Raphael Foshay - Valences of Interdisciplinarity: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy

Valences of Interdisciplinarity

Cultural Dialectics
Series editor: Raphael Foshay

The difference between subject and object slices through subject as well as through object.

Theodor Adorno

Cultural Dialectics provides an open arena in which to debate questions of culture and dialectictheir practices, their theoretical forms, and their relations to one another and to other spheres and modes of inquiry. Approaches that draw on any of the following are especially encouraged: continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt and Birmingham schools of cultural theory, deconstruction, gender theory, postcoloniality, and interdisciplinarity.

Series Titles

Northern Love: An Exploration of Canadian Masculinity
Paul Nonnekes

Making Game: An Essay on Hunting, Familiar Things, and the Strangeness of Being Who One Is
Peter L. Atkinson

Valences of Interdisciplinarity: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy
Edited by Raphael Foshay

Theory, Practice, Pedagogy

Edited by
RAPHAEL FOSHAY

Copyright 2011 Raphael Foshay

Published by AU Press, Athabasca University
1200, 10011 109 Street, Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8

ISBN 978-1-926836-46-1 (print) 978-1-926836-47-8 (PDF) 978-1-926836-48-5 (epub)

A volume in Cultural Dialectics series:
ISSN 1915-836X (print) 1915-8378 (digital)

Cover and interior design by Sergiy Kozakov

Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printers

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Valences of interdisciplinarity : theory, practice, pedagogy / edited by Raphael Foshay.

(Cultural dialectics)
Includes bibliographical references.
Issued also in electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-926836-46-1

1. Interdisciplinary approach in education. 2. Universities and colleges--Curricula. 3. Interdisciplinary research. 4. Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge. I. Foshay, Raphael, 1950- II. Series: Cultural dialectics series (Print)

LB2361.V35 2011 378.199 C2011-906521-5

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CFB) for our publishing activities.

Assistance provided by the Government of Alberta, Alberta Multimedia Development Fund.

Please contact AU Press, Athabasca University at aupress@athabascau.ca for permissions and copyright information.

Dedicated to the memory of
Paul Nonnekes (19612010),
friend and colleague

I would like to acknowledge the generous assistance of Athabasca University and its Vice-President Academic, Margaret Haughey, the Research Centre, under the leadership of Rory McGreal, and the MA program in Integrated Studies and its former director Mike Gismondi for generous support and financial assistance, both in the mounting of the 2008 symposium The Scope of Interdisciplinarity and in the realization of the present volume. Thanks, too, to my collaborator on the symposium and colleague in MA-IS , Derek Briton. This volume is dedicated to the late and much-mourned Paul Nonnekes, taken in mid-career by a cancer that robbed him, and us, of a vital, inspired, and inspiring scholarly career.

RAPHAEL FOSHAY

What compartmentalized disciplines project on to reality merely reflects back what has taken place in reality. False consciousness is also true: inner and outer life are torn apart. Only through the articulation of their difference, not by stretching concepts, can their relation be adequately expressed.

Theodor W. Adorno (quoted in Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic 55)

This collection of essays on interdisciplinarity arises from a 2008 symposium, The Scope of Interdisciplinarity, sponsored by Athabasca University and its MA program in Integrated Studies ( MA-IS ). Athabasca University is Canadas open university, and MA-IS is an interdisciplinary program that spans the full range of social science and the humanities disciplines.of us teaching in the program welcome this opportunity to engage in closer conversation with the leading edge of thought on interdisciplinarity.

In the following introduction, I attempt to set the debate surrounding interdisciplinarity in a certain historical, disciplinary, and theoretical context. Such a large and foundational topic does not easily lend itself to adequate introductory comment. Since general overviews of the situation that has given rise to intensive reflection on interdisciplinarity are now sufficiently numerous (e.g., Klein 1991; Frodeman 2010a, 2010b; Moran 2010; Stehr and Weingart 2000; Kagan 2009), I have tried to pursue in the following a line of reflection on what seem to me the primary concerns driving our engagement with interdisciplinarity. In asking what is and should be motivating our practice of and reflection on interdisciplinarity (Interdisciplinarity, for what?), I point out that this question comes to us from (at least) two quite different directions, one internal to academic life and one externalalthough my point is that these locations and sets of priorities are not simply opposed. They are not even two. The point is that they are one and the same, or that until they come into active engagement with each otheran engagement fully social, political, and economic, as well as intellectual and even personalthe potential and the prerogatives of interdisciplinarity will not be fully or adequately plumbed.

I

In 1784, in a short essay for the Berlinische Monatsschrift titled Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? Kant responds to the question posed to him by the editor in what would become, and has especially been confirmed in recent decades as, an iconic essay in the context of debates surrounding the issues of enlightenment, modernity, authority, knowledge/power, and the role of critical reflection in their ramifications (see Schmidt 1996). Kant reflects: If it is asked Do we now live in an enlightened age? the answer is No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment (Kant 1996, 62). Kant was at considerable pains in this short piece to address the relation between enlightenments two dimensions of responsibility: toward the citizen himself in the full exercise of his (and, in the eventual and inevitable logic of enlightenment, her) freedom and toward the individuals role in the community, which, in Kants case, as he explicitly addresses in the essay, means under the rule of the enlightened but absolute monarchy of Frederick the Great. Thus, Kant was concerned to draw the necessary boundary between what he calls the public and the private exercise of enlightened reasonbetween, on the one hand, the free exercise of self-determination and responsibility on the part of the individual in the public sphere (as an individual citizen) and, on the other, the constraints placed on those in public office to uphold state policy under a monarch who, while honouring learning and creative expression, had no reservations about the exercise of his absolute authority in social and political life. Thus, Kants qualified replywe do not live in an enlightened age, but we do live in an age of enlightenmenthas a social and political force. Kant dwells on the almost paradoxical tension between civil and spiritual freedom: A lesser degree of civil freedom, in contrast, creates the room for spiritual freedom to spread to its full capacity (63).