CIDRAL: Reflections on Interdisciplinarity

SALC’s biggest challenge is scope. In research terms alone, the research undertaken in our School is methodologically, geographically, temporally and thematically hugely diverse. CIDRAL’s Creations Launches alone bring together books on all manner of subjects and theories on societies, histories and cultures that cut across the globe, not to mention compositions, recordings, and sound boxes.

How, then, to create a sense, even a semblance, of a research community in any meaningful sense – let alone a research identity – among such a diverse group of people who are, almost by definition, specialists in specific things? What opportunities are embedded in this challenge? What would it mean to create such a community?

Researchers in Schools (and other sites of belonging) function much like a city – some people have a strong sense of belonging to their neighbourhood(s), maybe even certain streets. Some move more freely between different neighbourhoods, comfortable in all them. Either way, disciplines – or departments – are, at least in research terms, most productively thought of as, to lean on Doreen Massey (For Space, 2005), sites of ‘stories-so-far’. Though we are largely siloed into academic departments, the latter can still function as nodes around which narratives and practices gather and gather force, always open to alternative trajectories and travellers passing through.

CIDRAL is at its most effective when it enhances these nodes, either putting up new signposts, perhaps via themes like forests (2022/23), archives (2023/24), or im/mobilities (2024/25), and encouraging people to gather round and talk about them. Or using its resources to help others build such nodal sites of intensity. The outcome of these gatherings is difficult to quantify, but even over the past three years some at least have fed into ideas for articles and books, funding applications, new collaborations, and, something not to be undervalued, positive working relationships shaped around research practice.

The aspiration to cross-School collaboration and dialogues across subject areas is tied up with one of the core aspects of CIDRAL’s identity: interdisciplinarity. As researchers we often aspire to know everything. The researcher collects knowledge. The researcher receives grants by highlighting how there are ‘gaps in the field’, glaring absences that to date no one else has addressed but which will transform knowledge. The researcher reads a book in ways that no has to date, shedding – as we so often like to say – new light on things already illuminated. And the researcher explores the archive in the search of the missing document, the abandoned letter, the mislabelled file, which, once uncovered, will close off a gap, and complete one small corner of an infinite jigsaw, temporarily satisfying the impossible desire-drive to total knowing.

Impossible because, of course, there are always new things to uncover, new ways of shedding light, and new ways of reading. Even in the absence of the archival trace, Sadiya Hartman (‘Venus in Two Acts’, 2008) encourages us, it is sometimes imperative to shape new critical fabulations. There are always new stories to tell, and always new ways to tell those stories. In the first instance, then, the departure point of interdisciplinarity is to embrace our own ignorance. That might itself be a political gesture, a means of pushing at the confines of academia at the same time as supporting it.

The response to interdisciplinarity has changed over time: interdisciplinarity was once troublesome, speaking of difficulties when trying to allocate people, associate them with budgets, put publications on certain shelves in bookshops or lists on websites. Interdisciplinarity was – and still is, perhaps – a threat to the currency of discipline-based identities with which we all work. After all, many PhD students still shape themselves and are shaped by discipline specificity, only to be told immediately after graduating that their future is an interdisciplinary one.

The discipline is both a branch of knowledge and a form of punishment, a means to justify the critique that ensues if the researcher does not conform to the rules and established practices that shape that very same branch of knowledge. To undertake interdisciplinarity – to transgress with/in the discipline – is to risk multiple forms punishment and criticism.

Yet interdisciplinarity is increasingly of the times. Perhaps academia needs interdisciplinarity to fulfil itself, creating another insatiable drive to open up new avenues for funding and new discourses for research. In the market-driven world of higher education, interdisciplinarity is certainly a commodity and it is rapidly becoming a new site of orthodoxy.

How, then, to make the interdisciplinary drive meaningful rather than simply a trend or tick-box exercise? How do we prevent interdisciplinarity disciplining the discipline? How can we ensure that interdisciplinarity is not just a means to measure impact but an invitation to inhabit multiple thresholds? How to move from Interdisciplinarity to interdisciplinarities?

The thoughts of CIDRAL Visting Fellow, Sam Okoth Opondo, on the diplomat are particularly striking. The diplomat (less the bureaucrat than the practitioner of diplomacy), Sam argues, is the figure of the threshold, the translator, the communicator, the storyteller who is not indifferent to difference but speaks meaningfully to meaningful others. If the diplomat, as Isabelle Stengers (Cosmopolitics II, 2010) notes, lives on the cusp of translation and betrayal, then the latter, in whichever form it takes, is part of the risk assumed by the interdisciplinary researcher. But as Sam reminded us so starkly in his talk ‘Biodiplomatic and Biocolonial Fictions: Speculations on Immunity, Debility, and Humanity’, which referenced the racialized landscapes of organ donation, the legal implications of AI weaponry, the selling of one’s life time to pay debt in the film Paradise (2023), and the exclusionary narratives that circulate around the figure of the migrant, there is simply too much at stake not to assume that risk.