Welcome to the Sensemaking Interdisciplinary Forum
The Sensemaking Interdisciplinary Forum (SIF) aims
to bring together energetic scholars from diverse fields across the
University of Michigan who are passionate about sensemaking (and
related) scholarship. Our events have assembled graduate students
and faculty from sometimes disconnected fields
ranging from psychology, sociology, and organizational behavior to
management, information science, education, and design.
By bringing scholars from these various
disciplines into a single and ongoing forum on sensemaking, we hope to
raise peoples' awareness of the psychosocial processes involved in
confronting everyday uncertainty and ambiguity in the hope that it
leads to better decision-making in all corners of society.
Sensemaking can lead to better decision-making because of its ability
to affect how people anticipate the unexpected and its ability to
strengthen peoples' overall creativity.
The six coordinators who founded this group were
inspired by the work Karl E. Weick. In addition to being regarded
as the foremost thinker in this area of scholarship, Professor Weick
has been our teacher and mentor. We began this group after having
all completed one of Karl's courses. After regular, informal
meetings in which we discussed sensemaking scholarship, we decided to
broaden our mission and include others in our discussions.
SIF has four main objectives:
- First, we seek to broaden the knowledge of graduate students and
professors alike beyond the scope of their chosen disciplines.
- Second, we hope that SIF will generate high-quality professional
connections that will cultivate vanguard interdisciplinary research
projects.
- Third, we aim for SIF to engender high-quality
personal connections that provide support to graduate school students
and faculty members.
- Finally, we will provide students with
experience in presenting their research and opportunities to work on
dissertation ideas as well.
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