the book’s chapters, epistemic objects by interpretations of pieces and of analysis-performance relations, and shared agents by scholar-performers or performer-scholars. Mechanisms and processes of collaboration are briefly described: strategies for collaborating when views diverge, and degrees of collaborative convergence (working in parallel, translating or mediating knowledge for mutual influence, transforming domain-specific knowledge into new cross-domain knowledge).