**The aim of this blog is to inform and engage debate about recent developments in interdisciplinarity with reference to global and international studies. Entries in this blog are the views of the author. We encourage contributions from diverse views on the current condition of interdisciplinary research and teaching in global and international studies.
Interdisciplinarity seems to be everywhere – in universities, think-tanks, granting agencies, and research and development divisions of major corporations. In the 21st century it has become something of a badge of respectability and of being “innovative” and up-to-date. It signals that research is engaged and relevant. Yet, its epistemological assumptions and its impact on social and political functions of knowledge are often unclear.
Interdisciplinarity encompasses a rather wide range of epistemologies as well as research and teaching practices. Since publication of the 1972 OECD report Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities (based on a seminar held in 1970 at the University of Nice) interdisciplinarity has come to refer to a loose family of research practices going under a number of rubrics: cross-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary, anti-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary. All transgress established disciplinary boundaries and thereby, in their own ways, reveal limits of modern knowledge practices as they intervene in productions of knowledge. From my own perspective, then, interdisciplinarity is not merely a programmatic methodology but challenges the suppositions of modern systems of knowledge/power. We aim this blog to be a space for discussion of the current practices in the various forms of interdisciplinary research and teaching IDSS members along with others involved in ongoing inter-/trans-/multi-disciplinary research and teaching, and for debate on the significance and impact (epistemological, political, and social) of interdisciplinarity on knowledge production in global society.
Here are some of my thoughts on thinking interdisciplinarity.
Interdisciplinarity encompasses research practices, modes of reorganizing teaching, and a sensibility toward the social and political significance of knowledge production. It simultaneously addresses anomalies within and limits of academic disciplines, while often deploying academic knowledge and expertise to address concrete, real world problems. This gives interdisciplinary work a responsibility it does not often enough (to my mind at least) acknowledge: to make available professional and academic knowledge to public debate and decision-making. As such, interdisciplinarity in all its forms reflects and constitutes relations of knowledge and power.
As is of course well-known to academics, academic disciplines have always been about power. I do not mean by this the often petty, but sometimes significant internal squabbles and debates. I have in mind more their function as constituting distinct ways of seeing the world as the knowledge they produce is put to use in social and technical systems in societies and frame the way students and literate publics understand and act in the world. Academic disciplines play a key role in controlling the rules that constitute the possibilities of and what counts as knowledge and hence frame thought and action in modernity. In my view, interdisciplinarity challenges the norms and rules of knowledge production as they have developed in modernity, at least since the early 19th century. It also, crucially, raises the question of the responsibility of research and teaching in the uncertain and increasingly troubled times in which we live.
As I see it, interdisciplinarity is radical in a double sense: it excavates the roots of the organization of knowledge while it implicitly or explicitly critiques the adequacy of traditional divisions of knowledge. It does not sacrifice academic and intellectual rigor, as some critics allege. Yet, interdisciplinarity is always, at least to some degree, anti-disciplinary in that it locates research and teaching in a space in which fixed and opposed poles of knowledge are challenged and suspended. As such, interdisciplinarity both encodes and resists the normalization of knowledge and the forms of social relations, within and outside the academy, it enables.
Interdisciplinarity stems from and reflects complex conditions that require new configurations of knowledge and new practices of knowledge production. In my own field of political theory, key concepts are in the process of reassessment, their emergence with sovereign state territoriality being scrutinized both by more analytic political theorists rethinking concepts of justice and democracy among others, as well as more historical theorists increasingly interested in the constitutive role of colonialism and global capitalism in constituting modern political theory. In this sense, interdisciplinarity holds out the prospect for self-consciously bridging theory and practice, academia and public needs, both with regard to technical matters (on the environment and ecology for example) and on social and political matters (redressing historical silences and gaps in established disciplines).
Interdisciplinarity would seem to be thriving in the structural and cultural disjunctures of the global condition.[1] Where one might see the specialization of academic disciplines of knowledge as constitutive of modernity, as, for example, Weber does in Science as a Vocation, interdisciplinarity could be argued to be constitutive of globalization, consistent with a world in flux, a fluid or “liquid” age, in Zigmunt Bauman’s phrasing. Presupposing lacunas and aporias produced by specialization, some seek new deployments of expertise across disciplines that might give some purchase on the confusions, dislocations, and radical contingency of contemporary global worlds. As it challenges the territoriality of states and deterritorializes social relations, globalization challenges the organization of knowledge about the world. Hence interdisciplinarity’s special importance to scholars in global and international studies. It can address novel challenges and struggles for equality and justice that traditional disciplines formed in earlier times have difficulty with, and indeed to which they often contributed.
