What is transdisciplinary?

Transdisciplinary work takes place in the context of disciplinary organization. The discipline is so familiar that we rarely attend to its nature. It’s history is certainly fascinating, recalling distinctions between disciples (disciplined apprenticeship) and doctors (indoctrination) and between the directive arts and the objective sciences.[1] Today’s disciplines are communities of scholars.[2] Community requires cohesion and this is guaranteed by shared subject matter, methods, conceptual frameworks, traditions and a recognized history. Disciplinary norms are sustained, perhaps strengthened, by the existence of professional journals, associations, textbooks, and a standardized curriculum. Standard graduate programs serve as gatekeepers; hiring and tenure procedures preserve the distinctions.[3] This specialization is important because it facilitates the ability to focus on fine-grained problems and acquire deeper knowledge in a subject matter. Professionalization, too, is important, as it sets rigorous standards for relevance, acceptability and credibility. There are thus good reasons to acknowledge and support disciplinary work. But cohesion is not without consequence. As with species, all intellectual reproductive behavior takes place within the group; there is usually nothing sexy about outsiders.

Rethinking Interdisciplinarity

Now available online: RETHINKING INTERDISCIPLINARITY ACROSS THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND NEUROSCIENCES by Felicity Callard and Des Fitzgerald

This book offers a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities. Setting itself against standard accounts of interdisciplinary 'integration,' and rooting itself in the authors' own experiences, the book establishes a radical agenda for collaboration across these disciplines. Rethinking Interdisciplinarity does not merely advocate interdisciplinary research, but attends to the hitherto tacit pragmatics, affects, power dynamics, and spatial logics in which that research is enfolded. Understanding the complex relationships between brains, minds, and environments requires a delicate, playful and genuinely experimental interdisciplinarity, and this book shows us how it can be done.

From PelgraveConnect

Integrative Learning and Interdisciplinary Studies

Contextuality, conflict, and change are the defining parameters of this kind of learning. Contextuality is a different metaphor of knowledge and education than unity, which assumed consistent, logical relations within a linear framework with the expectation of achieving certainty and universality. Contextuality accepts the contingent character of knowledge and action. Students need to tolerate ambiguity and paradox if they are to take grounded stands in the face of multiple and sometimes conflicting perspectives. The relational skills they gain also foster the ability to adapt knowledge in unexpected and changing contexts. The answers they seek and the problems they will need to solve as workers, parents, and citizens are not “in the book.” They will require integrative interdisciplinary thinking

- from Klein, J. T. (2005). Integrative learning and interdisciplinary studies. Peer Review, 7(4), 8-10.