About journal > Aims and scope

Since the 1960s, the debates on pluridisciplinarity have been aboundant, in humanities and social sciences, both in teaching and research, but also in the professional world. The present goal does not pretend to build a consensus on the subject ; neither to take part in the terminological conflict which deals with a large part of the literature on pluridisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity. The journal is interested in all the research approaches, in which conceptual, methodological or tooling transfers are used. From occasional borrowing/use from another discipline, to hybridization, and disciplinary crossover, or even the rise of new transdisciplinary approaches, as digital humanities, all of these practices interrogate and challenge human and social sciences and, in this regard, are placed at the heart of the journal.

Pluridisciplinary research approaches are in a constant tension in paradoxical scientific and academic contexts. From a scientific point of view, the definition of pluridisciplinarity is only conceived to form a dialogical dialectic with other disciplines. It allows the relativity of each discipline to be taken into account, which leads to a re-examination of the concepts and representations mobilized within them. Pluridisciplinary approaches also favour the advent of new objects of study and new theoretical or methodological approaches to subjects that have for now been little considered within a discipline. The journal does not try to oppose pluridisciplinary practices and disciplines, but aims at showing the capacity of these approaches to enhance and renew disciplines. The paradoxical academic context, that involves instructions to use and develop pluridisciplinarity, and at the same time, strong disciplinary compartmentalization, both in institutional and professional contexts, causes an additional stress into pluridisciplinary approaches.

These scientific and academic contexts make pluridisciplinary practices both sources of potential in terms of innovations and scientific discoveries, but they also present some risks. Since the polemics of the 1960s and 1970s, the fears of a less scientific legitimacy from these pluridisciplinary approaches, or the possibility of the advent of an artificial interdisciplinary research island still remain. Beyond these outdated fears, the proliferation of so-called "wild" interdisciplinary practices, which are not very distant, and rarely displayed and assumed as such, entails the risk of disciplinary confusion or even conceptual loss. From an academic point of view, these practices complicate relations between disciplines and pluridisciplinary practices, while destabilizing the specificity of the conceptual territory and research objects of disciplines, already weakened by a competitive context in humanities and social sciences.

Faced with these challenges, the journal Passerelles SHS constitutes a privileged space for collective thought on pluridisciplinary practices in humanities and social sciences. The purpose is to give researchers the opportunity, in a pluridisciplinary journal, to question their interdisciplinary approaches in order to consider pluridisciplinarity as a conscious, developed, assumed and mastered process, that contributes to renew and enhance disciplines. The journal also aims at promoting the development of skills or a real culture of pluridisciplinarity, needed to create new disciplinary exchanges.

The journal pays specific attention to the publication of pluridisciplinary practices and approaches carried out by young researchers, considering that they are more particularly subject to these paradoxical tensions. As part of the project of the Doctoral School Sociétés, Temps, Territoires (STT), this journal is committed to a process of training in pluridisciplinary research methods in human and social sciences.