creating mappings of interdisciplinarities

I am using the term "flexible knowledges" as something that includes but is not limited to academies. I keep moving between this larger formation and academic knowledges understood among disciplines and interdisciplinarities.

I just began reading a book recommended to me by my friend TV Reed, Creating Interdisciplinarity by Lisa Lattuca (2001). For a while I have been trying to consider how to talk about a range of possible interdisciplinarities. I'd like to come up with some descriptions, maybe names for, a range of practices that could reasonably be called interdisciplinary. I'd like to do this in a mix: of things people I know do, together with schematizing their practices as possible types. I began doing this in a working paper I wrote "Theorizing Structures in Women's Studies". There I talked about "a project becomes a new field," and "disciplines as world views."

Lisa Lattuca refers to the work of Salter and Hearn 1996 on two types of interdisciplinarity that help me understand some differences important within my own women's studies department:

instrumental interdisciplinarity: a pragmatic approach which focuses on problem-solving without worrying about a synthesis of perspectives, or perhaps, which assumes a given synthesis as more important than a examination of it; and

conceptual interdisciplinarity: a more theoretical and epistemological enterprise developing new conceptual categories and methods.

Different degrees of mix among these poles on some continuum might be one way to map practices within my own department.

Salter and Hearne are also quoted: "interdisciplinarity as an integral part of the knowledge-production system: a normal part of the processes of fragmentation, synthesis, and recombination of knowledge." This is where "flexible knowledges" and "interdisciplinarity" overlap in my own interests here.

I trying to put together a personal mini-history of interdisciplinarities, charting where my own assumptions, preferences, biases and commitments come from. That will be the content of my next blog bit I think.

I'm inspired to consider a meta-mapping: that is to describe a range of conceptual maps that are in play currently in understanding interdisciplinarities, and to work out meta-movement among these mappings. I think of this as an other species of what Chela Sandoval calls "differential consciousness."