In my view, interdisciplinarity seeks to capture something of the elusiveness of current global worlds, that is, spaces that are constituted through transgressing boundaries and by new ways of being beyond settled borders. It is not surprising that it has emerged as social life has accelerated, as the modern world mutates from one of sovereign territoriality to one of flows and networks, as the division of blocs has given way to a more fluid array of state powers and relations along with a contradictory condition of economic centralization and fragmentation, and as international society and something we might call global culture display a dizzying plurality of continuously shifting political affiliations, communal affirmations, and atomistic individualisms. This condition seems ripe for the more transgressive research strategies interdisciplinary work involves than the seemingly more stable orders of the recent past.
Moreover, it is not surprising that interdisciplinarity has emerged with challenges to the modern faith in science and expertise. We seem to be in another interregnum – a period Antonio Gramsci famously described a one of undecidability in which “… the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”[2] One such “morbid symptom”—the distrust of science (exhibited by denial of climate change and in the current viral pandemic)—might be countered by interdisciplinary approaches better able to translate expert knowledge of the natural world into public discourse.
Indeed, in a world of linguistic uncertainty, that is, an inability to appeal to a secure underlying set of common meanings in order to settle conceptual and linguistic differences, interdisciplinarity would seem a term describing multiple forms of “translatability”–for example between different languages, between expert/professional and lay and local knowledges, between sacred and secular ontologies. Interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge production both in the sciences and in the interface between science, the humanities and social sciences, would seem more compatible with multiple forms of international collaboration that seem to be emerging in knowledge production in research communities inside and outside (increasingly intermingling) research universities.
As a reorganization of teaching, interdisciplinarity is well-established, although the resistance of traditional academic disciplines has not been fully overcome, especially from positivists who decry its supposedly loose methods. Nor in some areas has the political resistance from especially conservatives who associate interdisciplinary programs in the humanities and social sciences with radical political projects. Within universities, proponents of interdisciplinarity still have battles to fight. Increasing recognition that addressing contemporary issues requires transcending the traditional divisions of academic knowledge—public policy issues regarding ecology and the environment seem exemplary in this respect—derive from the increasingly complex issues we face that interconnect technical, social, and political systems. Whether drawing expertise from specific disciplines, collaborating in new modes and norms of inquiry, or artfully crossing seemingly opposed methods and academic rules, interdisciplinarity potentially alters established disciplines and constitutes new ones. As universities become more engaged with the social worlds in which they exist, and embrace constructive productions of useful, critical knowledge, interdisciplinarity has become a more accepted currency.
Surely, the mantra of the necessity for interdisciplinarity to understand and engage with the current global world trumpeted in university and college view books, is not always, or often, matched by the financial and institutional commitment to interdisciplinary research and academic programs, but such support is increasing. Within universities, interdisciplinarity has been an excuse for merging departments and downsizing. It has also been one of the mantras sustaining “public-private partnerships” that often enable corporate interventions into curriculum and university organization that threaten academic freedom and the open public inquiry that has linked liberal education to democratic public cultures and democratic states. Moreover, in areas of academic research, forms of interdisciplinarity remain linked to state power, extending and giving new life to Cold War forms of interdisciplinarity–area studies, deterrence theory, counter-insurgency, and counter-terrorism to cite several examples.
International studies itself was created as an interdisciplinary institutionalization of professional knowledge as well to rationalize state power. It also formed in the wake of liberal attempts to institutionalize a peaceful international society (these were not exclusive or necessarily contradictory), and hence was (and remains) a contradictory development. Various instantiations of interdisciplinarity went into the formation of the field of international political economy in the 1970s: liberals linking political economy with functionalist international organization, and theories of cooperation (often drawn from game theory); neo-Marxist political economies also came to inform the identity of international political economy, especially in Gramscian theories and in World Systems Theory (which drew Sociology and Anthropology, into a historically focused theory). Feminist interventions exposed silences in traditional international studies, as well as drew scholars from multiple disciplines—anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and political theorists—into international and global studies. Critical geographers opened up analyses of space beyond the assumed state-centered conceptions of the modern state-system. More recently, with the securitization of multiple fields of social life – biopolitical (especially health fields) and ecology/environment programs—international and global studies have become prime sites of interdisciplinarity linking academic and expert knowledges with public and lay discourses in order to meet current world challenges.
In its multiple forms, interdisciplinarity reflects a recognition of the transformation of knowledge practices that have sustained multiple features of modernity. I see it as simultaneously an academic project and an intervention into a world in which modern concepts (in my own field of political theory, again, concepts such as justice, freedom, democracy, authority and power) are undergoing significant rethinking and redefinition, often to include the impact of globalization (a term that itself reflects the current condition in its overuse, contestability, and allusiveness. As such, interdisciplinarity is a practice engaged in creating new forms of social and political life. My own hope is that through engaging and debating interdisciplinarity researchers and teachers might aid the self-conscious emergence of more democratic forms of social and political life that are respectful of the differences and multiple possibilities.
Stephen J. Rosow
President, Interdisciplinary Studies Section of the International Studies Association
[1] See the now classic essay by Arjun Appadurai. “Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy.” Public Culture, 2:2 (1990): 584-603.
[2] Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 276.
Interdisciplinary Studies Section/IDSS 