WHAT IS INTERDISCIPLINARITY? : A View from the Humanities

In this episode we will be looking at the concept of interdisciplinarity and the various ways in which it is defined across the humanities, the social sciences, and STEM subjects. Interdisciplinarity has gained prominence as a buzzword in intellectual circles at least since the 1990s. Entire institutional programs are set up with the explicit purpose of pursuing interdisciplinary studies, and yet the conceptual character and methodological implications of interdisciplinarity are not always easy to determine. We will note what we do when we say we are doing interdisciplinarity, the range of objects of research and teaching, and the kinds of institutional structures that sustain interdisciplinary research. But, most importantly, we will also examine the contradictions and difficulties that emerge on pursuing interdisciplinary work, especially with respect to the translation of concepts and methods from one discipline into another. +++++++++++++ Follow on: Twitter:   / criticreading   Facebook:   / criticreadin.  . Instagram:   / critic.read.  . +++++++++++++ Related Videos: JOSEPH CONRAD’s Heart of Darkness: Representing Colonial Atrocity:    • JOSEPH CONRAD’s Heart of Darkness: Represe...   FRANTZ FANON, Black Skin, White Masks and the Black Bodily Schema:    • FRANTZ FANON, Black Skin, White Masks and ...   SOPHOCLES' Philoctetes - On Pity and Conscience:    • SOPHOCLES' Philoctetes - On Pity and Consc...   +++++++++++++ Suggested Reading Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007) Christopher Norris, Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism: Philosophical Responses to Quantum Mechanics (2000) Gillian Beer, Darwin, Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (2009) Julie Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (1990) Ato Quayson, "Instrumental and Synoptic Dimensions of Interdisciplinarity," Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice, or Process? (2000), 23-47.