Course Grade: A
Interdisciplinary Theory and Concepts
This writing-intensive course examined the history, concepts, and application of interdisciplinary study — how distinct academic disciplines can be integrated to address problems that no single field can solve alone. Working through Repko and Szostak’s ten-step interdisciplinary research process, students learned to identify relevant disciplines, develop adequacy in each, evaluate and compare their insights, surface the conflicts between them, and build common ground into a single integrated understanding. The course centered on a semester-long research paper that applied this process to a real-world issue, developing both interdisciplinary reasoning and scholarly writing skills.
Course objectives
- Examine the interdisciplinary nature of work, education, and research
- Explore the relationship between critical thinking and interdisciplinary learning
- Apply Repko and Szostak’s ten-step interdisciplinary research process to a real-world problem
- Develop adequacy across multiple disciplines and evaluate their distinct insights
- Identify conflicts between disciplinary perspectives and build common ground
- Integrate insights from several disciplines into a single, coherent framework
- Strengthen scholarly research, argumentation, and APA writing skills
🔹 Key Skills & Topics
🧩 Interdisciplinary Research Process
- Repko & Szostak’s ten-step method
- Identifying relevant disciplines & developing adequacy
- Conflict identification & common-ground techniques (e.g., redefinition)
- Integration into a comprehensive understanding
⚖️ Applied Topic: AI, Law & Elder Fraud
- Privacy law and the notice-and-choice consent paradigm
- Criminology of elder fraud (routine activity theory, crime scripts, deterrence vs. legitimacy)
- Privacy-preserving AI detection (on-device inference, federated learning, differential privacy)
✍️ Academic Writing & Communication
- Thesis-driven, argumentative writing
- Evaluating empirical, peer-reviewed sources
- APA formatting and citation
- Translating technical concepts for a non-specialist audience
Course Material
Detecting Elder Fraud Without Surveilling Elders
🛡️ An interdisciplinary research paper examining the legal and criminological conditions under which AI can lawfully and privately detect phone-based scams targeting older adults. Drawing together criminology, law, and computer science, it argues that system architecture — opt-in, on-device, privacy-preserving design — resolves the tension between effective detection and individual privacy more decisively than policy alone.