"Newcomers" ?!?

I posted earlier about the EI conference on Women, Minorities, and Interdisciplinarity. I did go, although not for the whole day. It was interesting to see a group of people who are all, on some level, thinking about this interdisciplinarity thing - for some reason, it actually struck me as rather anticlimactic to see that there was this community of scholars already formed (or forming, as a few folks suggested) around the subject. That said, a few interesting things (which I should have posted a while ago, but haven't gotten around to until now - when I'm on Thanksgiving break):

• Veronica Boix-Mansilla's work with Howard Gardner really resonated with me. They've been working to understand how researchers actually act with respect to their discipline/other disciplines when they work on interdisciplinary projects. They've come up with a few categories (disc. stewards, protean chameleons, and neo-renaiss. men) to describe difference types of behavior. I like that they're trying to understand what it's actually like for a researcher to do interdisciplinary work.
• Leahy talked a bit about the unit-of-analysis question, as well as about the role of specialization/subgroup integration in interdisciplinary work. Also of note here is a mention that the NAS definition is becoming widely accepted.
• Corley mentioned the question of "collaboration" and its relationship to interdisciplinary research, and asked if the distinction was that interdisciplinary work has the goal of trying to create new fields or disciplines.
• Newstetter mentioned the distinction between in vivo/in vitro IDR - and drew a parallel to authentic/synthetic research.
• Finally, two old soldiers of the science studies arena (Sonnert and Holten) spoke about "newcomers" to research (that is, women and minorities - hmm...) as more likely to be successful at/interested in interdisciplinary work because all of the disciplinary questions have been answered/claimed (really?!?). Sonnert reminded the room to look to Merton for examples of ID work, and asked if IDR must, by definition, by problem-oriented. Holten invoked Wagner and gesamptkunstwerk as well as Bourdieu ("newcomers" need cultural capital, and claiming an interdisciplinary topic can, apparently, provide it). One of them (to be honest, I've forgotten which one) told a charming story about how, when some old German diplomat was shown the mechanics powering the first automated tram and he kept asking, "but where are the horses?"

Latour

From the introduction to Science in Action:
"This scattering of disciplines and objects would not be a problem if it was the hallmark of a necessary and fecund specialisation, growing from a core of common problems and methods. This is however far from the case."

Illuminating Frictions and Incongruities

I went looking through the bookshelves tonight for some books that I thought might have methodological appendices - I'm at the point in my ethnography fieldwork that I want to go back and read about other experiences doing the same. Anyway, I pulled out Anne Fadima's wonderful book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, and started reading the preface. It includes the following, which I think is a gorgeous description of interdisciplinarity:
"I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one. This is especially true, I think, when the apposition is cultural. When I first came to Merced, I hoped that the culture of American medicine, about which I knew a little, and the culture of the Hmong, about which I knew nothing, would in some way illuminate each other if I could position myself between the two and manage not to get caught in the cross fire."

Earth Institute Workshop

I posted earlier about an article in Inside Higher Ed on the intersection between interdisciplinarity, women, and minorities. It turns out there's a conference on Monday being sponsored by the Earth Institute, and co-chaired by the authors of that article. I'm going to go - less because I'm interested in this hypothesis that there's a potential relationship between interdisciplinary work and women/minorities, and more because I'm hoping it might give me some more broad ideas about interdisciplinary work in general. We'll see...

There's a link to a bunch of resources, including a link to a bibliography from a conference at the University of Wisconsin that looks pretty comprehensive.

Rethinking Interdisciplinarity: A Bibliography

A French group working on interdisciplinary research ideas has put together an interesting bibliography. I'm linking to it here so that I can come back to it when I've got more time.