Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought (review)

Having been an interdisciplinary faculty member for almost two decades, I have long thought that the biggest indicator of effective interdisciplinary learning, teaching, and scholarship is the interpersonal maturity of those involved and their capacity for building relationships. Even if one overcomes the standard institutional barriers, such as the disciplinary bias of promotion and tenure and reward structures, the time-consuming nature of interdisciplinary work, and the acquisition of the necessary funding, interdisciplinary work (to coin a phrase from Stanley Fish) is “so very hard to do”—precisely because it typically involves people—people who come from different backgrounds and must talk to one another.

Myra Strober’s book, Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought, confirms this point by analyzing the perceptions of various faculty members who participated in year-long seminars at three private research universities. The six seminars addressed topics ranging from broad ones such as social sciences, science studies, and ethics to more focused ones such as inequality, ethics, representation, and consilience, yet all were designed to promote interdisciplinary exchange and ideally the creation of courses, research projects, and greater understanding of other disciplinary worldviews. All seminars included postdoctoral fellows along with faculty members from different departments, and most involved administrators. To collect her data, Strober engaged in ongoing conversations with seminar leaders, visited one session from each of the six seminars, and interviewed forty faculty members about their experiences with the different seminars.

This book will be of interest to administrators heading interdisciplinary programs and faculty involved in interdisciplinary research, teaching or other collaborative projects. It complements the work of other interdisciplinary scholars who have theorized the interdisciplinary research process and the critical role of collaboration within it. For example, Kockelmans (1979), Newell and Green (1982), and Repko (2008) have underscored the need for interdisciplinarians to establish common ground when confronting conflicting disciplinary perspectives by “bringing out potential commonalties underlying the conflicting disciplinary and theory-based insights so that these can be reconciled and ultimately integrated” (Repko, 2008, p. 272). Newell, Szostak, and Repko (2011) have gone so far as to offer strategies for creating common ground, such as redefining concepts, extending theories to encompass other disciplinary concerns, or transforming thinking by placing opposing insights on a continuum. Other scholars have reinforced the critical need for productive collaboration in the interdisciplinary process of knowledge construction (Amey & Brown 2004; Boix-Mansilla, 2006; Derry et al., 2005; Klein, 2008) and the importance of strong leaders in fostering interdisciplinary collaborations (Bronstein, 2003; Casey, 2010; Klein, 2010).

Strober’s study enhances this literature by revealing that interdisciplinary exchange is thwarted for more fundamental reasons than the difficulty of translating terminology, reconciling conceptual conflicts or facilitating collaborative input. Surprisingly, she found little evidence of significant interdisciplinary communication among the seminar participants. Although some participants perceived the seminars as valuable (offering them new awareness and insights into other disciplines and disciplinary colleagues), none ended up collaborating with other faculty to create new courses or research proposals.

She concludes that the reason for the seminars’ lack of tangible outcomes is that the leaders and participants were unable to accept the contrasting ways that colleagues from other disciplines understand knowledge—that is, their conceptions of what constitutes truth, their methods of evaluating and generating ideas, and their habits of interacting. After presenting an overview of interdisciplinarity—its definitions, differences from disciplinarity, challenges and assets— in Part 1, the book focuses in Part 2 on a detailed description of the seminar conversations. Part 3 presents her findings, including her explanations for why the goal of producing interdisciplinary teaching and research projects was not met, a review of the challenges of interdisciplinary work, and suggestions for how leaders can foster productive interdisciplinary communication.

The book is at its best when the author describes and analyzes vivid and problematic examples of conversations, such as when a direct piece of criticism from an economist evoked the anger of a humanities seminar participant. The economist likely “did not think consciously at...