Interdiciplinarity is a buzzword in women’s studies departments. So much so that in my program we are required to take a course in a discipline new to us (the interdiciplinarity requirement), and we are constantly told that one of the cornerstones of feminist research is interdiciplinarity. Because of this I found Davis critique of interdiciplinarity to be very interesting. In his article he suggests that administrators see interdiciplinarity to be a cost cutting and reorganizing measure and that many scholars use interdiciplinarity as an excuse to teach a class in a discipline that they are interested in but only an amateur of. If this is how interdiciplinarity is seen in the academic community then why does women’s studies hold that interdiciplinarity is so important?
Using Davis’s definition of true interdiciplinarity (which he believes not everyone in the academy subscribes to), “being willing to let go of what you know so well and free fall into what is only beginning to be formulated” I would suggest that this definition is also the definition of what women’s studies has done and continues to do in the academy. Women’s studies imagines a world where we let go of the patriarchal structures and beliefs that the academy (and the world) so strongly subscribes to and discover a true knowledge without patriarchal undertones. Because of this, women’s studies seeks to be revolutionary and forget about the concrete walls that separate disciplines to allow knowledge to be created. I would suggest that women’s studies is one of the “new disciplines” that Davis calls for the creation of and I only wish other departments and university structures as a whole be broken down to allow for more true interdiciplinarity to occur within the academy.
Work Cited:
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Grand-Unified-Theory-of/13328/
No comments:
Post a Comment