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.

A Bibliography for Beginners

My introductory course for the MA in Integrative Studies includes a lengthy bibliography on the history and nature of interdisciplinary research. I'll share it below.

Augsburg, T. (2014). Becoming transdisciplinary: The emergence of the transdisciplinary individual. World Futures, 70(3-4), 233-247.

Austin, W., Park, C., & Goble, E. (2008). From interdisciplinary to transdisciplinary research: a case study. Qualitative Health Research, 18(4), 557-564.

Baldwin Jr, D. C. (2007). Some historical notes on interdisciplinary and interprofessional education and practice in health care in the USA. Journal of interprofessional care, 21(sup1), 23-37.

Bechtel, W. (1986). The nature of scientific integration. In Integrating scientific disciplines (pp. 3-52). Springer Netherlands.

Interdisciplinarity and complexity

In recent decades, the ideas of interdisciplinarity and complexity have become increasingly entwined. This convergence invites an exploration of the links and their implications. The implications span the nature of knowledge, the structure of the university, the character of problem solving, the dialogue between science and humanities, and the theoretical relationship of the two underlying ideas.

Klein, J. T. (1984). Interdisciplinarity and complexity: An evolving relationship. structure, 71, 72.

Academic Tribes

From Becher, T., & Trowler, P. (2001). Chapter One. "Landscapes, Tribal Territories and Academic Cultures" in Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines. McGraw-Hill Education (UK). 

The first edition of this book, published over a decade ago, mapped the territory of academic knowledge at the time and traced the links between the academic disciplines into which that knowledge had coalesced and the cultures of the academics engaged in them. Since then there have been major shifts in the topography of academic knowledge and more significantly, in the very landscape in which it lies: not only in higher education (HE) institutions and systems at the national and international level but also in the socio-economic contexts within which they operate. We can describe these shifts as structural in the sense that, as they occur, there are changes in long-standing sets of practices in different locales among the academic tribes which are the concern of this book.

From Anamaria Dutceac Segesten. (2012, December 16). Thinking about Academic Tribes. Retrieved June 30, 2015, from https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-venus/thinking-about-academic-tribes.

The general and global trend has been towards fragmentation/interdisciplinarity and a flourishing of disciplines. There are now very specific fields of inquiry that did not exist 25 years ago, from my own area of specialization, “European Studies”, to “Queer Studies” or “Visual Cultures” or you name it – whichever specific domain that is entitled to define a territory of knowledge with its own boundaries.

Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning

A very nice list of sources related to interdisciplinary teaching and learning can be found at Miami University Office of Undergraduate Education.