Contributors come from Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, and Glasgow, with a variety of different disciplines.
A student-led team at the University of Glasgow has published the UK’s first student interdisciplinary journal, titled The 1451 Review.
The first volume of the review contains contributors from the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London School of Economics and Political Science, and Glasgow with subjects ranging from life science, computer science, social science, psychology, engineering, economics, and law.
Editors Cameron Bell and Alejandro Serrano Saunders state that interdisciplinary thinking will allow students to “connect the dots between different fields, important problems and great ideas” and believe it is important for world-changing ideas to develop.
The editors also note that students are being encouraged to specialise too early in their academic careers and the new generation of academics are left without the necessary skills to “tackle many of the most prominent problems” ranging from “global warming, political unrest and the health crisis”. They ask: “How can we truly understand the world we live in without grappling with our own cognitive biases?”
In addition to this, they feel that interdisciplinary thinking is needed to “uncover solutions” to these problems and all articles in the journal, from scientific hypothesis testing to data-driven prediction making, are “all unified in their approach” to use insights from other academic fields “which provide opportunity to innovate and do things better.” To read the first volume of The 1451 Review click here.
