Title:
Interdisciplinary research: benefits and challenges
Submission deadline:
15 February 2023
Description:
Team members at Materia come from diverse educational backgrounds and professional specialities which enrich and inform our roles as editors. Our monthly meetings often include stimulating discussions about the benefits and challenges of collaboration during the editing process. These same dynamics can also be observed in the papers submitted to our journal. Through our experience working on past issues we have noticed certain tropes emerge, representing historical tensions often seen between art historians, conservators, and conservation scientists. These include, but are not limited to, differences in methodological approaches, use of technical terminology and theoretical language, as well as broader discrepancies when it comes to researchers’ points of entry. For this reason, we thought it fitting to pay tribute to the benefits and challenges of collaboration between art historians, conservators, and conservation scientists within the the fields of academia and in the museum world, in our latest call for papers.
We encourage authors to submit Feature Articles highlighting a particularly successful or challenging collaborative experience. This can be presented in the form of research undertaken by a conservator/conservation scientist and an art historian, or all three disciplines together. Moreover, authors may approach the subject from different vantage points, including a discussion of results from a specific study, or a broader reflection on the experience of collaborating. Questions which may be posed could consider what colleagues have learned from each other throughout the collaboration, whether innovative ways of improving communication were developed or if common research methodologies were found as part of your experience. The overall aim is to highlight the benefits and challenges that often come with interdisciplinary collaboration.
In addition to welcoming these theme-specific Feature Articles, we continue to encourage authors to submit shorter Technical Case Studies, which for this issue can focus on artworks in any media. Also note that for this call for papers we request that authors submit full text articles (i.e. not short abstracts, as with previous issues). The word limit for Feature Articles is 7,000 words, while for Technical Case Studies it is 5,000 words (not including footnotes). Please submit your article in the form of a Word document (Times New Roman, 12 pt font, 1.5 spacing). We also urge authors to please consult our general submission guidelines, as well as our referencing and structure guidelines prior to their submission. This is to ensure that all submitted articles meet our standard formatting criteria, which is something that will be considered by our editorial team when it comes to accepting submissions. For any further questions regarding the format or submission procedure please feel free to contact us at: info@materiajournal.com
Best of luck with your submissions!
Kind regards, The Materia team