Interdisciplinarity

Differing in tone and structure from the others, this essay foregrounds team members’ reflections on interdisciplinarity, highlighting both the benefits and challenges/frictions we experienced during our interdisciplinary work on the Ego-Media project.

Using a combination of text, video, and audio material, this essay explores the natures of interdisciplinarity (or the nature of interdisciplinarities) in the context of the Ego-Media project and the development, making, and editing of Ego Media.

It shows how interdisciplinarity means different things to different contributors. So, for example, those who inhabit one or more disciplines that encourage a “pure” disciplinary approach, with formally prescribed methodologies, have a very different take than others who inhabit disciplines that encourage and undertake research that demands a more heterogeneous or even improvisational approach.

It then unpicks the benefits and challenges of interdisciplinary working and how these affect the ways in which team members collaborated in research and shared decision-making and, ultimately, worked to create this publication.

It finishes with Rebecca Roach’s advice for successful interdisciplinary collaboration.

Interdisciplinarity was baked into the Ego-Media Project from the very start. The “Document of Work” which formed part of the Ego Media funding bid, described how, based “in the interdisciplinary Centre for Life Writing Research in the School of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London,” the project would “combine a humanistic, life-writing theory approach with an interdisciplinary methodology.” The project would involve “researchers from Sociolinguistics, Culture Media and Creative Industries, Digital Humanities, Medical Humanities, Psychiatry, War Studies, and Education.”

In this clip, principal investigator Max Saunders, and the three co-investigators Leone Ridsdale, Clare Brant, and Alex Georgakopoulou discuss interdisciplinary working.

Unlike the other theme essays, this one doesn't have a summary. Instead, see What we’ve learned for a bullet-point list of advice for academics planning interdisciplinary projects.

Choi and Pak offer a clear definition of interdisciplinarity, situating it in relation to both multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. “Interdisciplinarity,” they write, “analyzes, synthesizes and harmonizes links between disciplines into a coordinated and coherent whole.” In contrast, “[m]ultidisciplinarity draws on knowledge from different disciplines but stays within their boundaries,” while “[t]ransdisciplinarity integrates the natural, social and health sciences in a humanities context, and transcends their traditional boundaries.” In all these cases

The objectives of multiple disciplinary approaches are to resolve real world or complex problems, to provide different perspectives on problems, to create comprehensive research questions

In the context from which Choi and Pak are writing, these objectives extend “to develop[ing] consensus clinical definitions and guidelines, and to provid[ing] comprehensive health services.” And they stress that “[m]ultiple disciplinary teamwork has both benefits and drawbacks.”¹

This chimes with Ego Media team members’ experience. There were advantages – the “cross-fertilization,” and “richness" Clare Brant and Alex Georgakopoulou mention above. But there were also challenges. “Men,” wrote Thomas S. Kuhn (in 1962, before women were invented), “whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice. That commitment and the consensus it produces are prerequisites for normal science, i.e., for the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition.”² Arts and humanities and social sciences sit within different paradigms. Most of the challenges for the team emerged where these different paradigms collided; particularly in those instances where there was a slight mismatch between languages of different disciplines. A focus group, for example, is a different beast for a psychologist and a literary scholar.

At some points, the social scientists on the Ego Media team were shocked by the “unscientific” approach of the literary scholars. At others, the literary scholars were unimpressed by the the (necessarily) circumscribed scope of the social scientists’ research questions and the tentative nature of their conclusions. As Kuhn writes of “normal” science: “[p]erhaps the most striking feature of … normal research problems … is how little they aim to produce major novelties, conceptual or phenomenal … the range of anticipated, and thus of assimilable, results is always small compared with the range that imagination can conceive.”³ As Clare Brant’s work on Imaginative Agency and Max Saunders’s on the speculative nonfiction of the To-Day and To-Morrow series suggest, while the freedom to exercise imagination and to speculate is possible in any discipline, it is not equally encouraged or enabled in all.

For Joe Moran, because of these paradigmatic clashes, “[i]nterdisciplinarity means that people working within established modes of thought have to be permanently aware of the intellectual and institutional constraints within which they are working, and open to different ways of structuring and representing their understanding of the world.”⁴ For successful interdisciplinary work, then, we need to step outside of our disciplinary research paradigm. Which isn’t always easy, and may, perhaps, be harder for those in higher status disciplines, utilizing scientific methodologies, which tend to be regarded as more rigorous and even objective.

