On Managed Interdisciplinarity

In an earlier post, I discussed the evacuation of meaning from the term “interdisciplinarity” and some forms that I consider to be more authentic attempts to get beyond limits of traditional–and nontraditional–disciplines.

One question often left unasked is why universities are now so interested in fostering certain kinds of interdisciplinarity. When I was first learning about university disciplines in the late 80s and early 90s, it was still very much in the “Theory” moment (to use Frederic Jameson’s term) and there was a lot of writing that assumed that remaining in one’s disciplinary space was fundamentally conservative (hence the proliferation of metaphors like “disciplinary silo”) and interdisciplinarity was fundamentally radical in some way.

Today, the world looks very different to me. Just as many interdisciplinary initiatives come from university administrations as they do from actual researchers working together. Sometimes, it’s a matter of efficiency: create a PhD in cultural studies and you can potentially avoid having PhDs in each of the humanities. Or if you’re in Ontario, create an interdisciplinary PhD and get more money flowing into your university while not expending additional resources (though of course your faculty will have to work harder). Or if you get people in business, liberal arts, and science working together you can bring in more grant money. None of these goals is inherently bad or regressive. I am not arguing that interdisciplinarity has been “sold out” in any of these cases. But it is worth noting that in each of them, the justification is institutional rather than intellectual and the ideas come after the fact: “here’s a group of people who should work together on a project: now make up a project.” Sometimes great good can come out of these kinds of initiatives. For instance, I have always thought every university needs an interdisciplinary humanities center, just so people can have occasions to come together and talk. But for every one of those, there are plenty of other plans hatched by administrators or grant agencies that have more to do with someone moving around institutional chess pieces or trying to get “more value for their money” as opposed to a genuine intellectual project. Maybe this was always the case and I just was unaware of the institutional dimensions as a student (or too eager to believe the radical posturing of capital-T-Theorists, which is also a possibility).

No matter how it happened, it has led me to a kind of double consciousness as a scholar. Yes, I believe my work is interdisciplinary (not the least because any field I could reasonably call a “home”–communication studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies–has a weak sense, if any, of itself as a discipline). It aspires to the kinds of interdisciplinary I mentioned in my first post on the subject, but it is always driven by specific intellectual questions (as opposed, for instance, to the need to speak for a field of “sound studies” or whatever). At the same time, I am more suspicious than I would like to be when others laud the interdisciplinarity of their own work or when I hear of a new interdisciplinary initiative. My first question now is always “why?”

Goodbye 2008

The joy of New Year’s is that it’s the most obviously arbitrary of holidays (as opposed to all the rest which are less obviously arbitrary), but that’s also its downfall. People always complain that New Year’s Eve always has too much pressure to have fun and not enough fun. That’s probably true. Nevertheless, we are heading out to dinner (though not one of those god-awful overpriced “special” menus, thank you) and a party. Better someone else host it rather than me. And I do take seriously the need to reflect, assess and commit to change. The fact that people fail to live up to their new year’s resolutions each year–including me–does not make the activity any less valid. For those of us who dwell in the secular world, there are not enough opportunities for this kind of introspection. It is always a good thing to take stock and try again, which is what you do when you review the previous year and resolve for the next one. Plus those music lists are useful for me since I don’t have enough time to pay attention. I always pick up a few extra albums this time of year.

I’d hoped to end the year with a few entries on what I wished I’d covered but alas, it’s down to a list and wave, as I head off to NYC tomorrow in historian drag. It’s been an up and down year for the blog, though one reader said he liked the “less frequent but more substantial entries,” so maybe I’m on to something. In lieu of doing it, here’s what I wished I’d written more about, not exactly in order of priority but close to it:

1. The Australia trip
2. The Europe trip
3. Ambivalence about Obama
4. The coalition threat and the bizarreness of Canadian democracy
5. The ICA party
6. There’s always more to say about academic politics, food (though we did get the food page after answering one too many emails about food for ICA last summer), music, and lord knows what else.

2008 was a year of intense highs and lows. I could handle more of a middle path for 2009, but it’s clearly not entirely up to me. See you next year. Hopefully it’s the year I finish that mp3 manuscript and get it under review (but no that’s not my resolution–I’d try to do that anyway).

Housecleaning

I’ve done a little housecleaning in the links bar.  I deleted everything that hasn’t been updated in 6 months or more.  If the blogs or sites come back to life, I’ll put them back. 

Of course I also added some new things.  

–The Montreal Sound Map is part of an internet phenomenon around acoustic ecology.  I’m not sure what documenting all these sound spaces adds up to but there is a strong “check it out it’s cool” factor.

–Michael Berube is blogging again, which is nice, though he appears to lack an RSS feed.  Because I was paying attention to other things, I failed to notice that he’d been invited to the National Communication Association this year, which I also failed to notice had the incredibly bad form to consider inviting David Horowitz to address it and then sub in the more polite but equally heinous Anne Neal.  I wish I could tell you that I was part of some boycott in response to Marriott’s support of Proposition 8 but really I was just too busy with other stuff to go this year.

