Abstract:

Social problems in 21st century are more multidimensional than ever. They are problems made up of complex interrelated elements coming from the intense interaction between social, technical and natural systems that cannot be captured by unidisciplinary scientific approaches. A series of events indicate that contemporary society faces a new type of highly integrated, dynamic and far-reaching critical situations that transcend the local spaces in which they originate (Posner 2010; Walby 2015; Castillo 2016; Centola 2018; Hurton 2020). This new scenario is reflected in events such as the 2008 financial crisis, the global political upheavals in 2011, the unpredictability of the terrorist threat since 2001, the growing international tension between different political regimes, the global pandemics in 2020, and the dramatic devastation of large human settlements and critical infrastructure caused by natural phenomena along the present century. This makes socio-political dynamics today profoundly multi-layered, with behavioral patterns that propagate and amplify their consequences for those involved in multiple spaces.

In the face of this order of things, the education of postgraduate students in social sciences with a solely unidisciplinary approach would be reductionist and would not succeed in capturing the complexity of the phenomena it analyses. However, it would also be reductionist to consider that the sum of disciplines could constitute an interdisciplinary approach. For this reason, the development of an interdisciplinary sensibility is required. It is composed of three fundamental dimensions:
a) the collaboration of different disciplines with a focus on a transversal topic in the program's training processes;
b) collaboration in networks between local and transnational spaces; and
c) collaboration between the academic world and the professional sphere.

To address this problem, in this article we begin with a theoretical-conceptual analysis of the relationship between complex social problems in contemporary society and their possibilities of translation into doctoral training in the field of social sciences. Here we start from the premise that multidimensional social problems require interdisciplinary sensitivity to be properly understood. In the following section we analyze how collaboration between disciplines, in scientific networks, and between academia and profession can support the design of doctoral training with interdisciplinary sensitivity in the social sciences. We then report on the authors' experience in leading an interdisciplinary doctoral program and its results so far. Here we evaluate a series of strategies implemented to promote interdisciplinary training that can be replicated in other programs with similar aims (interdisciplinary colloquia, mixed learning of research techniques, co-tutoring of doctoral research by professors from different disciplines, internships in foreign centers, among others). Finally, we address our original problem in the light of our own and international experience and provide some recommendations for the development of an interdisciplinary sensitivity in doctoral training in the social sciences of the 21st century.

Keywords:

Complexity, postgraduate education, interdisciplinary, collaboration, networks.