[Air-l] response to alex re: transdisciplinarity

[Jeremy Hunsinger]

>
> Perhaps what Reid was saying is this: "Although exposed to terms like
> axiology and praxis--as any social scientist has been over the last
> few decades, whether wittingly or no--those in my own field(s) tend to
> treat these ideas superficially and uncritically. I wonder whether
> Jeremy or others might be willing to provide some good entry points to
> the idea of transdisciplinarity for someone who does not have a
> significant background in, say, cultural studies or STS."

actually, I think that both cultural studies and STS focus on  
interdisciplinary/disciplinary studies, which is why i wanted to push  
for transdisciplinary studies.

I think the best place to look for transdisciplinary studies is to  
grab an encyclopedia of higher education or other encyclopedia that  
is fairly advanced and to see if it is in there.  Once you have that,  
and it is in a few encyclopedias, then you will have the context for  
the early debates on transdisciplinarity vs interdisciplinarity, with  
that context in hand, then you might look at the transformation of  
institutions to include the idea of transdisciplinarity in the 70's,  
along with the Guattari and Vilar report to the U.N. on the topic,  
that report was 1992 and can be found:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020612053100/http://www.fnet.fr/ASLB/ 
ARCHIVES/TEXTES/GUATTARI-transdicip.html

That report, I think, reopened much of the current debate in Europe  
and Australia in regards to transdisciplinarity.  What launched my  
interest and my reframing of some of my ideas into  
transdisciplinarity was the Gary Genosko's book 'Félix Guattari: an  
aberrant  introduction' along with Guattari's works Chaosmosis and  
Three Ecologies.

Other works that I'd recommend are :
http://www.interdisciplines.org/interdisciplinarity/papers/5
http://www.btgjapan.org/dial_01.html
http://epl.scu.edu:16080/~gbowker/elusive.pdf

Other works can be found in other field, such as the fields that I  
mentioned in the description of the Transdisciplinary Studies book  
series.

Hope that helps (I realize that transdisciplinary studies is actually  
not the topic of air-l, so I'll leave it at this)

Jeremy Hunsinger
School of Library and Information Science
Pratt Institute
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