–Dave Noon is no longer writing his blog Axis of Evel Knievel but can be found at Lawyers, Gun$ and Money, which has had some great political coverage last fall.

–spacing montréal has wonderful historical images of the city, often in juxtaposition with a current picture.

Criminalization of Chemistry

Annalee at io9 posted a story about a Saskatchewan university student arrested for having a chemistry lab at home. What’s most disturbing to me is that a few years earlier, Saskatchewan police evacuated a Salvation Army community centre after finding chemicals for a darkroom.

One interesting and unfortunate side effect of the consumer-electronicsification and digitization of leisure time is that practices like chemistry, which used to be a staple of various forms of geek home life, are now rendered strange and threatening. What other practices are now treated as evidence of criminal intent in our paranoid world where once they were evidence, of well, hobbies?

I don’t want to wax too nostalgic, though, since when my father was hired at the University of Minnesota in 1970, they still asked for a signed loyalty oath from professors. It seems the police state has simply moved on to new targets.

Ready to Fight Back, Only Too Late

Despite my vegetarianism, one of my favorite attractions at the Minnesota State Fair (which, if you don’t know, is the best state fair in the world) was always the bad taxidermy. Although I would say bizarre is a better term for it, Carrie and I passed by a barber on Liège while walking around the neighborhood the other day. Pardon the window glare, but it’s not every barber who’s got taxidermy in the window.

We also discovered that the former Jo-El patisserie on Liège right next door is under new ownership, with no new name as of yet, but they are definitely in full effect. The croissants were the best we’ve had in the neighborhood. And the new owner, Lucy, showed us cool pictures of the place from the 1940s. Turns out the facade had art-deco-y glass blocks until the owner failed to properly light the gas oven one day and an explosion blew them all out.

A Brief Commercial Phenomenology of Christmas

Two Christmas posts on a blog by a lapsed Jew. Something must be wrong. Let’s pretend this one is about Boxing Day.

Now that I live in Canada and American secular holidays like Thanksgiving and the 4th of July aren’t in effect for the people around me, Christmas is probably the quietest day of the year on the internet. Quebec also (I think) has a law that closes most stores at 5pm on Christmas eve, allowing them to reopen sometime on the 26th. Restaurants and movie theaters and clearly some other similar institutions are excepted, and the metro still runs, so some people work, but it’s still a massive shutdown.

What’s interesting about this is that given the erosion of the sabbath as a meaningful commercial phenomenon, Christmas is pretty much the only day during the year where this is anything approaching a complete shutdown of businesses. Even newspapers don’t come. The response to this is an intensification of commercial activity on the days immediately preceding and following. We were struck by a long line at the SAQ (liquor store) on the 24th as we headed to the metro. People were waiting outside for 10 minutes or more to get in. Boxing Day here is more or less like Black Friday — it appears to be Canada’s largest shopping day of the year.

In other words, a single day without buying and selling is such a shock that it must be compensated for on either end. Of course the effect is largely ideological (or perhaps simply a result of poor planning on the part of some people) since many people can go for many days without buying anything. But still, there is something striking about how rare and strange the systematic and temporary cessation of commercial activity — for just one day a year — has become.

Christmas Wakeup

2007 ended so fast that we didn’t manage to mail out our Christmas letter, something we’d just started doing a few years earlier. 2008 went faster for me but the brakes are on this week as I try to bring the locomotive force of my life to a brief resting point. This year we’re getting the letter into the mail on the 24th, but only to family and a few old friends with whom we aren’t much virtually in touch. That’s 10-15 letters. Obviously, you send these things to family and distant friends, but even figuring out to whom to send it is mind twisting in a world with facebook feeds, blogs, email, and countless other ways in which I am somewhere between in touch and out of touch with distant friends, memorable acquaintances, former teachers and students, and on and on. That’s over 50 letters. That feels somehow excessive. Maybe it isn’t, or maybe it just feels excessive because I’ve never sent a lot of letters by regular mail. I would have no problem emailing 50 people about something. So maybe it’s a generational thing, or a classed thing, or an endeavor somewhere between pathos and phatics, as Steven Rubio would have it. It’s definitely a genre.

After we send out the letter tomorrow, it’s lunch and a long-overdue visit to an art museum and cooking for the 25th, when we will have a few people over.

For the past two years and possibly more, the end of the term always involves a process of “waking up” for me, where I start paying attention to things I care about but didn’t get around to attending to during the term, from rock concerts to art shows to software updates to dentist’s appointments. Oh yeah, and this blog. So I was disappointed to learn too late that we’re going to miss out on a couple Hum reunion shows in Chicago for New Year’s Eve. As with Prince’s stint in Las Vegas, I would have seriously considered flying out there just for the event. On the other hand, we’ll be in New York on the 1st, so I think we should manage to find something fun to do.