Southeast Center for Education in the Arts

Interdisciplinarity is a way to combine the objects and methods of different disciplines to solve a particular problem or tell a particular story.

But what defines a discipline? A discipline is defined by its object of study or subject matter. Literary critics study literature; psychologists study cognition, emotion, volition or will; sociologists study society and social institutions, status and roles within them; and so forth. Crucially, disciplines are also defined by what counts in them as evidence. Humanities scholars often interpret texts; social scientists employ statistical data; the physical sciences are historically empirical and experimental.

In saying that disciplines are defined by their methods, we mean that specialists also learn to think like their disciplines.

– Literary critics think in terms of forms of expression: linguistic, rhetorical, generic, or syntactic
...structures. They notice the forms of expression as much as their content. Their methods are
...intertextual. They employ citation, argument, and the distinction between text and document.
...A text is a verbal construct.

– An historian, alternatively, uses documents as evidence, not as verbal constructs.

– Anthropologists think in terms of the social and kinship structures, practices, cultures and objects
...of everyday life.

– Economists provide for the needs and desires of the people, and therefore think in terms of
...less and more, maximization, risk, scarcity, and exchange.

But even beyond content and method, disciplines are also social practices, embedded in institutions and activities.

– Mathematicians do not give papers at conferences, but produce theorems and formulae.
...Typically, they present the math without discussion; their peers go away to work it up on their
...own computers; and only later, after they have had time to play with the formulae, do they
...reconvene for discussion.

– Literary scholars often read papers, for the language itself is important to them. They like their
...papers to be well formed with beginning, middle, and end (like the narratives or poems they
...are used to interpreting).

– Scientists almost always use powerpoints, for they need to present evidence that is often best
...presented visually, such as diagrams, flow charts, tables and graphs.

This means that disciplines are “distinct cultures” and that interdisciplinarity must also entail “efforts in cross-cultural communication.” There is an anthropology of interdisciplinarity including different levels of civility, different degrees of democratic decision-making, different styles of presentation, and different styles of leadership.

Yet despite the formidable fact that the different areas of knowledge production that we call disciplines actually constitute different cultures, some problems are just too complex to be solved by one discipline, some stories are too complex to be told without help from other disciplines. Most of the problems of the modern world are just this complex, as are most stories having anything to do with humans.