‘Less about the disciplines, more about the knowledge & the journey’. This sentence was part of CRIA – NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST researcher Francisca Alves Cardoso’s contribution to our debate on the challenges of interdisciplinarity, held on September 13^th, at the NOVA FCSH Campolide campus.

Sharing the floor with Francisca, anthropologist with a PhD in Biological Anthropology, were Ana Isabel Queiroz (IHC – NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST), biologist/ethologist with a PhD in Landscape Architecture, and Nicola Schiavon (HERCULES – University of Évora / IN2PAST), Doctor in Geological Sciences. And the audience, which included our ‘bootcampers’, the PhD students who took part in IN2PAST’s first Doctoral School – In2future Boot Camp, now presenting their results in Lisbon.

In the lively debate that followed the six presentations, we discussed the differences between multi-, inter- and transdisciplinarity, understood here as a space of research that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries between, across and beyond each field of knowledge, using a common conceptual framework.  

And why? Because it is a cornerstone of IN2PAST’s activity, and because transdisciplinarity at work was one of the major accomplishments of the In2Future Boot Camp, held in Évora last May, in partnership with Festival Imaterial and Évora 27 – European Capital of Culture.

The six collective projects, produced from scratch in less than a week, were originally shown on May 24th at the Salão Nobre of the Garcia de Resende Theatre, in Évora, to the audience of Festival Imaterial, in a round table entitled ‘Heritage Anarchives in Évora: Towards an ecology of practices’.