{"id":7520,"date":"2014-05-16T09:26:02","date_gmt":"2014-05-16T14:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=7520"},"modified":"2016-06-16T07:58:22","modified_gmt":"2016-06-16T12:58:22","slug":"the-discipline-of-interdiscipline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/05\/16\/the-discipline-of-interdiscipline\/","title":{"rendered":"The discipline of interdiscipline"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mtg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Rachel Carson Center’s Minding the Gap: Working Across Disciplines in Environmental Studies<\/a>\u00a0has come out (in PDF<\/a> and MOBI<\/a> formats). It includes pieces by Gregg Mitman, Rob Nixon, SueEllen Campbell, John Meyer, Basarab Nicolescu, and others.<\/p>\n

My piece, “The Discipline of Interdisciplines” (pp. 11-13), is intended as something of a collective statement from my generation (the first generation) of ES doctoral graduates. (Apologies for being so bold, but no one else has done it, to my knowledge, so I thought I’d try.)<\/p>\n

I’m sharing it below.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Discipline of Interdiscipline<\/strong><\/p>\n

Training in a discipline is a honing of skills comparable to any craft\u2014like that involved,\u00a0say, in running a farm. One masters the tools and learns the routines. One gains a feel\u00a0for the soil, the moisture, the weather, the signs and clues coming from one\u2019s animals,\u00a0and in the process internalizes the daily, seasonal, and annual round of activities. One\u00a0comes to inhabit those skills, background assumptions, and tacit knowledges in ways\u00a0that reshape one\u2019s very demeanor, posture, gait, and sensibility.<\/p>\n

For such a farmer, a sedentary knowledge-maker, interdisciplinarity is a walk in the\u00a0mountainous woods separating one\u2019s cultivated plain from another\u2019s. Or it is something\u00a0even more foreign\u2014perhaps the nomadic movement of traders setting off on journeys\u00a0or meeting in ports, where goods will be exchanged and prices negotiated, but where\u00a0food is now a product, a currency, not one\u2019s lifeblood (or that of one\u2019s animals).<\/p>\n

One could wander by chance into interdisciplinary woods. But just as one cannot successfully\u00a0cultivate a field one just happened to wander into, so is interdisciplinarity\u00a0nothing without its methods, skills, and knowledges. Interdisciplinary fields\u2014area studies,\u00a0<\/span>urban studies, ethnic studies, women\u2019s and gender studies, environmental studies,\u00a0cultural studies, semiotics, science and technology studies, global studies, complexity\u00a0theory, sustainability science, and others\u2014arise when new problems have emerged and\u00a0the old tools no longer suffice for addressing them. New toolkits and sheds must be built\u00a0before they can become \u201chomes\u201d for new trainees (and those homes may never be as\u00a0comfortable as the disciplinary ones, into which the interdisciplinarian may gaze longingly\u00a0from the outside).<\/p>\n

My graduate training came from an institution of environmental interdisciplinarity. The\u00a0Faculty of Environmental Studies at Toronto\u2019s York University was a school that had\u00a0been formed by a quirky assemblage of geographers, urban planners, environmental\u00a0philosophers, organizational managers, and natural scientists in 1970, during the heyday\u00a0of the first environmental revolution. My master\u2019s and doctoral defense committees\u00a0<\/span>included a cultural anthropologist, a human geographer, a sociologist of media and\u00a0culture, a political scientist turned geographer, a filmmaker-philosopher-naturalist, a\u00a0biologist turned ecophilosopher, and an Allende-era Chilean socialist politician turned\u00a0political ecologist. None of them began as an \u201cenvironmental studies scholar,\u201d so it was\u00a0up to my generation\u2014the first to graduate with environmental studies PhDs in North\u00a0America\u2014to define what it means to be one.<\/p>\n

We defined it through a process not too different from the one that forms disciplines: trial,\u00a0<\/span>error, and the messy bricolage of collective self-fashioning. Making our way through\u00a0North American academe, we learned to pay attention to disciplinary boundaries and\u00a0maps. We learned to compare these maps and negotiate our ways between them, to\u00a0probe the disjunctions between one map and another, and between the maps and the\u00a0territories they ostensibly referred to. It was these territories, after all\u2014the \u201creal world\u201d\u00a0of (in our case) socioecological problems\u2014that prompted the birth of our interdiscipline.<\/p>\n

But being an effective interdisciplinarian, we realized, required even more discipline to\u00a0be effective\u2014and to communicate effectively, and convincingly, to and between other\u00a0disciplines. It required learning the methods, crafts, rules of conduct, and modes of existence\u00a0(as Bruno Latour calls them) of not one discipline, but several. It required learning\u00a0the skills of translation\u2014the habitus of the ethnographer of academe. It required skill in\u00a0seeing how concepts, methods, and tools travel across domains, and how they could be\u00a0bent to travel more smoothly.<\/p>\n

Environmental scholarship\u2014of the sort that might effectively tackle the complex, multiscalar\u00a0problems we identify as \u201cenvironmental\u201d today\u2014is inherently interdisciplinary\u00a0at its outset, if not transdisciplinary (since it is rooted in and actively responds to real\u00a0world affairs). But this interdisciplinarity is not some supplement grafted onto a set of\u00a0primary homes called disciplines. Rather, it is paradoxically the best name we have for a\u00a0practice of knowledge-making that is hybrid at its origins. Knowledge is bricolage; it is\u00a0an understanding of things that draws on methods and practices that did not begin as a\u00a0standardized set of disciplinary measures, but only became so over time. Knowledge is\u00a0always \u201cinter,\u201d always between: between the knower and the known, but also between\u00a0the knower and other knowers, including those who know things differently, knowers in\u00a0the past who have shaped our knowledge, and future knowers to whom we direct our efforts.\u00a0<\/span>Disciplined knowledge becomes \u201ctrans\u201d when a leap between levels or discourses\u00a0becomes necessary: between academe and the \u201creal world,\u201d or between a paradigm\u00a0being questioned and a new one that is called for.<\/p>\n

