Breaking the Shackles of Time by Claremont Graduate University

February 04, 2020 Transdisciplinarity – Philosophy & Practice

In response to complex contemporary problems & the limitations of siloed specializations in solving them, a new boundary-crossing approach is actively being developed by researchers.

Episode transcript:

Marcus Weakley:

This is Breaking the Shackles of Time. I have two wonderful guests with me. I am Marcus Weakley. The first guest, who has already introduced himself, is Dr. Andy Vosko. Would you like to say something about yourself?

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Sure. I am an associate provost, and I direct the transdisciplinary studies program at Claremont Graduate University. I come from a lot of different academic backgrounds, but I’d say that I studied East Asian language and literature and then went on to become a neuroscientist. So I liked to mix and match a lot of different perspectives into what I’m doing.

Marcus Weakley:

Great, welcome.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Thank you.

Marcus Weakley:

And the other guest has been a guest before. Will you re-introduce yourself?

Troy:

Yeah, I’m Troy [McKanovich 00:00:46]. I’m a PhD student studying religion in American politics. Before that I was doing religion and social theory, and before that astrophysics.

Marcus Weakley:

Great. So we have two transdisciplinary folks in personal experience with us today.

Marcus Weakley:

One of the things that I wanted to do to kind of set a lay of the land for the audience a bit was to try to see if we could talk a bit and maybe figure out some of the problems and agreed-upon areas of what transdisciplinary is or how it’s defined let’s say, more specifically. So I jumped on Google. I Googled transdisciplinarity definition. I clicked on the top three results, and I’m going to read them okay for our audience.

Marcus Weakley:

Number one, our good friend, Wikipedia, transdisciplinarity, connotes, connotes, a research strategy that crosses many disciplinary boundaries to create a holistic approach. It applies to research efforts focused on problems that cross the boundaries of two or more disciplines, such as research on effective information systems for biomedical research, and can refer to concepts or methods that were originally developed by one discipline but are now used by several others, such as ethnography, a field, research method, originally for anthropology now widely used.

Marcus Weakley:

Okay. So we have crosses disciplinary boundaries towards a holistic approach, focuses on problems across two or more disciplines, are taking something from one discipline and applying it to others.

Marcus Weakley:

Second was from Purdue university. It’s a blog. What is transdisciplinarity? I had to dig a bit on the second page. We’ve got, quoting someone named Petrie, “The notion of transdisciplinarity exemplifies one of the historically important driving forces in the area of interdisciplinarity, namely, the idea of the desirability of the integration of knowledge into some meaningful whole. The best example, perhaps, of the drive to transdisciplinarity might be the early discussions of general systems theory when it was being held forward as a grand synthesis of knowledge. Marxism, structuralism, and feminist theory,” as well other examples. “Essentially, this kind of interdisciplinarity represents the impetus to integrate knowledge, and, hence, is often characterized by a denigration and repudiation of the disciplines and disciplinary work as essentially fragmented and incomplete.”

Marcus Weakley:

So again, we have integration of knowledge into a meaningful whole, so that vibes off the holistic approach of the last one. But we have a strong definition here of it being a force, an impetus, of a desire or a push, right? It’s historical, and it’s a kind of interdisciplinarity.

Marcus Weakley:

And finally, we have the Harvard Transdisciplinary Research in Energetics and Cancer Center. Their definition is more straightforward. Transdisciplinary research, so it’s not transdisciplinarity, but it was still result number three, is defined as research efforts conducted by investigators from different disciplines, working jointly, to create new conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and translational innovations that integrate and move beyond discipline-specific approaches to address a common problem.

Marcus Weakley:

So like our first definition, problem-based for the most part. Strong focus on collaboration here, kind of present in the others, but not really. Are in the first, but not really. Clearly here talking about working together to create new innovations, be those conceptual, theoretical methodological, which seems most interesting to me.

Marcus Weakley:

Translation. Thoughts.

Troy:

Beautiful.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

You illustrated the parable of all of the blind individuals feeling different parts of an elephant and explaining what it was.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

There’s parts of it, each of those, that are true. I think it’s much simpler and much more inclusive than what any of them had actually explained.

