Professional education and interdisciplinary fields: the role of global 'boundary objects' in the emerging open systems of the post-Soviet academe

Abstract

The post-Soviet professional education has been stigmatized by a number of legacies to provide an effective support to the emerging interdisciplinary fields. Professions often exist in silos, and professional education can rarely go beyond the norms of the established disciplines and institutional structures. The concept of community outreach is outdated and is based on narrow interests and ignorance of public needs and major societal transformations. Getting meaningful advice from the professions on the routes, priorities and strategies of developing comprehensive approaches for large scale public initiatives is often extremely difficult. The proposed paper examines how international partnerships and global ideas behind them break the walls of mistrust and achieve legitimization of change in the academic environments aspiring to become open systems.