Can interspeciality be the step to interdisciplinarity?

(the case post-graduate studies in Belarus in 2015-2021)

Kiryl Rudy

Interdisciplinarity, interspecialty, post-graduate studies.

Doctor of Economics, Professor, World Economy Department, Belarus State Economic University (2020 – now), Ambassador of Belarus to China (2016 – 2020), Economic Advisor to the President of Republic of Belarus (2013 – 2016), kvrudy@gmail.com.

Introduction.

Interdisciplinarity attracts academic interest as it covers two or more disciplines in one activity with variety of inter, trans, multi and even pluridisciplinarity approaches. Interdisciplinarity’s roots are originated in 1960s (Hoffman-Riem et. al., 2008) by complexity of historical, political, philosophical, intellectual factors (Klein, 1991), the structure and behavior of complex systems (Newell, 2001) and raised its popularity in social sciences in late 1990s (Nissani, 1995) with political support in 2000s to solve faced challenges of ‘knowledge society’ (Guerreiro, 2016), globalization, global warming (Gomez, 2020), behavioral economy with interconnections of economy, politics, psychology, sociology (Rudy et al, 2018, Rudy, 2021), ‘IT society’ focusing on computer science (Heikkinen et al, 2018), etc.

Although interdisciplinarity attracts political attention and becomes scientific mainstream, interdisciplinarity these studies most of the time stay in academic field, fully reveal themselves in higher education (Jacob, 2015) sometimes with the focus on academic motivation (Corbacho et al, 2021). Nevertheless, there is no consensus in studies how to measure interdisciplinarity (Porter et. al., 2007, Wagner et. al., 2011, Wang et. al., 2017, Marres et. al., 2020). Some approaches on interdisciplinary indicators and indicating worth considering (Huutoniemi et. al., 2010, Sandes-Guimarães, 2022). This paper tries to use obvious approach to measure interdisciplinarity. It’s the post-graduate studies that include interdisciplinarity or at least interspeciality as the first step. This approach shows when and how scientific society admits interdisciplinarity existence in relevant fields with providing academic degree with two specialties or two disciplines. Here it is observed in the case of one of the Eastern European country – the Republic of Belarus in recent years from 2015 to 2021. Interdisciplinarity in post-Soviet, Central and Eastern European countries is developing under the shadow of their heritage, past scientific successes and failures, academic schools, state policy, speed and direction of public and academic reforms in the region, country and industry.

Interdisciplinarity is not well-developed in Belarus. It also is not the common part of Belarussian long-term strategy to develop scientific researches. Of course, there are some exceptions, for example, state program in interdisciplinary study in physics, approved by Belarus’ government in 2020 for 2021-2025^[1], or Belarus State University’s interdisciplinary research on human rights (Afonchenko et. al., 2020). There is also some infrastructure for interdisciplinarity development in Belarus: the computer science laboratories; the medicine science centers in different hospitals and research institutes; the philology interdisciplinary centers to support researches on diaspora; the economics science centers to cover regional political and economic interconnections in Central and Eastern Europe, including studying Belarus (but located in Poland), etc. Studies show that such centers provide necessary environment to raise future scholars, PhDs, as the case of Stanford University proves in 1993 – 2014 (Biancani et. al., 2018), to open opportunities for publications in new fields (Abramo et. al., 2017, Bishop et al., 2014), to give a chance for broader citation (Larivière et. al., 2015), but not always (Yegros et. al., 2015). In case of Belarus the role of interdisciplinary centers is not so obvious in rising doctors of science in interdisciplinarity.

Anyway, Belarussian researchers cross the thin interdisciplinary line in their studies. But when the time comes to finalize their long-term research in a form of dissertation, they have to make a choice about the discipline and specialty they study. It’s necessary to satisfy demands of High Attestation Committee of Belarus (here and after HAC). This organization makes the final decision to approve the dissertation and has the right to cancel the decision made by the board of scientists at university. So, interdisciplinary (or better to say interspeciality, as there is no interdisciplinary dissertation in Belarus) studies are hidden under one or another scientific specialty. Of course, it’s not all about HAC tough requests. If the applicant decides to do interdisciplinary or interspeciality research, he’ll face several problems: (1) choosing the supervisor/advisor (recognized in two disciplines); (2) managing conflicting methodologies of research in different industries; (3) making unusual structure of dissertation; (4) finding necessary data in different databases; (5) formulating new research achievements in two disciplines according to requests of HAC and traditions of one of two chosen fields; (6) finding academic opponents, administrative support and sometimes political blessings for doctor’s theses, scientific society that will be ready to discuss and accept interdisciplinary dissertation; (7) overcoming the fears to be among the first and go the hard way with no obvious comparative gain (Golde et. al., 1999). Nevertheless, there are some cases, when HAC provides diplomas noting two specialties for some researchers that did their study on the border of specialties in one discipline. These cases could be the signal to outline importance of interspeciality studies as a step to interdisciplinarity in Belarus.

This paper analyzes post-graduate interspeciality studies as an indicator to measure interdisciplinarity potential. The case of Belarus reveals its recent scientific trends, comparative advantages in academic disciplines. The main focus of this paper is on doctor’s interdisciplinary studies, as the highly requested, hard-passing with specific state attitude and control in Belarus (see further). First part includes the overview of doctor’s studies by the disciplines in Belarus in 2015-2021. Part 2 analyzes the interspeciality studies in two levels of dissertations in Belarus. Part 3 discusses the motivation, priorities and potential of interdisciplinary studies in Belarus through the lens of interspecialty theses in this country. Conclusions are at the end.

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[For full text, please see the Collected Works on Country and Area Studies, 2022]