Valences of Interdisciplinarity: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy

Abstract

Theodor W. Adorno (quoted in Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic 55) This collection of essays on interdisciplinarity arises from a 2008 symposium, "The Scope of Interdisciplinarity," sponsored by Athabasca University and its Ma program in Integrated Studies (Ma-is).Athabasca University is Canada's open university, and Ma-is is an interdisciplinary program that spans the full range of social science and the humanities disciplines. 1 The purpose of the symposium was straightforward: to bring together leading scholars of interdisciplinary work in order to explore the range of ways that interdisciplinarity finds expression in thinking, research, and teaching and to measure its valences.It was intended from the beginning that the papers presented at the symposium would form themselves into the present volume, and I am pleased to present them here and to offer a preliminary reflection on the broad, in many respects amorphous, but certainly pervasive, issues presented by the decisive trend in recent decades toward interdisciplinary research, study, and teaching.The Ma-is program is an expression of these trends, and those Mitcham makes the point more sharply in summarizing the reflections on it of Albert Borgmann: "Borgmann insightfully distinguishes between information about reality (science), information for reality (engineering design), and information as reality (the high-definition representations and creations emerging from it)-and further the increasing prominence, glamour, and malleability of information as reality is having the effect of diminishing human engagement with more fundamental realities" (331). 1996, 58).A striking instance of the manner in which technology is driving new interdisciplinary configurations is the converging technologies initiative, the key document for which is Mihail Roco and William Bainbridge's Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science (2003).As Steve Fuller points out in his report on this movement, "There is an ongoing struggle between the us and eu to define the direction given to the idea of 'converging technologies (ct) for improving I cannot quite end with Israel, however, in his invocation of a "human and cosmic" unity as the goal of a philosophically informed grasp of radical Enlightenment values and interdisciplinary interdependencies.We are beyond resting easy in such unities, and, with Fredric Jameson, I am more comfortable in engaging the question, "Interdisciplinarity, for what?" as a theoretical rather than a philosophical one.As Jameson importantly reminds us: while also critically examining and extending them-in a way analogous to Haneke's cinematography.In "Transdisciplinarity and Journal Publishing," Gary Genosko explores the impact of "planetary computerization" on the transdisciplinary collaborations characteristic of the self-constituting microinstitutions associated with journal publishing.Given the increasingly distributed collaborative effort that such publishing entails, journals become for Genosko privileged sites of transdisciplinary work, work that, in having to achieve synergetic approaches to problems and opportunities raised by new media technologies, must in his view go one step beyond interdisciplinarity to a extra-disciplinary kind of collaboration.After a discussion of several French journal collaborations, he examines in some detail two salient Canadian journal communities, Arthur and Marie Kroker's Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory and Paul Piccone's Telos.We continue the exploration of specific nodes of interdisciplinary configuration in the form of two critical and historical "case studies," as Morny Joy puts it, of two composite academic disciplines, religious studies and literacy studies.Joy sees religious studies as a "field" rather than a discipline because of its very constitution out of multiple disciplines (she names history, anthropology, philosophy, literary studies, sociology, and psychology as the most prominent).In "Gender, Women's Rights, WoRKs cited Frodeman, Robert.2010a."Introduction."In Frodeman 2010b, xxix-xxxix.

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