INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN THE HUMANITIES (IRANIAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL RESEARCH)
Year:2015 | Volume:7 | Issue:3 (27)|Papers Count:10

History as a science has different functions in its individual, social and cultural senses that epistemologically support other paradigms in different fields of the humanities. This is a fact that by its turn poses serious challenges to the validity of history’s factual bases and its professional functions. Most philosophers and humanists have acknowledged the importance of history in its essential sense as the past, and historical knowledge as a unique instrument for knowing this past. Meanwhile, they have raised several basic questions that have challenged the very possibility of historical knowledge as a scientific discipline and the reliability of its results and findings. Since the time of Aristotle, these had been the main questions with which the minds of philosophers and historians have been concerned. This paper tries to examine this problem from a rather different point of view: it attempts to show that most of the historians who tried to give an answer to these questions suffered from a conceptual and theoretical deficiency. In other words, most historians failed to prepare an adequate theoretical framework that makes their answers scientifically acceptable. It also tries to shed new light on this matter by showing the possibilities which new developments in the field of humanities can offer historians to find new answers for these basic questions. Interdisciplinary interactions are among of these possibilities by which the historians can use the facts given in the field of epistemology to challenge the opponents of the scientificity of history. Using this option, historians will have the opportunity to show that their knowledge satisfies the criterion of validity in a contextual account of knowledge.

The phenomenon of Sanandaj Traditional Bazaar is a complete and complex set of economic, cultural and social activities. A reasonable harmony has gradually developed between the various aspects of the Bazaar and its architecture in spite of all these complexities. Thus it seems that this phenomenon involves valuable but hidden structures, whose understanding is possible only in a constructive interaction with the space, its users and the shopkeepers. The purpose of this study is to explain the Sanandaj Traditional Bazaar phenomenon as reflected in the experiences of the users and shopkeepers through a phenomenological viewpoint and by relying on the views of philosophers such as Gadamer and Heidegger. The research method is phenomenological hermeneutics, and depth semi-structured interviews with eleven shopkeepers and users were conducted in this study. Finally, nineteen new semantic horizons of Sanandaj Traditional Bazaar emerged. The violation of the main passage by the shopkeepers as an authentic behavior, the communicational function of Bazaar, the combination of the concept of Sanandaj Traditional Bazaar with the historic event of the construction of Enghelab Street, the comfort and intimacy in communications within the Bazaar and incomprehensible natural passage of time in the Bazaar due to the physical structure of the Bazaar, are the main results of this paper.

Interdisciplinary studies confirm the fact that different branches of the humanities are closely connected with each other and increase each others’ efficiency. Since comparative interdisciplinary studies also include fields that are not purely literary, such as printing and publishing industries, the present study aims to analyze how cultural products achieve a better marketing through designing processes. Paratextuality, from Genette’s point of view, is the theoretical basis of this study, and peritexts and epitexts in the novels of Daneshvar and Soleimani are analyzed here. First, we define “comparative interdisciplinary study” and then discuss the peritexts and the epitexts in their novels. This is a library-based research; however, data is also collected through interviews with the publishers of their novels, Kharazmi, Ghoghnoos and Cheshmeh publications. It is a descriptive-analytical study and its findings show that there are some features in the appearance of books that motivate the customers to buy them. During years, because of cultural structures, advertising strategies and critical reviews, these features have changed. However, this study shows that the scope of the changes in the novels of Soleimani is vaster; in other words, by changing such features,  publishers have been able to create a better marketing for Soleimani, even though he is less known than Daneshvar.

The examination and interpretation of “Mirrors for Prince”, with regard to their historical context, necessitates an interdisciplinary study. With respect to the intertwinement of political thought and history, the mirrors for prince, as the most powerful current of political thought in the history of Iran, have normally been good sources for assessing the relationship between politics and ethics in different historical eras. Akhlaq-e- Mohseni, written by Hossein Va’izi Kashefi, as a important example in this genre, shows the relationship between politics, power and ethic in the critical Mongolian-Turkish era. In an era in which the practices of rulers had led to a critical situation, Kashefi, as an important figure in the Iranian intellectual tradition, recommends ethical politics and considers legitimacy and durability of ruling dependent on ethical principles. Thus, governance is defined based on principles such as justice and piety. In Akhlaq-e Mohseni these principles, which are based on ethics, are not complicated and have been approved of by different people with different ideas and religions in different eras and places. These principles highlight a common set of ethics that could satisfy the need of Kashefi’s era for justice and prosperity without ethnic-religious prejudices.

Environmental problems, expanding knowledge and developing new technologies for environmental curriculum in higher education require planning environmental curriculum and developing academic thinking in relation to the dynamics of past, present and future. The purpose of present study is to analyze the interdisciplinary curriculum of environmental education in higher education. The research methodology is descriptive. The research population is composed of 759 professors and students of environmental education at Iranian universities, including 40 teachers and 719 students. The sampling of students was random; based on the proposed model by Morgan and Krejcie, 250 students were selected. However, the professors were selected using census mthod. The research data were collected using questionnaires developed by the researchers in this study. The validity was assessed 0.8, using opinions of experts and Lawshe’s Formula, and the reliability was calculated 0.806 based on Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. The SWOT matrix was used for the analysis and interpretation of the data. Considering the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, the current strategy of higher education system in the environmental curriculum, is an offensive strategy, a strategy that uses the strengths and takes advantage of opportunities to advance the goals of development and progress. This type of strategy is the optimal strategy.

In this article, we declare the preliminary approaches of translation in Iran's history, includes some results of a research about translation trends in Iran’s cultural history, in order to understand any probable relation between the assumed approaches and the socio-cultural changes, in which there is two major historical periods, the ancient Iran and the Islamic cultural period. Then the probable relation between translation approaches and socio-cultural changes has been considered and conceptually used as an index for understanding the social functions of translation in those periods, and also finding out any socio-historical role of translation in the cultural history of Iran. The concept of “translation” in this article has been used in two different, but related conceptual meaning: the first one considers translation as the process of rendering words or texts from one language into another, the second approaches includes any reading and re-reading of a culture by another culture, as an intercultural process. Methodologically, older periods have been studied by pursuing the relations between transitional engravings, scripts and monuments. The newer periods have been studied through historical reports. The final conclusion proposes two different functions of translation; it seems that translation in the ancient period is an inner cultural trait; and in the Islamic era seems to function more as a “necessity for intercultural communications”, and also as a way to provide basic needs for constructing a trans-cultural society.

The aim of the present study is to investigate “the challenges and hindrances to science journalism in Iran” using in-depth semi-structured interviews with science journalists and experts. The results of the study show that some of the challenges to science and science policy in the country are the same as the challenges to science journalism. The elitist view of science, academics’ charge of populism against any involvement in the production of media content, the prevalence of a technocratic model in the atmosphere of science policy-making rather than a model of public participation, the ideologization of science and technology, and the consideration of science as power by science policy-makers are among the challenges a science journalist has to confront in Iran. Science journalists have not been trained for a professional presence in this field. This, coupled with the lack of an educational institution for the public sphere, has turned science journalism into an arena of trial and error experience which allows many errors and undermines confidence in the scientific community. Quality products are not encouraged and quantity is valued over quality, which results in failure to publish desirable works. Moreover, due to an exaggerated elitist consideration of scientists in the public opinion, journalists lose their critical power against scientists, and content is presented to the audience without being simplified.