Why and How to Be Interdisciplinary
This Bryn Mawr program has a long track record of getting faculty members to talk across borders.
By Anne Dalke, Paul Grobstein, and Elizabeth McCormack
Interdisciplinary conversations are fast becoming a central feature of academic and intellectual life. We believe this revolution-in-progress, in which faculty engage in the once-fringe activity of figuring out how to do what we haven’t been trained to do, offers an antidote to many of the ills of the discipline-focused academic tradition. It is invigorating disciplinary work and calling attention to broader patterns and new areas of exploration that we may not perceive if we look only from our own disciplinary perspectives.
Like all revolutions, the movement toward interdisciplinarity stems from unmet aspirations, and its justification and evolving practices remain a little inchoate. Because interdisciplinary research and teaching differ sharply from what we were educated to do, they can also be daunting. We offer here our own experiences to help persuade you to become a willing—perhaps even enthusiastic—explorer of interdisciplinary terrain.
Our essay reflects the different perspectives of a literary scholar, a biologist, and a physicist, as well as the voices of colleagues in other disciplines who have worked together under the auspices of the six-year-old Center for Science in Society at Bryn Mawr College (http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/local/scisoc). By illustrating a blending of voices, we hope to show that meaningful interdisciplinary conversations can be productive and need not be difficult or abstruse.1
Productive Play
The Center for Science in Society was founded at Bryn Mawr in 2000 to encourage conversations among scientists and nonscientists about, among other things, “the relationships among forms of creativity and understanding.” In such conversations, disciplinary training plays a critical role, but no single discipline can lay claim to special authority. Virtually all disciplines touch on such broad problems in one way or another, and all provide varying perspectives on them. When you use institutional support to bring faculty, staff, and students from different disciplines into an interdisciplinary conversation, surprises can result— people are willing to take chances, to engage in genuinely productive play.
Interdisciplinary work is indeed play, but play of the most meaningful kind. That many of us have reacted to what we’ve been doing together with a sense of pleased surprise suggests that productive work of this kind has been less common in academic life than it should be. We look forward to the time, now emerging, when the satisfaction of such extended intellectual engagements no longer strikes any of us as unusual.
A discussion that began in a center-sponsored brown-bag lunch several years ago illustrates the process we follow at Bryn Mawr. In a series on the culture of science, a computational biologist talked about some of his personal frustrations in making his own work understandable and useful to experimental and observational biologists. Because he aimed to determine the consequences of situations that might occur instead of collecting observations on the real world, his colleagues who study physical phenomena didn’t understand what to do with his work.
Participants in this discussion came from biology, chemistry, English, mathematics, physics, and psychology departments; programs in computer science, gender studies, and the history of science; and the campus offices of resources and environmental health and safety. All of them recognized the frustration of the computational biologist—and described similar tensions in their own fields between broader, more synthetic efforts and more focused, concrete research. Historians, for example, noted that some of their colleagues eschew general stories and big narratives and draw conclusions only from looking at specific data, while others study larger patterns and approach data gathering from that perspective. Although everyone agreed that both approaches are valid, each researcher was used to working only one way.
What happened in our brown-bag conversation was complicated and exciting. Faculty members came to recognize that methodological difficulties in their own disciplines were not unique to them. Although each of our fields has its competing or complementary methods, as we talked with one another about broad issues of creativity and understanding, we learned to appreciate the perspectives of other disciplines and the alternate methodologies of our own. We all began to listen differently to our colleagues as a result.
General and Specific
We have continued over the years to discuss the nature and significance of the distinctions we identified in that early brown-bag discussion, which we refer to variously as metaphoric and metonymic, theoretical and observational, abstract and empirical, or general and specific. We’ve also hosted other working groups on topics such as information, diversity, quantification and value, science’s audiences, and teaching and learning.
