Interdisciplinarity

The aspect of interdisciplinarity that struck me most was when Klein said, "Interdisciplinarity does not spontaneously emerge by putting an economist and a sociologist, or any other combination of specialists in close proximity." To explain why that statement had an impact on me, let me start by saying that this whole discourse on interdisciplinarity is very new to me. Previously, I just assumed any collaboration of two people from different fields would be considered interdisciplinary work. These readings have given me a much wider perspective on this evolving idea. Rather than just throwing two different disciplines together, and immediately producing interdisciplinary work, it takes time and careful thought on how these two disciplines can be synthesized into a new interdisciplinary field.

In addition to this much more defined view of what interdisciplinarity is, I also realized that it is something that is fairly new. Although some of the underlying ideas of interdisciplinarity originated in the time of Greek philosophers, much of the current ideas of what constitutes interdisciplinarity came about in the last century. Furthermore, much of the interdisciplinary work has been highly experimental. Some universities took the civic model approach to interdisciplinary knowledge, which proposed that books for the basis of intelligence. Other universities took the are approach which focused on teaching people in particular disciplines about other areas.

I am interested to see how interdisciplinarity will manifest itself in our work.
Some questions that I came up with while doing today's readings are:
1) What aspects of our research will be interdisciplinary?
2) How will our views of and actions of interdisciplinarity change from when we are in Seattle versus when we are in Amsterdam?