Why Interdisciplinarity Matters Today | in Teaching & Research

[The Changing Nature of University Research]

& The Tunnel Vision Problem in Disciplinary Studies 

Last week there was an interesting article in The New Indian Express by Shankkar Aiyar on ‘Non-Economists Who Are Successfully Fighting Inflation’.

Shankkar Aiyar observed that –

Monetary policy in four of the largest economic blocs in the world, is managed by non-economists!

RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das did his BA & MA in History at St Stephens in Delhi.

Governor, Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, studied history at Cambridge.

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde studied law and political science at Paris Nanterre University.

US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell studied Politics at Princeton.

Tasked with shepherding the economy through turmoil they have wrestled with words to pave the transition, says Shankkar Aiyar.

Well, these real-life examples underline to a great extent, the significance and the importance of cultivating an interdisciplinarity mindset, in academia today.

Allen Repko et al, in their book titled, Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies, highlight the importance of Interdisciplinary Studies.

Just thought of giving valuable excerpts from their book for us.

What Is Driving Interdisciplinary Studies Today?

For over two decades, major scientific organizations, funding agencies, and prominent educators have advocated the need for interdisciplinary studies.

The current interest in interdisciplinarity is widespread and increasing in intensity, motivated by the belief that it is now basic to education and research.

To meet this perceived need, educators have developed a wide range of interdisciplinary courses and “studies” programs.

Interdisciplinarity, it is fair to say, is becoming an integral part of higher education.

Say for example - 

A key component of an economy is its central bank and its power to set interest rates.

By lowering the prime interest rate, the central bank impacts the economy in multiple ways, economic as well as noneconomic.

There are also the unexpected political impacts of a reduction in the prime rate.

So if you ask the question - 

“What interest rate should the nation’s central bank charge?” 

answering it requires input from several disciplines including political science (which studies government policies and international relations), economics (which studies consumer behavior), philosophy (which studies ethics and logic), and possibly history (which studies historical patterns).

The Absence of Contextual Thinking in Disciplinary Studies

Contextual thinking is the ability to view a subject from a broad perspective by placing it in the fabric of time, culture, or personal experience.

Sadly, contextual thinking is not a primary learning outcome of traditional disciplinary majors.

After completing their general requirements (which vary from university to university), many undergraduates specialize or “major” in a traditional discipline.

As they proceed in their major, they are prone to develop a silo perspective, meaning the tendency to see the university and the larger world through the narrow lens of that major.

In contrast, undergraduates pursuing an interdisciplinary field such as environmental studies, cultural studies, American studies, urban studies, and health management studies are taught to relate the smallest parts of the system they are studying to the whole.

A hallmark of interdisciplinary studies is relating the particular to the whole by drawing on multiple disciplinary perspectives that are relevant to a specific problem or question.

The Changing Nature of University Research

A key driver of interdisciplinary studies is the changing nature of university research.

Emphasizing more interdisciplinary research is both financially and scientifically sensible, says Columbia University Professor Mark C. Taylor, because graduates are becoming too specialized to find employment due to the unsustainable nature of department-based hierarchies.

Interdisciplinarity Acquires Academic Legitimacy in the 1980s and 1990s

In the early 1980s, interdisciplinarity began to acquire academic legitimacy.

Women’s studies programs asserted that they were interdisciplinary by their very nature, which, in this instance, linked interdisciplinarity with critiques of the academy in general and the disciplines in particular.

Environmental studies also embraced the interdisciplinary impulse by seeking to pull together insights from a variety of disciplines to form holistic conceptions such as ecosystems.

“Your planet is very beautiful,” [said the little prince]. “Has it any oceans?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” said the geographer. . . .

“But you are a geographer!”

“Exactly,” the geographer said. “But I am not an explorer. I haven’t a single explorer on my planet.

It is not the geographer who goes out to count the towns, the rivers, the mountains, the seas, the oceans, the deserts.

The geographer is much too important to go loafing about. He does not leave his desk.”

The lesson of this story is that specialization—that is, “not leaving [your] desk” to see what’s outside your area of specialization—can blind you to the broader context of a situation.

Specialization Tends to Produce Tunnel Vision

Disciplinary specialization can produce consequences much like what tunnel vision produces.

In natural eyesight, tunnel vision means that the eye has only a small area of focus, with the rest of the field of view beyond the lens being unfocused or blurry, as shown in the picture.

When it comes to approaching a complex problem, the specialist is able to focus only on the part of the problem that is familiar to the specialist, not on other parts that fall outside the specialist’s area of expertise.

Focusing on only part of a complex problem can produce serious unintended consequences.

Specialization Tends to Discount or Ignore Other Perspectives

Interdisciplinarity faults the disciplines for sometimes failing to consider other perspectives. Conversely, the rise of interdisciplinary research and learning reflects the need to ask new questions, try new approaches, produce new technologies, and develop new intellectual orientations.

We can never entirely dispense with the disciplines as a means of organizing knowledge, but we can use them to create new intellectual configurations of knowledge,

sign off Repko et al.

Image Source: [Under Creative Common Licence] Tunnel vision imitation by Скампецкий http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tunnel_vision_sc.png licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en