This repository contains a number of blog posts on various aspects of diversity. Integration and Implementation Insights (also known as i2Insights) is a community weblog (blog) for sharing methods, frameworks, processes, concepts, theories and competencies to better understand and act on complex societal and environmental problems (problems like refugee crises, global climate change, and inequality).

The primer on understanding diversity provides an introduction for beginners of eight key aspects: mental models, perceptions of good research, power, values, interests, culture, personality, and team roles. There are also advanced considerations for increasing diversity.

IT is about three years since I made a sketch in print of a problem which had been on my mind for some time. It was a problem I could not avoid just because of the circumstances of my life. The only credentials I had to ruminate on the subject at all came through those circumstances, through nothing more than a set of chances. Anyone with similar experience would have seen much the same things and I think made very much the same comments about them. It just happened to be an unusual experience. By training I was a scientist: by vocation I was a writer. That was all. It was a piece of luck, if you like, that arose through coming from a poor home.

This Aboriginal pedagogy framework is expressed as eight interconnected pedagogies involving narrative-driven learning, visualised learning processes, hands-on/reflective techniques, use of symbols/metaphors, land-based learning, indirect/synergistic logic, modelled/scaffolded genre mastery, and connectedness to community. But these can change in different settings.

Bringing together great academic minds and diverse perspectives from different disciplines can transform university research. A recent project at Durham University called “Hearing the Voice” challenges conventional assumptions about the “problems” confronted by people who hear voices. By bringing together a range of disciplines, including humanities and social science researchers, it has opened up new avenues for thinking about the experience of hearing voices. Another project: “The Ordered Universe”, a collaboration between historians and physicists to co-translate the writings of bishop and theologian Robert Grossteste, has revealed the extraordinary sophistication of science in the medieval period.

Until the early 1900s, scholars took it for granted that they could draw on any area of knowledge to inform their thinking on the major questions of the day. Medieval polymaths such as Hildegard of Bingen (medicine, linguistics, botany, art, philosophy and music) opened the door to Victorian scholars such as Temple Chevallier (astronomy, theology and maths) and Thomas Young (medicine, physics, music and Egyptology).
In the last century, however, the emergence of multiple disciplines and the exponential development of specialist knowledge, has discouraged such carefree grazing across academic terrains. The application of free-market ideologies to the higher education sector in the 1990s has positioned academic disciplines in competition with each other for resources.