The question for me is as much \u201cwhen should environmental scholarship become inter-(or trans-) disciplinary?\u201d as it is \u201cwhen should environmental scholarship remain\u00a0firmly rooted within a single discipline?\u201d In the face of the environmental crisis, perhaps\u00a0<\/span>the onus should be on the disciplines to reassert their value. There is no doubt\u00a0in my mind that historians, philosophers, classicists, literary and art scholars, and others\u00a0bring much value to environmental scholarship. Some of their labor can certainly\u00a0be carried out in the traditional confines of disciplinary discourse, for that is where\u00a0disciplinary tools are refined and strengthened. But some of what they do ought to be\u00a0done with others\u2014across boundaries dividing disciplines and even those separating\u00a0academe from lived reality. It need not be obligatory to abandon our ships to swim in\u00a0the tempestuous currents of transdisciplinary seas. But disciplinarity and transdisciplinarity\u00a0ought to be seen as the two faces\u2014the inward gaze and the outward gaze\u2014\u00a0that shape the ways we make, negotiate, and question our knowledge, and the ways\u00a0we constitute our common world.<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Rachel Carson Center’s Minding the Gap: Working Across Disciplines in Environmental Studies\u00a0has come out (in PDF and MOBI formats). It includes pieces by Gregg Mitman, Rob Nixon, SueEllen Campbell, John Meyer, Basarab Nicolescu, and others. My piece, “The Discipline of Interdisciplines” (pp. 11-13), is intended as something of a collective statement from my generation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[203],"tags":[25057,16147,25026,16770,109061,258],"class_list":["post-7520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academe","tag-environmental-humanities","tag-environmental-studies","tag-grad-student-advice","tag-interdisciplinarity","tag-rachel-carson-center-for-environment-and-society","tag-transdisciplinarity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-1Xi","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6837,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/07\/19\/kochelsee\/","url_meta":{"origin":7520,"position":0},"title":"Kochelsee","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 19, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm at the Vollmar Akademie by Lake Kochel in the Bavarian Alps, just a short train ride beyond the last S-Bahn station south of Munich, for \"Studying the Environment - Working Across Disciplines.\" The Rachel Carson Center has got a bunch of us together here to hammer out some ideas\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"File:Gvva kochelsee1.jpg","src":"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/5\/5d\/Gvva_kochelsee1.jpg\/800px-Gvva_kochelsee1.jpg","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7819,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/09\/15\/emi-on-enviro-humanities-book-chat\/","url_meta":{"origin":7520,"position":1},"title":"EMI on Enviro Humanities Book Chat","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 15, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The third\u00a0edition of the Environmental Humanities Book Chat\u00a0features a discussion of my Ecologies of the Moving Image. Discussants include\u00a0the Royal Institute of Technology's Anna \u00c5berg, organizer of the\u00a0\"Tales from Planet Earth\"\u00a0film festival and conference, Seth Peabody of Harvard University (and a\u00a0Rachel Carson Center fellow), and moderator Hannes Bergthaller of National\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/VU4LVa39ZlI\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8785,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/06\/08\/state-of-the-eco-humanities-take-1\/","url_meta":{"origin":7520,"position":2},"title":"State of the Eco-Humanities, Take 1","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 8, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"This post is the first of a series of reflections on the state of the Environmental Humanities, or Eco-Humanities, and of where this interdisciplinary field might be headed. A note on terminology: The term \"Environmental Humanities\" has\u00a0caught on in ways that \"Eco-Humanities\" and other variations have not, but the debate\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8051,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/04\/09\/33%e2%85%93-environmental-studies-greats-or-a-canon-revisited\/","url_meta":{"origin":7520,"position":3},"title":"33\u2153 Environmental Studies greats (or, a canon, revisited)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 9, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"The following is a significantly revised version of an article I posted to the Indications\u00a0blog\u00a0(and\u00a0etc)\u00a0five and a half years ago. I was curious to see how much of it still holds (a lot, I think), so I've revisited it and expanded its proposed sort-of-canon, in the second part of what\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Throbbing-Gristle-20-Jazz-Funk-Greats","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2015\/03\/Throbbing-Gristle-20-Jazz-Funk-Greats-275x275.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4804,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/06\/22\/advice-for-environmental-interdisciplinarians\/","url_meta":{"origin":7520,"position":4},"title":"Advice for environmental interdisciplinarians","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 22, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"The first issue of the new Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences is out and available here. The JESS is the journal of the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences, which is meeting this week at the University of Vermont in Burlington (where I live and work, so I'll be\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7208,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/01\/20\/anthropocene-readings\/","url_meta":{"origin":7520,"position":5},"title":"Anthropocene readings","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 20, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 I'm thinking of making my Spring semester graduate class, \"Environment, Science, and Society in the Anthropocene,\" into a semi-public seminar series, with a blog where we will share links to readings and videos as well as discussions. (Actual meetings will not be online, but will be open to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Clark","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2014\/01\/Clark-183x275.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7520"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7529,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7520\/revisions\/7529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}