“As the composite nature of the term itself suggests,” writes Moran, “‘inter-disciplinarity’ assumes the existence and relative resilience of disciplines as modes of thought and institutional practices.”⁵ For Moran, “[w]ithin academia, disciplines are a … form of common sense … They enable us to locate manageable objects of enquiry, set limits to our study and present our findings to a community that understands the intellectual framework within which we are working.”⁶ Or, as Rebecca Roach explains,

When you write something, you have to envisage a specific audience for it. You have to know the assumptions you can make, the degree to which you can or don’t have to gloss a term, the degree to which a debate is specifically interesting for that audience. You have to know what assumptions are being brought to the text by the audience.

The title (and content) of Moran’s first chapter, “Interdisciplinary English,” underlines the fuzzy nature of some disciplines: “literary studies,” he writes “… has never been a ‘pure’ discipline but a hotchpotch of contending aesthetic, theoretical and scientific discourses.”⁷ This contention is supported both by the way in which English, as a discipline evolved during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, out of the “theory and practice of interpreting texts – hermeneutics – which has formed the main activity of literary studies since at least the end of the First World War … [and which] derives from two much older disciplines , theology and law”⁸ and by the ways in which Ego Media team members think about their discipline(s). Here’s team member Stijn Peeters, for example, talking about his discipline, new media studies:

Clare Brant, asked which discipline(s) she “inhabits” listed seven. At the top of her list were life writing, the history of ideas, and literary criticism, the last of these, she writes, “is such a broad discipline, it borrows /absorbs whatever’s useful.” Max Saunders and Rob Gallagher also responded with lists of seven disciplines, while Rebecca Roach answered “literary studies – but often looking from an interdisciplinary perspective. Also digital cultures.” Between them, team members listed twenty-six disciplines. Of these, literary criticism is the only one professed by three team members, while a further six are professed by two team members. (See this table of Ego Media team disciplines in Lisa Gee’s page on Researcher stance).⁹

These responses, however, raise questions about what makes something a discipline rather than, say, a subdiscipline, a methodology, or a subject/object of inquiry: an issue which leapt to the fore when the team began developing and refining the taxonomy for the faceted search on the homepage. We aimed to use this, in part, to highlight Ego Media’s interdisciplinarity and the range of methodologies the team employed. To this end, we initially separated “disciplines” and “methodologies” into different facets. This proved more challenging than we had anticipated. Some terms appeared in both lists and – with the limited time available to us – it proved impossible to assign them to one list or the other in a satisfactory way. We resolved this by merging the two facets into “Disciplines/Methods.” This may be something of a cop out, but, it’s arguable that it simply demonstrates the blurred nature of the boundaries of some disciplines, particularly those situated within the same methodological paradigm, or shows that in some fields the same term denotes a method and a discipline or subdiscipline (discourse analysis), while in others (i.e., literary studies/close reading) it doesn’t.

Disciplinarity can be said to enable the development of “communities of practice”¹⁰ within which “members are brought together by a learning need they share … their collective learning becomes a bond among them over time (experienced in various ways and thus not a source of homogeneity) … [and] …their interactions produce resources that affect their practice,” together with the identification of an audience for the outputs of that community of practice, likely to be slightly broader than the community, but roughly conforming to it.¹¹

There is, however, one element of disciplinarity that isn’t reflected in the definition of a community of practice: the development and use of a shared language. Robert Frodeman writes in “The Future of Interdisciplinarity: An Introduction to the 2nd Edition” in The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity that interdisciplinarity

consists of not only the study of how to integrate various kinds of disciplinary knowledge – call this the epistemic task – but just as much the analysis of the challenges surrounding effective communication to different audiences – call this the political and rhetorical element.¹²

While English and History, for instance, clearly constitute different disciplines within the academy, their methodologies and, in many cases, the types of objects of their research – often texts – overlap considerably. And the outputs from one of the disciplines can, in most cases, be comprehended by denizens of the other. So, how far does collaboration between different disciplines like English and History which speak more or less the same language and employ the same – or similar – methods count as genuinely interdisciplinary? For Ego Media team member, Lisa Gee, they don’t.

Lisa Gee’s take is that collaborations that are genuinely interdisciplinary require the sharing of different languages and methodologies: the crossing of boundaries between paradigms. This way of working is, as team members discovered, more challenging. In the video below, Max Saunders, Rebecca Roach, and Alex Georgakopoulou discuss some of the challenges they faced. Alex Georgakopoulou flags the issue of the need to develop, and the challenges of developing, a shared language, while Rebecca Roach highlights how humanities – and particularly literary studies – are diminished in contemporary discourse about and within academia.¹³ In the audio clip, she expands briefly on the impact of this on interdisciplinary working.

But, as Rebecca Roach explains below, it’s not only the hierarchy of disciplines that comes into play in interdisciplinary working. There are also academic hierarchies – and the ways people working within them perceive their situations within them.

Additionally, the role of a professor vis-à-vis their research varies across different disciplines. While, in the arts and humanities, it is standard practice for professors to conduct their own research, in the medical sciences, professors fulfill a more supervisory function.