The topics we have explored in these discussions have found expression in traditional scholarly work in history, literary studies, philosophy, and neurobiology, as well as in a range of new courses, including “Beauty: A Conversation Between Chemistry and Culture” (cross-listed in English); “Ideals of Scientific Explanation and the Nature of Its Objects” (cross-listed in biology and philosophy); “The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories” (cross-listed in English and biology); and “The Stuff of Art” (cross-listed in chemistry and art history). (See http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/local/scisoc/courses.html for a complete listing of classes.)
Why have these interdisciplinary conversations produced so much exciting research and so many challenging new undergraduate courses? The conversations presume that everyone has something to contribute and that every participant can gain from taking part in the dialogue. We never set out to determine a “right” or “final” answer, individual or collective, to any of the questions that engage us. Instead, our conversations continue as long as they generate new understandings that participants find useful and as long as we all feel productively engaged with others in a larger creative activity.
It has proven surprisingly easy to create and sustain such interdisciplinary exchanges. To encourage a supportive and productive atmosphere, we keep meetings informal. We choose speakers to represent a variety of potentially relevant disciplinary perspectives on a given topic. They briefly set the context for particular discussions related to their own expertise and suggest ways it might connect to other areas and broader questions. We post summaries of all discussions on the Web and invite further discussion in an online forum.
We have repeatedly found that the interplay between the abstract and the empirical determines the success of our interdisciplinary conversations. We are reciprocally productive when others’ theories motivate new observations and questions in our own realms and, conversely, when others’ observations become incentives for us to develop new theories. When we achieve this kind of dynamic exchange, our conversations are inclusive, rich, and challenging. By design, this process is unending, because it always generates new relations between parts and whole.
A New Map
In an era in which no one scholar can possibly assimilate all available information within a single field, interdisciplinary exchange offers us a way to map a direction through a crowded landscape and to alter its contours. It is a driving force that frees us from the idea that we need to know it all, because we have connected with others who know other things, or the same things differently.
A disciplinary landscape is grounded in a common understanding of the relation between theory and practice. As we engage in conversations with colleagues who understand that relationship differently, our understanding is unsettled. Such disruption can happen even among colleagues from the same department when they leave their own niche. The fields of play shift perpetually; information is continually translated among several systems. In the process, the presumptions that underlie the discussion are continuously and productively made visible and transformed.
We have come to see our interdisciplinary conversations as belonging to what philosopher Richard Rorty has called “the fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth”: a place for sorting through different perspectives, not to strip away all that is personal, experiential, and contextual, but rather to make use of the intersections so as to discover what might otherwise not be found. Interdisciplinarity brings together the products of focused inquiry to uncover broader patterns, meaningful in themselves and generative of new directions of disciplinary activity. The interdisciplinary playground reminds us of the ongoing continuity of the intellectual enterprise and the broad curiosity and risk taking that characterizes it.
Interdisciplinary conversations directly and enjoyably help us develop among ourselves and with our students the ability to create, critique, and re-create “multiplicitous” accounts. These conversations constitute neither an escape nor a fad but a revolution-in-progress. They require each of us to share our interest in making sense of the world however we can. Finding ways to tell the larger human story so that all people feel included can help us address our collective need to think productively about national and world communities and the relations among them. The disciplines remain an essential part of these conversations, of course; they derive new strength from their place in a common enterprise that compares different views.
Traditional academic structures must change further for interdisciplinarity to truly work. We believe the needed changes will be made as more of us learn to value the contribution of our own perspectives to conversations with our colleagues from other disciplines—and as we learn to appreciate and make use of, rather than distrust, the perspectives of our fellow explorers who follow paths different from our own.
Note
1. For an extended discussion of the issues and experiences outlined in this article, see http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/local/scisoc/theorizing.html. Back to text.
All three authors of this article are from Bryn Mawr College. Anne Dalke is senior lecturer in English; Paul Grobstein is professor of biology and director of the college’s Center for Science in Society; and Elizabeth McCormack is professor of physics.
|