Valences of Interdisciplinarity Theory, Practice, Pedagogy

The modern university can trace its roots to Kant’s call for enlightened self-determination, with education aiming to produce an informed and responsible body of citizens. As the university evolved, specialized areas of investigation emerged, enabling ever more precise research and increasingly nuanced arguments. In recent decades, however, challenges to the hegemony of disciplines have arisen, partly in response to a perceived need for the university to focus greater energy on its public vocation—teaching and the dissemination of knowledge.

Valences of Interdisciplinarity presents essays by an international array of scholars committed to enhancing our understanding of the theoretical underpinnings and the practical realities of interdisciplinary teaching and research. What is, and what should be, motivating our reflections on (and practice of) approaches that transcend the conventional boundaries of discipline? And in adopting such transdisciplinary approaches, how do we safeguard critical methods and academic rigour? Reflecting on the obstacles they have encountered both as thinkers and as educators, the authors map out innovative new directions for the interdisciplinary project. Together, the essays promise to set the standards of the debate about interdisciplinarity for years to come.

For students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, the critical and multifaceted essays in Valences of Interdisciplinarity bring together a good conspectus of issues in this field and a stimulating and provocative intervention into current debate. Highlighting the relation between various interdisciplinarities and projects of enlightenment, democracy, and liberation, this volume brings epistemological-type issues into dialogue with ethical and political ones.

Andrew Wernick, Trent University

About the Editor

Raphael Foshay is the program director of the Master of Arts in Integrated Studies program at Athabasca University. His research interests include literary and cultural theory and continental philosophy.

Reviews

What all the essays here seem to be wrestling with—at their core—is the creation of an engaged self, both for the practitioner of interdisciplinary studies and for students…. In wrestling with the shifting valences of interdisciplinarity, the authors reveal their own quests for integration, to find a stable nucleus within the cloud of shifting electrons.

Intergrative Pathways, The Newsletter for the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies

This volume of essays could be of interest to faculty and administrators of graduate interdisciplinary programs or those contemplating developing such programs, because it shows the complexity of clarifying what such a program would be, the value of such programs and the challenges in gaining acceptance for them.

Impact

Table of Contents

1. Acknowledgements
2. Introduction: Interdisciplinarity, for What? / Raphael Foshay
3. Part I. Theory
   1. 1. The Menace of Consilience: Keeping the Disciplines Unreconciled / Martin Jay
   2. 2. The Telos of the Good Life: Reflections on Interdisciplinarity and Models of Knowledge / Ian Angus
   3. 3. Interdisciplinary Models and Dialectical Integration: A Proposed Model of Integrated Interdisciplinarity / Wendell Kisner
   4. 4. Globalization and Higher Education: Working Toward Cognitive Justice /Diana Brydon
   5. 5. The Law of Non-contradiction: Dialectic and the Possibility of Non-propositional Knowledge / Raphael Foshay
   6. 6. Interdisciplinarity, Humanities, and the Terministic Screens of Definition / Julie Thompson Klein
   7. 7. Integrating Interdisciplinary Studies Across the Humanities and Social Sciences / Rick Szostak
4. Part II. Practice
   1. 8. Ecological Thinking as Interdisciplinary Practice: Situation, Silence, and Skepticism / Lorraine Code
   2. 9. Michael Haneke: The Spectatorship of Self-RefleXivity and the Virtual Gaze in Benny’s Video and Caché / jan jagodzinski
   3. 10. Transdisciplinarity and Journal Publishing / Gary Genosko
   4. 11. Gender, Women’s Rights, and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Case Study / Morny Joy
   5. 12. Literacy Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies: Reflections on History and Theory / Harvey J. Graff
5. Part III. Pedagogy
   1. 13. Teaching and Enjoyment: A Lacanian Encounter with the Master Signifier / Paul Nonnekes
   2. 14. “One code to rule them all . . .” / Suzanne de Castell
   3. 15. Decolonizing Teaching and Learning Through Embodied Learning: Toward an Integrated Approach / Roxana Ng
   4. 16. From Integrated to Interstitial Studies / Derek Briton
6. List of Contributors

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