In The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, Robert Frodeman compares interdisciplinary working to jazz:

While the jazz musician comes armed with knowledge (of, e.g., chord progressions), the real business occurs while riffing with others. A rhetorically sensitive interdisciplinarity begins with the needs and perspective of a specific audience in a particular context, armed with a toolbox of approaches that can be tweaked as needed. This contrasts with a top-down, methodological attitude that develops a set of principles which are then programmatically applied to different situations (cf. Frodeman 2013). If done right, one’s interlocutors sees no “method” at all.¹⁴

To improvise in this way, as Rebecca Roach states, requires researchers to feel confident and secure: in themselves, in their methodological facility and in their knowledge, their understanding of its limits, and willingness to admit to what they don’t know. Moran writes:

As Geoffrey Bennington points out, “inter” is an ambiguous prefix, which can mean forming a communication between and joining together, as in “international” and “intercourse,” or separating and keeping apart, as in “interval” and “intercalate” (Bennington 1999: 104). This ambiguity is partly reflected in the slipperiness of the term, “interdisciplinary.” It can suggest forging connections across the different disciplines; but it can also mean establishing a kind of undisciplined space in the interstices between disciplines, or even attempting to transcend disciplinary boundaries altogether.¹⁵

To what extent does interdisciplinary work take place in those interstices? Arguably, the team’s monthly workshops and meetings described in our Methodologies essay could be said to be situated there. These meetings (fitting them into everyone’s diaries proved another challenge of interdisciplinary working!) featured contributions from an impressive range of scholars from around the world.

These included

• Professor Alfred Hornung (Johannes Gutenberg University), who discussed building interdisciplinary collaborations between the humanities and medical sciences.
• Tobias Blanke, Giles Greenway, Jennifer Pybus, and Mark Cote (Digital Humanities scholars at King’s College London) outlined their research into co-researching in partnership with young coder communities.
• Professor Craig Howes (University of Hawai’i) explained how his research into platforms (FaceBook,YouTube) through an ethical lens, specifically with respect to pathologies of life writing off- and online, biography, war studies, and necrobiography, requires an understanding of literary forms, biography, war writing, media studies, and a range of technologies.
• Libby Heaney (Royal College of Art) described and demoed her practice-based project BritBot,¹⁶ commissioned by Sky Arts as part of their post-Brexit public engagement work. Our discussion focused on the collaborative (interdisciplinary) nature of art and technology projects like BritBot; built-in and learned biases of the bots; and the shifting political nature of the material they are working with.
• Professor Gillian Whitlock (University of Queensland) presented her research into twenty-first-century testimonials and ethics questions associated with how narratives collected from migrants and asylum seekers detained at Australia’s Nauru processing centers are presented, shared, and stored, and outlined the interdisciplinarity of this research which incorporates biography studies, migration, politics, legal studies (with respect to human rights), accessibility, and digital media forms.

In June 2019, team member Rob Gallagher co-convened a symposium Indisciplinary Approaches to Digital Play.¹⁷ The introduction to the program included the following accounts of interstitial interdisciplinarity:

For W.J.T. Mitchell, the best form of interdisciplinarity was a form of “indiscipline” (1995, p. 541), of turbulence or incoherence at the inner and outer boundaries of disciplines. He distinguished this form from two other kinds: a “top-down” model that dreams of a Kantian architectonic of learning, a pyramidal and complete organisation of knowledge; and a “bottom-up” model that responds to emergencies and opportunities, but which ultimately also ends up being disciplinary in its need to carve out professional spaces. Jacques Rancière (2008), whose mode of philosophising opposed the recognition of boundaries that separated philosophy from other practices, ended up leaning on a similar term: “indisciplinary” practice was, for him, a method that works in explicit defiance of normative divisions. If interdisciplinarity keeps existing disciplines in place and shuttles between them (without breaking existing boundaries), indisciplinarity aims to show how the disciplines themselves are constituted.

It then returned to the idea of interdiscipinarity-as-buzzword, the desirable (indeed essential – except for those working in the “hard” sciences) mode of working within the contemporary university, particularly when it comes to applying for and securing grants:

Taking a different approach, Rosi Braidotti has drawn attention to the transformation of the classical disciplines and the growth of the infra-disciplinary “studies,” citing as one example the way that the study of “new media has proliferated into sub-sections and meta-fields: software, internet, game, algorithmic and critical code studies and more” (2018, p. 14; 10). But even as she celebrates these developments as steps towards new kinds of “supra-disciplinarity,” Braidotti also acknowledges that the “intense and hybrid cross-fertilization” of disciplines is in many respects an index of the “speed with which they are over-coded by and interwoven with ‘cognitive capitalism’ (through practices like the academic star system, the research audits, the privatization of universities, the emphasis on grants and fund-raising, etc.)” (2018, p. 13).¹⁸

