The construction of interdisciplinary research:challenges and perspectives

Abstract

This paper aims to reflect on the challenges and perspectives related to the first phase of the construction of interdisciplinary research, a discipline of the Postgraduate Program of Sustainable Territorial Development, Federal University of Paraná - Brazil (PPGDTS/UFPR), which aims to diagnose and identify the research problem. This discipline meets the objectives of the Program and aims fundamentally to promote, through interdisciplinary perspective, the dialogue with theoretical and methodological approaches that articulate natural and social sciences and consider the diversity, complexity, local knowledge and different livelihoods in the analysis of reality. The proposed interdisciplinary exercise requires the formation of a new perspective on reality, formed by the dialogue between different areas and forms of knowledge; a look that, open to new possibilities, goes back to the territory and to sustainable development. The objective of the first stage of interdisciplinary research was reached with regard to the territorial diagnosis and the identification / construction of research problems. The collectively constructed observation and diagnostic work allowed each individual student to exercise reflexivity, maturing his or her research object; not obviously in the same territory, but within the theme of Sustainable Territorial Development.