Cross-disciplinary integration : through argumentation and for sustainability

Today's sustainability problems require wisdom that can only come by integrating different ways of knowing for each situation. When academic researchers undertake sustainability work, many of these ways of knowing come from different disciplines. However, years of cross-disciplinary research and practice have yielded only metaphorical or abstract understandings of what researchers actually do to integrate disciplinary contributions. Without a clear understanding of the actions researchers take to accomplish integration, we have been left with confusion, inconsistent proxy measures, or lengthy learning by trial and error. This has left sustainability and other wicked problems either in the hands of veterans with decades of experience or subject to unreliable integrative attempts by newer investigators. To aid practice through clearer understanding, I open the black box of cross-disciplinary integration, explicating one the main processes that investigators use to integrate disciplinary contributions into cross-disciplinary insights: reasoning together.Through three articles, the dissertation shows that (1) as a field, argumentation studies provides valuable, actionable insights into cross-disciplinary integration, (2) one of the main processes of cross-disciplinary integration is reasoning together, and (3) the details of cross-disciplinary reasoning specify and clarify two existing, more abstract models of cross-disciplinary integration. Thus, overall, the dissertation clarifies what has been an urgent but confusing process in sustainability investigations, and, in doing so, it points the way to practical improvements in sustainability research policies, norms, and education.