This blog post takes an ecological approach towards understanding interdisciplinarity, opening questions about the purpose and consequences of different ways of keeping disciplines separated, intermingling, or fused. By extension, I explore how an ecological approach might inform the kind of interdisciplinary thinking we might need to conceive, evaluate and respond to the inter/disciplinary challenges currently faced. Here, I am particularly concerned with the existential sides of engaging in interdisciplinarity and how these ‘ecologise’ with different facets of human and biotic worlds.
Interdisciplinarity is often promoted for the benefits new knowledges play in addressing social, economic or ecological problems. One concern is that siloed knowledge leads to actions and attitudes based on partial premises, and dialogue between silos can achieve a more holistic picture of phenomena. Undoubtedly the interdisciplinary conversation between, say, coral reef biologists and atmospheric scientists helps understand the causes of, and steps forward in addressing, mass bleaching of these wondrous systems. But does it follow that interdisciplinarity is always good ‘ecologically’?
Through dynamic interactions between relata, ecologies maintain certain variables while changing others. They develop ‘dynamic equilibria’ (Kauffman 1993), patterns of stability across space and time, which become enabling conditions for the organisation and emergence of complexity. For example, while a species of bee and flower may in principle evolve in diverse ways, in practice they mutually specify the range and rates of change of the other (Maturana and Varela 1992) -at least until dependence relationships break down.
Disciplines and interdisciplines are also involved in a range of ecological dynamics. They are not only patterns of knowing, they are also patterns interacting with the world. These interactions can become very complex, affecting, among many other things, the ‘psychology’ of the knower. Our epistemological and existential needs also regulate rates of being and becoming in the relationships they constitute. These may be dangerous (dysecological), healthful, or either or both, at different temporal and spatial scales.
An ecological approach to knowing suggests sometimes even false premises will be ‘used’ for the stabilities they produce. Plastic in the ocean becomes a niche for new ecosystems, a faulty theory may still be the basis for a prosperous academic career. In the ecological and existential dimensions of interdisciplinarity, errors can become true through the relations they come to sustain. But such scaling out eventually leads to laissez-faire relativism. We need to make a cut. Ought we see how different ecologies emerge on different scales, within and without, before we do so? How do we learn to give up some cherished ecologies when we come to see others as more important? How can education approach these problems?
Some scholars have suggested there is a magical moment two disciplines cross boundaries and meet one another (Angerer). ‘Magic’ suggests positive qualities seen characteristic of an interdisciplinary experience: a sense of suspense, of surprise, of enchantment, perhaps a feeling the synthesis appearing before consciousness is the result of some subterranean sleight-of-hand work in our personal or social physiologies. I have felt something ‘magical’ in the arising of new ideas and insights when seemingly separated rivers come to ramble together. But I also sometimes feel resistance, and I remember that magic has long been associated with the dark arts, a space where people fear to tread.
A discipline is a habitual way of attending the world, where people, boundaries, concepts, logics, practices, and materials, ecologise into a self-reinforcing groove. Much has settled into the unconscious, because we stop thinking about what we know well or do often. But a vibrant edge of novelty remains, like a magic froth on the invisible wave that carries us. As researchers, we may relish this edge; it gives opportunity to experience freshness, but within the safe contexts of a sensible matrix. We get our little adventures but we still get our home.
Interdisciplinarity demands a different psychology. What does it feel like to have the foundations of one’s home pulled away? Even the silent work sustaining our magic froth seems now at risk. Along with it, the decades of work invested into that way of worldmaking, the professional identities constellated around it, even the way it has simply given to the world a structure, a logos, a nest: there may even be inklings of a spiritual abyss gloaming in the distance. (Moreover, other people and perhaps species too have come to rely on the regularities arising from my habit, however ill conceived it may be). Add the pragmatic fact we have trained to see and act towards phenomena in a certain way, magnified our focus of a sliver of the world while backgrounding the unknown unknowns needed to sustain that gaze. Is it any wonder attempts at interdisciplinarity often have lackluster outcomes?
Some educational questions arise from thinking about this existential ecology:
Maybe all new thought is magical. It involves the birth of the new from the old, and with it our participation in the creation of the world. The more difficult and unexpected the birth, the more astonishing it may be, -and so how do we respond to the dynamics of stability and change in interdisciplinary education? Perhaps the psychology guarding the well-disciplined mind against radical novelty produces and protects something sacred in its arising, and it would be somehow desecrating or improprietous to force such confluences.
Nevertheless, it would be absurd to try to protect the ‘magic’ of an unexpectedly rare offspring when the cost of keeping disciplines separated is a thousand clumsy cuts into the also magical world outside of us. The ecologies of the mind retained at the expense of the ecologies around it. Cancer too is an ecology. Sustainability cannot concern solely with inner ecologies or outer ones, but with the interconnected dynamics between them. After all, hidden connections between things in the world are occluded by the disciplines, and the magic we experience in the novelty of knowing mirrors the magic felt at the revelation of the world. What kind of discipline or interdiscipline can perceive these dynamics and respond to them?
If current disciplinary structures need to be taken down urgently, what kind of disciplinarity follows, given ecologies necessarily sustain patterns and enabling conditions? What is an ecological approach to ecology? If there is no solution we must agree on, how to educate for pluralism in light of our existential needs?