ABSTRACT
The goal of this chapter is to introduce the book as a whole. The chapter begins with a reminder of just how difficult and potentially rewarding cross-disciplinary knowledge-making can be. With this reminder in place, the chapter proceeds to ask whether there is there anything that can be done to alter the risk/reward calculus of this sort of research. The work of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (TDI) changes that calculus in a positive way. The chapter provides a brief introduction to TDI’s method and its core ideas of cross-disciplinarity, dialogue, philosophy, mutual understanding, communication, and integration. The chapter concludes with a sketch of the rest of the book that allows readers to navigate the book in the ways most beneficial to them.
