Alan Clarke on Interdisciplinary Work

Although he claims to be a Luddite and thus unwilling/unable to post to our blog (not to mention Wikkipedia), Alan Clarke has written the following as part of a book proposal he is sending around to prospective publishers.

I post it on his behalf.

This Proposal Adopts a Broad Interdisciplinary Perspective Which Should Attract Interest in the United States and in Europe and Canada

The most multi-disciplinary works on torture or rendition, of which I am aware, are found within edited anthologies. These necessarily present an eclectic range of disciplinary understandings, differing from author to author, and essay to essay. A given essay in an anthology (on torture or anything else) ordinarily uses the methods and understandings of a single discipline. True interdisciplinarity – the integration of a variety of disciplinary perspectives in a single coherent analysis remains rare. Edited volumes are, therefore, more appropriately seen as multidisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary. Their strength revolves around the many perspectives that they bring to bear on a problem; their weakness is in failing to integrate the differing analyses in a sustained critique of the problem at hand.

Examples of edited anthologies focusing on torture include:

The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary, (William F. Schulz ed., 2007);

The Torture Debate in America 151, 154 (Karen J. Greenberg ed., 2006).

On Torture, (Hilde, Thomas C., ed., 2008);

Torture, A Collection (Sanford Levinson ed., 2004);

America’s Disappeared, (Meeropol, Rachael, ed., Seven Stories Press, 2005).

The strength of this proposal is that it integrates differing perspectives as it examines the complex problem of torture. A full understanding of the phenomenon of torture resists narrowly focused disciplinary analyses and is most usefully considered by employing findings of history, law, psychology, sociology, politics and philosophy. This book proposal aims to do just that. Because both Canada and many European nations were complicit in the U.S. use of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and rendition, this comprehensive and interdisciplinary treatment of the subject should attract a transnational audience.

Truth: Interdisciplinary?

A peculiarity of the truth in academia is that it seems to be discipline-specific. One of the more uncanny experiences arising from any lengthy interdisciplinary sojourn is the repeated necessity for exchanging one's epistemological currency nearly every time one crosses an academic border. It is a bit as if knowledge in university departments were still mostly a feudal affair, with each tiny duchy self-authorized to issue its own coin of the realm and raise its own taxes on any intellectual traffic passing through its territory.

This peculiarity obtains not only across the infamous chasm between the "two cultures" of the sciences and humanities, but also across many of the sciences themselves. Even within closely related disciplines, such as the experimental social sciences, the truth-value of data often bears a certifying stamp specific to a particular, local tradition. Which are more reliable, for instance, data acquired from experimental subjects who did not know what the experiment was actually about (as is typical in social and cognitive psychology), or data acquired from fully informed experimental subjects motivated by immediate cash reward (as is de rigeur in behavioral economics)? The conundrum lies not so much in any profound metaphysical differences as in the different traditions of assuming that certain kinds of information are better than others, when such traditions often define each discipline's sense of its own unique mission.

Is it any wonder then, that it becomes difficult to measure how much research is interdisciplinary at all? The thought crossed my mind after reading the previous post (see below), on the curious contradiction between the assertion of policymakers as "an article of faith" that interdisciplinary research will be crucial to tomorrow's world and the "fuzzy definition of an interdisciplinary program" that confounds the measurement of interdisciplinary activity.

It also led me back to the questions raised in earlier posts (just a little further below) about whether and how the data and theory of the evolutionary neurosciences would revolutionize literary criticism. Until and unless literary critics and neuroscientists forge a common currency as to what counts as true--or at least as importantly true--the disciplines may poach information or ideas from each other but remain more or less locked up behind their castle walls.

New Presence on the 5th Floor

We came back from the holidays to find new company on the UVU Library's 5th floor: Charles Darwin, as sculpted by Associate Dean of Science and Health Dan Fairbanks.

Dan gives an amazing lecture about evolution while sculpting a young Darwin, who ages as the lecture/sculpting moves along. It's a breathtaking display of interdisciplinary work.

And, of course, Darwin was himself an interdisciplinary thinker. In fact, 18th and 19th-century scientists were often thought of as natural philosophers and/or naturalists. It wasn't unusual for Darwin to be as interested in geology as he was in marine biology, as competent in botany as in zoology. Big problems (and evolution is one of THE big problems) require knowledge of all sorts, data of many kinds, and a general ability to synthesize information from various sources.

So, welcome Mr. Darwin.

Interdisciplinarity in Science

Ben Abbott, my son, is currently doing Ph.D. work at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. The photo of him was taken while he was working at the Toolik Field Station north of the Brooks Range in Alaska. I asked him about interdisciplinary aspects of the project he's involved in. Here's his answer:

Interdisciplinary work is essential to doing good science. None of us studies everything. The various fields of knowing have expanded and deepened to the point that no one is capable of mastering all of the current unfoldings and discoveries. Luckily, collaboration is possible. When numerous researchers examine a new question a more complete understanding is attainable. As an ecologist, I study the interactions between the living (biotic) and non‑ living (abiotic) systems of earth. Right now I'm looking at the causes, extent, and effects of sinkholes, called thermokarsts, which have been melting more and more frequently in the permafrost on the North Slope. There are 13 principle investigators (big bosses) and 20 graduate students working on this project. Each researcher has a specialty or emphasis depending on their interests and background. The first challenge we're dealing with is generating compelling and powerful questions. Why are these features forming where they are forming? How are they changing the vegetation? What is being released from the sinkholes? Not only does each

researcher's background determine what parts of which questions he or she can work on, it influences the very questions they are capable of generating. I didn't think to ask, "how deep does the thermokarst disturbance extend into the soil and underlying material," though, once that question was posed by one of the geomorphologists in the group, I immediately recognized its importance to understanding the system as a whole.

One possible complication in assembling an "interdisciplinary" team is the trouble of finding people of truly different disciplines. Many times the fields or disciplines that are brought together have shared roots. This facilitates communication and consensus but it also propagates prejudice and potential bias. For example, though I feel the team working on this thermokarst project is wildly diverse, a non‑ scientist might well consider us completely homogeneous. I mean what I see as interdisciplinary‑‑ gelogists, ecologists (of the terrestrial, aquatic and community varieties), climatologists, hydrologists etc.‑‑ may seem totally one sided to an outsider. Indeed, we all share some basic assumptions about how to uncover truths. There are a couple collaborators with more distant relations to the physical scientists, one of whom is an anthropologist interviewing native populations about their understanding of the frequency, importance, and duration of these features. There has only been one field season of data collection so far so it is still to be seen if there will be real dialogue and collaboration between the physical scientists and the cultural scientists. I'm excited to see how much "inter" and how much "discipline"for that matter there will be in this project.