Since the mid-1990s interdisciplinarity has been advocated as a means of transforming contemporary research and education. Rather than organizing inquiry around disciplinary specializations–with their conventions of knowledge formation and articulation–scholars and researchers, designers and engineers, teachers and students, would now employ themes, bringing to bear on these themes disparate methods and perspectives.
Nell Painter, Creative Research Center, MSU
Like most intellectual fashions, the weakness of interdisciplinary studies lay in its popularity. Some versions of what purported to be interdisciplinary studies were instead multidisciplinary — maintaining specialized approaches rather than synthesizing them (see, for example, Benson 1982) to achieve genuinely integrated methods and, through these, intriguing new perspectives.
This is not to suggest that multidisciplinary approaches have no value; they have the potential to be specially informative. It is to say, however, that strong claims for the transformative power of interdisciplinary approaches were sometimes undermined by a lack of structured, rigorous, radicalized practice. After all, a synonym sometimes used for interdisciplinary studies is integrative studies.
A decade later, transdisciplinarity arose as a movement not only within higher education but world intellectual and design cultures. Sometimes referred to as “radical interdisciplinarity,” the approach attempts to tap into the full range of human creativity by developing radical new methods of inquiry, especially those enabled by new media technologies. Two typical methods by which radical interdisciplinarity mashes up disciplines are (1) combining analytic and expressive modes of investigating or communicating knowledge and (2) distributing and flattening the dynamic construction of knowledge.
Examples of combined analytic and expressive modes for knowledge investigation or communication:
- exploring blood dynamics or physics equations through sonification (such as is done in UC Santa Barbara’s Allosphere)
- artistic performances (such as contemporary dance) that employs scientific or data visualization and / or sonification (as iLAND does)
Examples of distributed and flattened knowledge construction:
- aggregating crowdsourced information (e.g., Wikipedia)
- reCaptcha
- topic- and news-driven blogs
- GLOBE citizen scientist program for youth
Degree-granting programs in interdisciplinary studies at colleges and universities are growing in number, but still typically face an uphill climb on campuses where competition for resources between traditional disciplines and such new initiatives is significant. Tenure lines for radically interdisciplinary faculty tend to be scarce, making it difficult for campuses to build local communities around such work.
Distributed knowledge communities encouraged by centers, institutes, associations, and conferences–university-affiliated or not–are therefore all the more important in connecting people working within transdisciplinary studies. Some are, by now, venerable institutions, having begun the course earlier than most — for example, MIT Media Lab (one of the few well-funded degree-granting successes with large numbers of graduates who are seemingly ubiquitous), SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, and Leonardo (the association and journal). Some of these communities have begun to establish themselves as new leading lights, such as George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (the creator of Zotero); RPI’s world-class EMPAC; University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Games, Learning, and Society Group; and HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Science,and Technology Advanced Collaboratory).
Still more communities are being established at colleges and universities worldwide across the transdisciplinary spectrum, from area informatics to digital arts and humanities, treating contemporary themes as diverse as environmental studies and ideological terrorism. These programs are encouraging teachers and students to reach beyond the bounds of not only disciplines but also classrooms, institutions, and nations, to engage with experts and non-experts, to manifest in print, on the web, and in the studio, theater, and lab. They tend to be almost as outward as inward facing, encouraging interactions that cross institutional boundaries, as well as departmental and disciplinary ones.
Take for example Montclair State University’s Creative Research Center, which opened in the spring of 2010, led by cultural historian and critic Neil Baldwin. CRC was created to provide a “transdisciplinary online community,” a “a born-digital, dynamic, nimble, open-source, collaborative space — a Web forum to stimulate, reinvigorate, promote and publicize Very Large-Scale Conversations.” This “hub model” for encouraging interdisciplinarity is one that has great potential, with these hubs serving as distributed innovation pumps across a wide sea of creative possibilities.
We find that such contemporary knowledge communities are very much in synch with the new learning.
– Kelly Searsmith
References
Benson, TC. 1982. Five arguments against interdisciplinary studies. Issues in Integrative Studies 1: 28-48.
Image Source: MSU CRC site, main page; artist Nell Painter
You’d probably push the button. But what if the gadget had other functions? Would it occur to you to search for them, if your teacher hadn’t alluded to their existence?
