In Between Disciplines

in between exposures

Source: Rami Gabriel

Over time, there is a subtle dance between what we find worthy of investigation and the types of questions we ask. The former depends upon our goals in studying nature and the latter is a matter of adopting a methodology. Quite often, due to new discoveries, convincing theoreticians, and shifts in institutional organization, the frame from which we would like to ask questions and collect answers does not fit easily into preexisting disciplines. Significant divergence between prevailing modes of inquiry begets hybrid frameworks of interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and multidisciplinarity. Of course, the disciplines we take to be solid frameworks, like, say, cultural anthropology or social psychology, were at their inception young upstarts fighting for respectability.

The struggle towards a space of interdisciplinarity is essentially an attempt to connect the insights of various disciplines across time and across epistemological landscapes with different horizons. Take for example the phenomenon of affect, or emotion. Affect is studied by animal ethologists, by political scientists, by neuroscientists, and in many other disciplines. In each case, the approach or field of inquiry has a different methodology for verifying assertions, asking questions, and collecting evidence—I call this an epistemological landscape. The horizon of each landscape differs as well: It is the stated goals, the ultimate purpose of the research questions.

To continue our example, the purpose, or horizon, of studying affect for animal ethologists is to better predict and understand animal behavior toward the end of creating a description of the behavioral palette of a given species that will be helpful in our knowledge of how to read and interact with individual and groups of animals in that species (see for example the work of Frans De Waal). In political science, the study of affect asks questions about when and how emotions are used to manipulate behavior in the polis. Evidence is collected via surveys and demographic data, and the horizon is an understanding of how individual actors as citizens in a body politic act under the influence of their emotions and how charismatic leaders employ strategies of emotional manipulation (see Slaby & von Scheve, 2019).

Ideally, two disciplines will speak to each other insofar as they share the same horizon. What is captivating about this situation is that each discipline sees the horizon from a different direction, and thus the phenomenon under investigation is doubly affirmed. The findings of animal ethologists and political scientists about affect meet on the same horizon from their respective methodological directions. While animal ethologists record behaviors of animals in the wild and in captivity, political scientists ask people questions and analyze the rhetoric of speeches and political pronouncements. In the case of an interdisciplinarity of affect, the horizon would be shared, namely the purpose of understanding how emotions influence behavior. But the differences are also pertinent­­—in this case, the difference between species, Homo sapiens and Pan paniscus, for example, which live in different ecological settings, reside in social groups of widely varying numbers, etc. Interdisciplinarity is only worthwhile when the epistemological landscapes reveal consistent qualities of the phenomenon at hand, which together coalesce to form a richer, more predictive, or otherwise useful picture of the horizon.

In general, we can say that interdisciplinarity is thus valuable when:

a) New knowledge, which is useful for considering/solving real problems, is made possible and enacted.

b) The epistemological landscape of the interdisciplinary field differs substantially enough from the source field.

c) Scholars are provided with enough time to achieve progress in knowledge, that is, the field must be able to sustain careers.

At the level of individual scholars, how is interdisciplinarity tenable when institutions, like schools, fellowships, publication schedules at academic presses, and job opportunities, are organized in terms of extant disciplinary institutions? How do the individuals whose interests and methods lie in between established disciplines sustain themselves?

It turns out that in many cases individuals whose work is interdisciplinary must create more institutions to draw resources, while fostering young talent, or else be consumed again into the dominant paradigms in the traditional fields. Sustenance for interdisciplinary endeavor includes access to institutional and financial power: schools, departments, workshops, conferences, centers, visiting positions, patrons, journals, etc. In addition to convincing preliminary intellectual achievements, charismatic leaders are necessary, ideas must be spread, legitimacy must be achieved. This is usually reflected by the number of adherents to a new approach: A compelling finding or set of methodologies convinces scholars, and this zeitgeist draws an ever-larger set of like-minded individuals. In some cases, by sole virtue of the size of the crowd, individuals or donors who do not hold definitive positions and are looking for something to hold onto are drawn in.

Some interdisciplinary fields succeed, breed generations, corner the epistemological horizon until internal shifts make room for the next wave who may either burn the past or coexist with aging revolutionaries. Some fields founder in pursuit of the greater goals of interdisciplinarity (new knowledge, new epistemological landscapes, careers), leaving misshapen scholars and dwarf departments behind to fend for themselves.

Maybe the most an interdisciplinary field can hope for is to solve its problems and enable careers that leave behind monuments of pulp and stone, that dissolve back into the unknown, mulch for future hybrids. After all, it is the loose ends, the gray areas, in established disciplines that provide the best argument for interdisciplinary innovation.