[Air-l] What is a discipline.

[Charles Ess]

radhika gajjala writes

> ethics of inter/trans/disciplinarity sounds pretty good - but who will lay
> down the Law on this one?

Hmmm.  
It seems to me that aoir-ists, as interdisciplinarians par excellence,
should attempt to articulate these ethics.

Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic, but my experience with the ethics
working committee convinces me that

a) we - by which I mean, a bunch of different people working out of a bunch
of different disciplines in a bunch of different kinds of institutions and
cultural contexts - already have some sense (partly overt and articulate /
partly covert and tacit) of what such an ethics would "look like," based on
our experiences, our own ethical reflections, etc.
(In particular: one of the most important sources for the development of the
working committee's guidelines were the ethical reflections of many
different researchers in a variety of contexts.  In addition to some of the
hallmark articles and values statements, these individual works meant we did
not have to start de novo and in a vacuum: we were able instead to begin
exploring some paths worked out in practice that turned out to be very
helpful and substantive.)

b) with enough good will and patience (in the case of the working committee,
nearly two years - but hey, that's not much in the scope of the history of
world philosophies - smile!) people from a variety of disciplines,
experiences, and cultures, can achieve a reasonable degree of success both
in articulating commonly shared values and orientations, and in marking out
irreducible differences that help demarcate important distinctions between
disciplines, methodologies, and larger cultural/national traditions.

It would seem to me, then, that an ethics of inter/trans/disciplinarity
would share with the current ethical guidelines precisely an emphasis on a
pluralism that avoid both monolithic dogmatism (what most of us seem to find
unsatisfactory about "disciplines" in the narrow sense) and a sheer
relativism that by endorsing everything may not endorse much of anything
(and renders attempting to make qualitative judgments about research and
scholarship more or less a meaningless exercise).

It would also share with those guidelines a sense of on-going dialogue and
openness - i.e., a sense that discerning and articulating these sorts of
things is very much a continuing process, one open to pursuing new insights
and new directions.  (A good thing we have these documents on the web - they
can be changed easily!)

Finally, if such an ethics were to have these characteristics, they would
not look entirely like the Law (e.g., as brought down from on high, carved
in stone, by a single prophet who enjoyed exclusive access to the Absolute)
but more like an emergent _ethos_, a description and prescription of what
our best habits (ethos), our best practices might be under the current
circumstances.
(This may be part of radhika's point?)
They would be the work of a collective dialogue - one marked by sometimes
passionate but respectful debate over important differences.
They would be the result of a lot of hard work - but also a lot of fun.

In sum, I'd encourage aoir-ists to jump in and start articulating!

cheers,

Charles Ess
Director, Interdisciplinary Studies Center
Drury University
900 N. Benton Ave.                          Voice: 417-873-7230
Springfield, MO  65802  USA            FAX: 417-873-7435
Home page:  http://www.drury.edu/ess/ess.html
Co-chair, CATaC 2002: http://www.it.murdoch.edu.au/~sudweeks/catac02/

Exemplary persons seek harmony, not sameness. -- Analects 13.23

> From: radhika gajjala <radhika at cyberdiva.org>
> Reply-To: air-l at aoir.org
> Date: Wed, 06 Nov 2002 07:16:05 -0500
> To: air-l at aoir.org
> Subject: Re: [Air-l] What is a discipline.
> 
> 
> ethics of inter/trans/disciplinarity sounds pretty good - but who will lay
> down the Law on this one?