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.

Increased specialization also means there are larger problems that can fall between the cracks or exist in the blurred regions at the boundaries of established disciplines.[4] Multidisciplinary projects bring together different disciplinary expertise to share knowledge on big questions, but there is no integration of work or insights. As experts come to the table, information is shared but remains encapsulated; a single problem is viewed through different lenses and from different angles. A multidisciplinary curriculum might ask students to take courses in different disciplines all focused on a single theme or issue but not require an experience in which students integrate or synthesize the material. They might integrate these different perspectives on their own, but the program itself is multidisciplinary.

Interdisciplinary work can be defined as “a process of answering a question, solving a problem, or addressing a topic that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline or profession...and draws on disciplinary perspectives and integrates their insights through construction of a more comprehensive perspective.”[5] Work between two disciplines in near proximity in the problem space is not uncommon[6], and is sometimes not even recognized as being interdisciplinary. But integration across a wider array of disciplinary perspectives has become increasingly popular over the past half-century. We see this confined often to academic activity in area studies programs like Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Asian Studies, where a large suite of social issues demand the integration of diverse perspectives and methodologies. We see this also, for example, in neuroscience programs, which often form at the intersection of academic disciplines such as biology, psychology, philosophy, and computer science, but more recently involve and inform economics, marketing, and politics. With interdisciplinarity narrow bands of specialized knowledge are integrated and made to shine new light on big problems[7] that go beyond traditional disciplinary or professional boundaries. An interdisciplinary curriculum would bring together different disciplinary perspectives and require also established moments of integration. Sometimes integrative moments take place in introductory or capstone courses, sometimes they occur in proseminars that run alongside the other coursework.

Transdisciplinarity has relatively recently appeared on the scene, at first highlighting the goal of unifying knowledge and promoting the idea that there are common axioms running through all disciplinary knowledge. Think of the “trans” in “transcontinental.” But this initial guiding assumption has been supplanted with the goal of addressing complex real-world problems in collaboration with community stakeholders.[8] Complexity theory addresses phenomena that require explanations that go beyond the sum of partial explanations. Large-scale phenomena, like global poverty, environmental sustainability, the stock market, and health care, present such a source of complexity: autonomous agents interact to create emergent properties, self-organizing systems, and problems that defy formulaic or linear solutions. The initial guiding assumption is not lost: complex problems demand a holistic and integrative approach to knowledge. For today’s transdisciplinarian, given the nature of the problem, something new or innovative is expected to arise from the collaborative and integrative activities of the disciplines and stakeholders. Think of the “trans” in “transformative” or “transcendent.” The transdisciplinary curriculum can look a lot like its interdisciplinary cousin but it retains a special identity by highlighting the special complexity of the problem--often a problem with significant social implications--and a collaborative relationship with external stakeholders. Interdisciplinarity moves out of the academy and into the real-world. The potential of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work does not reject the power and importance of the discipline or the profession. Different kinds of problem call for different forms of explanation, different levels of integration, and different arrangements of work .

Notes

[1] Shumway, D. R., & Messer-Davidow, E. (1991). Disciplinarity: an introduction. Poetics today, 201-225. See also Weingart, P. (2010). A Short History of Knowledge Formations. In J. T. Klein & C. Mitcham (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (pp. 3–14). Oup Oxford.

[2] Klein, J. T. (1996). Crossing boundaries: Knowledge, disciplinarities, and interdisciplinarities. University of Virginia Press. Newell, W. H., & Green, W. J. (1982). Defining and teaching interdisciplinary studies. Improving College and University Teaching, 30(1), 23-30. See also Shulman et al. (1991) and Weingart (2010).
[3] Menand, L. (2010). The marketplace of ideas: Reform and resistance in the American University (Issues of Our Time). WW Norton & Company.

[4] Klein, J. T. (1993). Blurring, cracking, and crossing: Permeation and the fracturing of discipline. Knowledges: Historical and critical studies in disciplinarity, 185-211.

[5] Klein, J. T. Newell, w. H.(1996).”Advancing interdisciplinary studies”. JG Gaff, JL Racliff and Associates, Handbook of the undergraduate curriculum. A comprehensive guide to purposes, structures, practice and change. College Board, 393-415.

[6] Morgan M. Millar and Don A. Dillman, “Analyses of Interdisciplinary Doctoral Research Data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates,” Technical Report #10-063A (Pullman: Washington State University Social and Economic Sciences Research Center, 2010).

[7] Newell, W. H. (2001). A theory of interdisciplinary studies. Issues in integrative studies, 19(1), 1-25.

[8] Klein, J. T. (2009). Creating interdisciplinary campus cultures: A model for strength and sustainability. John Wiley & Sons.