The Global Turn. Eve Darian-Smith
also Strathern 2005). On the other side, the champions of interdisciplinary scholarship portray the disciplines as self-marginalizing dinosaurs on the verge of extinction. These debates can get bitter as communities of scholars fight over funding and limited resources within their institutions. In the United States, this has been very much the case in recent years as university administrators have tried to deal with the impact of the economic recession. As a result, support for interdisciplinary scholarship has generally declined across many university campuses in the Euro-American academy.1
Whether one is a supporter or a critic of interdisciplinary scholarship, one of the central problems in debates about its relative value is that these debates are entrenched in modernist concepts and logics such as individualism, nationalism, rationalism, and secularism (Ludden 2000). Just as international studies implicitly reaffirms the national, interdisciplinarity implicitly reaffirms the modern disciplines. Interdisciplinary approaches can only extend so far beyond the disciplines against which their innovation and purpose are measured. In an effort to move past disciplinary/interdisciplinary debates and “today’s arid rhetoric of ‘interdisciplinarity”’ (Fitzgerald and Callard 2014: 4), this chapter focuses on broader trends affecting not one discipline, or the interactive space between any two disciplines, but many disciplines concurrently.
As the intellectual debate over interdisciplinarity has raged unabated over the past four decades, fundamental changes have overtaken academic practice. Leading intellectual contributions have emerged at the intersections between established disciplines, including the contributions of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and more recent scholars such as Bruno Latour, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. As we discuss in Chapter 1, these changes reflect a new worldview that began to emerge following World War I and reached a peak in the aftermath of World War II.
In the postwar period, the Euro-American academy questioned its belief in stability and fixity of accepted knowledge. Building on the social and legal changes wrought by the civil rights movements in North America, Europe, and Latin America, many of the ways of thinking that had dominated nineteenth- and twentieth-century academia began to be challenged. Interdisciplinary programs emerged throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and included area, environmental, ethnic, feminist, gender, religious, and science and technology studies (Ferguson 2012). Interdisciplinary scholarly innovations jumped again in the 1990s with the end of the Cold War, increasing awareness of international processes, and new, integrative forms of political, economic, and cultural globalization. To meet these emerging challenges, scholars forged new, previously unimaginable connections across disciplines. These divergent academic endeavors have more recently coalesced into a transdisciplinary framework that in some ways makes both disciplinary boundaries and the concept of interdisciplinarity itself less relevant.
Interdisciplinarity is long established in the physical sciences, engineering, and medicine. Neuroscience is a salient example of transdisciplinarity. As a burgeoning field of inquiry, neuroscience “has become a combination of anatomy, physiology, chemistry, biology, pharmacology, and genetics with a profound concern for culture, ethics, and social context … To survive in the twenty-first century the neurosciences will have to link all of their parts even further and bring genetics, the environment, and the sociocultural context together in order to develop more complex models of [the] mind” (Burnett 2008: 252; see also Fitzgerald and Callard 2014). Within the social sciences and humanities disciplinary boundaries have similarly been blurred, though, as we discuss below, this has often gone unacknowledged and even unrecognized.
Our objective in this chapter is to demonstrate the presence of transdisciplinarity within existing scholarship and call for all scholars to embrace it, whether one self-identifies with its innovative research agendas or not. We feel that such an embrace is absolutely essential given the prevalence of corporate pressures within universities to “dice disciplines, faculty, and students, and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments” that prevent scholars from thinking holistically and creatively, and engaging with “the most pressing moral, political and cultural questions” of our times (Hedges 2008: 89–90). Embracing transdisciplinarity offers a way to overcome what has been called the “balkanization of the academy into narrow enclaves” (Hall 2010: 27). Embracing transdisciplinarity is one way scholars can explicitly “engage in and generate deep critical thinking” that seeks to better understand our complex present (Hall 2010: 27).
DISTINGUISHING INTERDISCIPLINARITY FROM TRANSDISCIPLINARITY
Though lesser known, transdisciplinary scholarship developed concurrently with that of interdisciplinary scholarship. It was Swiss development psychologist Jean Piaget who formally introduced the concept of transdisciplinarity in 1970. In his writings he used the term to refer to scholarship that “would not only cover interactions or reciprocities between specialized research projects, but would place these relationships within a total system without any firm boundaries between disciplines” (Piaget 1972: 138).2 As Basarab Nicolescu notes, this description did not mean that Piaget advocated dismantling conventional disciplines in favor of a new super- or hyperdiscipline. Rather, Piaget was interested in “contemplating the possibility of a space of knowledge beyond the disciplines” (Nicolescu 2008: 1).
According to the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research, which was founded in Paris in 1987, transdisciplinary research complements interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research but is nonetheless distinct (fig. 7). Multidisciplinary approaches use the perspectives of a number of different disciplines with no necessary overlap, while interdisciplinary approaches use the methods and theories of one discipline to inform other disciplines. In contrast, the goal of transdisciplinarity is to move beyond the limits of both the disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches to provide new ways of organizing knowledge and modes of thinking (Blassnigg and Punt 2012; also Gasper 2010).
Figure 7. Transdisciplinarity.
One of the important elements of transdisciplinary work is that it is problem based and thus concerned with the practical applications of knowledge in the real world, where issues tend to be multifaceted and call for multiple analytical perspectives. Transdisciplinary scholarship also explores how knowledge is constituted in the first place as a reflection and product of particular worldviews, ideologies, and cultural biases. According to Rosemary Johnston, transdisciplinarity “overtly seeks ways to open up thinking to ‘maps of unlimited possibilities’ … to create mindscapes that are unfettered by traditional patterns and procedures” (Johnston 2008: 229–30). Transdisciplinary scholarship is potentially emancipatory in that it explicitly seeks to free up modernist ways of thinking and our organization of knowledge in the academy by incorporating Western and non-Western knowledge into a more holistic approach to pressing contemporary issues. Adds Patricia Leavy, “Transdisciplinarity produces new knowledge-building practices … that [are] vital for making academic research an authentic part of the globalized world it claims to study” (Leavy 2011: 14).
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