About

About ASU Interdisciplinary Cooperation Initiative

The ASU Interdisciplinary Cooperation Initiative is a strategic initiative supported by the President’s Office to support the growing field of interdisciplinary cooperation studies and - more broadly - to foster interdisciplinary cooperation to tackle the challenges that face humankind. 

The ASU Interdisciplinary Cooperation Initiative has two primary foci:

The interdisciplinary study of cooperation: Bringing together scholars from across the disciplines who study cooperation and creating research and training opportunities

Fostering interdisciplinary cooperation: Fostering cooperation among the disciplines in order to solve pressing problems of our present and future

Our goal is to discover the fundamental processes underlying cooperation in diverse systems in order to better understand the world and help support positive outcomes for humanity. We do this through building new opportunities for research, training and outreach involving diverse disciplines including Psychology, Evolutionary Biology, Anthropology, Sociology and Computational Modeling. We also engage with artists and futurists to envision non-traditional solutions. We create infrastructure for interdisciplinary work in cooperation, and address some of the core challenges of cooperation across systems within this interdisciplinary environment. This facilitates research on cooperation across many domains including: (A) among cells in the transition from unicellularity to multicellularity, (B) among microbes in diverse environments including inside us (C) among humans in small scale societies, and (D) among humans in large scale societies.