Interdisciplinarity

Posted on | October 18, 2004 | 2 Comments

Last Friday the Australian Studies Centre hosted a professional development day with the topic ‘Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity’. I took a bunch of notes that I thought worth sharing.

Martin Crotty introduced the session by saying ‘disciplines seem to have been out of fashion for some time’. This point seemed debatable, but then Mandy Thomas (Executive Director for the Humanities and Creative Arts at the ARC) spoke about how the nation’s prime funding body strongly favours projects with an interdiciplinary approach. Amongst policy wonks there’s a strong perception that ‘the most dynamic and novel research occurs at the frontiers’ and ‘the highest impact work is interdisciplinary’. Projects that tend to get funding usually have topics that cross two or more of the following – art, science, technology and society/culture. Mandy suggested that interdisciplinarity creates relevant knowledge by virtue of the collaboration process, that collaboration forces you to demonstrate the significance of your project and your contribution to it in particular. How this challenges traditional practices in the Humanities is that it encourages a more productive model of research: we have to do more than argue that ‘critique’ is something inherently valuable.

Graeme Turner then made ‘The case for Interdisiciplinarity in the Humanities and its Limitations’ which I’ll list briefly:

Academic Case: Pros
- It turns attention to new objects of study
- It identifies the usefulness of analytic methods from each field
- It questions the practice of disciplinary division/policing
- It challenges the institutional power of some disciplines
- It responds to new problematics/objects and makes these central (eg. gender)
- It allows for the incorporation of theoretical and philosophical advances

Government Case: Pros
- Allows a different meaning for sciences and humanities
- Encourages research concentrations
- Facilitates the movement of money around the sector
- Adapts to the contemporary model of scientific research (problem-based, collaborative, applied + outcomes driven)
- Maximizes the knowledge already existing and proves its usefulness

Academic Case: Cons
- Unknown effects of interdisciplinary training at undergraduate level
- Danger of failing to define what constitutes rigour
- Risks the provisionalisation of all disciplinary protocols
- A potential imperialism of the interdisciplines (disciplines are colonised)
- Can provide assistance to agendas of rationalisation (dept mergers, etc)

Government case – Cons
- The humanities model for research is treated as an exception
- Often difficult to assess each side of an interdisciplinary collaboration equally
- Convenient method of legitimising mergers (eg. ‘Asian studies’)
- Licence to dispense with disciplinary training at school level.

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