Despite all the challenges inherent in and political concerns about interdisciplinary working, the experience was, for team members, overwhelmingly positive. As both Clare Brant and Alex Georgakopoulou mention in the video below, for them, working with colleagues from other research paradigms who work with unfamiliar methodologies, have different skills, and approach their research in different ways was the most interesting aspect of the Ego-Media project. Alisa Miller, whose research practice is “grounded in literature and history,” felt that working with social scientists enabled her to look at her project “through a different lens.” And, for Rebecca Roach, interdisciplinarity “can teach you an awful lot about your own discipline. This has value in itself.”

Overall, then, the interdisciplinary nature of the project enabled team members to increase their awareness “of the intellectual and institutional constraints within which they are working,” and helped them open up “to different ways of structuring and representing their understanding of the world.” Working on an interdisciplinary project broadens perspectives and, for most participants, proved a rewarding experience.

As Lisa Gee’s essay Writing for Online Reading indicates, creating this digital book posed several interdisciplinary challenges. Rebecca Roach puts it succinctly, describing how “trying to adapt my writing style and more importantly my argument construction for this new kind of publication” was far from easy. “I am used,” she wrote, “to assuming one reading pathway through the text [so] I write and construct my prose and argument accordingly. Writing in a more ‘chunked’ way is really difficult!” Meanwhile, Clare Brant wonders “what happens to readers’ trains of thought” as they take advantage of the “ability to link through to material – which is an adventure.” And one challenge we didn't anticipate was that of negotiating our citation style. Stanford University Press uses Chicago Manual of Style: notes and bibliography or author-date. Preferences divided along disciplinary lines, with those working in arts and humanities opting for notes and bibliography, and those in the social or medical sciences for author-date. The choice was made democratically (by simple majority). Those used to working with author-date didn’t find it easy to adapt, and – while the system that King’s Digital Lab developed is ingenious and effective – given the complexity of adding footnotes to a digital publication, author-date would probably have been the better choice.

Ultimately, Max Saunders feels that creating this digital book cemented the process of interdisciplinarity within the team as it required us to engage with each other’s work in a different kind of way.

During his interview with Lisa Gee, he asked, “Is interdisciplinarity changing as we put the publication together?”

This, arguably, signals a shift from “Methodological ID” towards “Theoretical ID,” or perhaps from “Endogenous ID” to “Coproduction of Knowledge.”¹⁹ Although Gee is not so sure. Is this genuine interdisciplinarity, or is it that writing, editing, uploading to, and linking across the digital publication – new media writing, if you like – constitutes a discipline in itself? Rebecca Roach’s reflections on the writing process do, arguably, support this.

Rebecca Roach suggests pointers for those interdisciplinary collaborations:

• Ask what kind of collaboration is it? Be specific and explicit about assumptions – remember, these might not be shared. Also your assumptions are interesting to reflect on (potentially a path to self-reflexivity).
• Be cognizant of power differentials in encounters. Power differentials are born of institutional/disciplinary setups, norms, hierarchies, and privilege. What counts as valuable labor can be disciplinary-specific. Ask who is expected to do that work and who gets credit? How is credit assigned and how do perceptions of credit fold into the work process?
• Ensure you build trust and respect researchers’ autonomy.
• Make sure that both sides believe that there is something valuable for them to give and to gain, and that both respect – and want to benefit from – their partners’ expertise. This is key to the development of the good working relationships essential to successful collaborations.
• It’s important to recognize that participants from different disciplines are likely to have different levels of interest in, and different angles on, research questions. Discuss these early on – and remember that even though a question or angle may not be of interest to you/your discipline, it may have significant value in a different research context.
• At an early stage, establish the kinds of feedback that are useful/required on work in progress, as this is an area where it’s particularly easy for misunderstandings to arise.
• Working out who your audience (for outputs) is can be tricky, but is crucial. What interventions are you making and to which debate? Audiences (or readers for journals particularly) are rarely interdisciplinary, even if the research is.

For Principal Investigator Max Saunders, the Ego-Media project was multi-interdisciplinary. “For me as a literary critic,” he writes, “there’s auto-interdisciplinarity, when I have to step off the curb into the traffic of the internet. Then there’s inter-researcher-interdisciplinarity, as when humanists talk to sociolinguists, digital humanists, or medics. Then there’s black-box interdisciplinarity of researchers puzzling over messages from analysts and programmers!”

Chapters

If you’ve read the theme essays in order, we’d recommend

Imaginative Agency

Or, if you’d like to explore ideas from this essay

Reflections: On Making This Publication