Hi, Matt's question is a good one, and I heartily endorse his assertion of the difficulties facing transdisciplinary scholars, a camp I'd slot myself in (or out of :). If we look at the *recent* history of cultural studies alongside the commercial institutions of new media, the assertions of epistemological novelty and the end of everything (such as traditional disciplinary activity) are often associated with smart-arses leveraging their cultural capital for essentially self-promotional purposes. Maybe that's a bit harsh, but I get the feeling sometimes that the racial and feminist critiques of disciplinary exclusion have been heavily appropriated by people with a lot of socio-economic privilege to extend by avoiding issues of accountability to disciplines, cultures and socio-economic locations. I guess I'd count myself among that group at various points. Growing fields (though it would be interesting to hear from those in "named" programmes such as "Internet Studies" about how their enrolments are doing after the crash lol) tend to produce Pollyanna-ish discourses that gloss over these issues. Freed from the weighty constraints of disciplinary history, how many of us haven't enjoyed some sense of frisson at being in the middle of something new, exciting and developing? This is probably why so much new media discourse (particularly in the U.S.) takes place in Traweek's "culture of no culture", where ideas circulate with little reflexive positioning or critique. As Dilbert put it during the boom, "Hey, I go to work, I get paid a million bucks. What's not to like?". So I guess I'm interested in an ethics of interdisciplinarity - from which traditions do we draw from for our ethical frameworks, when these are no longer given? By this I don't mean the work on "researching online human subjects" which Charles Ess and co. have covered admirably. I guess I'm asking about an "ethics of being interdisciplinary". So I suppose this is more of a philosophical question (well outside my expertise:). And I was sure this post started out about institutional strategy! Anyway, any leads? Regards, Danny Matthew Allen wrote on 6/11/02 2:06 PM:
the boundaries or terrain which they enclose. I would assert that the difficulty for transdisciplinary scholars, such as found in areas of study such as Internet Studies, is not in traversing the ground, nor crossing the borders, of the many disciplines which they might encounter; rather, the difficulty is one of connection with and deep understanding of processes.