Marcus Weakley:

Yeah, so when I hear you talk about it, when we chat, or when I hear you talking to others about it, and I hope I don’t misrepresent represent you here, so pushback, I hear you talk or say more than anything else about crossing boundaries.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

That is, you have to cross boundaries to do it. It comes down to a basic phrase, it’s not about the discipline. You have to understand that you’re using your discipline, and you got to acknowledge that as a starting point. It gives you a set of tools and perspectives that are really important, and those are inherent in you. But what you’re looking at isn’t about your discipline. So you’ve got to both separate yourself from that and include it at the same time.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

And that means to have the humility, to talk to other people who are not you or people that look or sound or were trained in a very different way from you, to recognize ways of knowing that are not yours because it’s not about your discipline. And it comes as a response to us creating a culture, a disciplinary culture, of where a bunch of disciplines are sitting together where we assume that each one of those is getting its own perspective on something, and some magical way of integration will happen to address a particular complex problem.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

That doesn’t happen when you get a bunch of people in the room. You don’t actually get this kind of effect that you get when you get a bunch of atoms together in a small space. You don’t get a bunch of mixing. Turns out, humans are really good at just kind of staying in their groups, or they create even more boundaried spaces around them. And this is an active response to what’s happened there to remind everyone that it’s not about your discipline.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

And I think we all understand that inherently. We don’t necessarily raise our families the way that we do our scholarship in our disciplinary areas. Why is that? If your discipline is so special in solving all of these important things, why don’t you treat your children as a microbiologist would treat viruses or bacteria? Because we know it doesn’t work that way.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

And I think it’s trying to formalize that concept. And that includes what was said. You have to be collaborative; you have to be self-reflexive, which was a piece that should have been included in there. You have to go into liminal spaces. You have to integrate; that’s really important. So what you had mentioned before, Troy, about understanding a bunch of different perspectives around something, is one of the big pitfalls around transdisciplinarity, is that people assume that taking a historical lens or an economics lens or all of the different lenses that are often used in ways of describing what scholarship, is really just interperspectivity. It’s this idea that I can stand from the left side now, and I can stand from the right side now. And because I’m standing from each of these sides, you’re going to get a 360 degree understanding of what’s going on. And that’s bunk because it’s all within your brain, and you’re assuming that your lens is not a part of this and that’s got its own very strong filters on it.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

What’s important is not that you can just take a side, but what does integration of those different lenses look like? And what does integration look like when you’ve got someone else there? It’s very hard. It’s an art; it’s not a science. And at that level, there are signs, see things about it, but at that level, how do you communicate the art of it? How do you celebrate the art of it? And because it’s hard to do, we often get some of these kind of utility-based definitions of what it’s doing, what it’s good for, and that sells it short. It’s not quite what it is.

Marcus Weakley:

So that takes us a bit back to the distinction between multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, right? So that’s part of what transdisciplinarity is doing different, right? It’s a form of integration that you don’t have to do when you’re doing interdisciplinary work or multidisciplinary work. When you can just kind of take two disparate wholes, still be really focused on disciplinarity and bring those together in unique combinations. Instead of focusing on the process of the research together, the form of the research as being redefined through the process of collaboration and therefore taking those forms of, I guess it’s collaboration, but coming together further are the different type altogether. Is that part of what I’m understanding? What do you think?

Troy:

I think a little of what you’re talking about, and especially compared to the idea of these kinds of siloed disciplinary bites of the apple, is an emergent process, right? That where it, through collaboration, there is something that exists that wouldn’t just exist in doing three things in isolation from three different perspectives, one at a time. Right? But that the idea that my working with someone in a different discipline, looking at a shared phenomenon, shared problem, and between us trying to figure out, what does this kind of thing we’re looking at necessitate that we do to better understand it? That there’s something emergent there that doesn’t happen if each one of us tries to do the process on our own from our own perspective or tries to imagine what that process would look like in whole, without actually engaging with another person towards those same ends.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

And I do think that there’s space to do the self isolation, archival, deep dive into something. Disciplines are also… They’re models to give us tools to learn about the world in ways that are a little more established, and they allow a little more detailed search. So it’s important to have them. I really don’t… I often feel like I’m a threat, by being an ambassador for transdisciplinarity, to people who are embedded in disciplines. That’s absolutely not the case. You have to have dug deep in the disciplinary space. You have to be very well-grounded in the disciplinary space because that’s giving you a footing from which you can do other things. But from that space you also have to come out of that sometimes and realize the depth of knowledge you learn from that needs to be linked with other knowledges.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

And those knowledges could be learned from your kids.They could be learned from your siblings, or they could be learned from the person who’s working the other side of the window at a bank. Because everybody has something that you don’t and you can learn from. Actually, if you’re learning the essence of your discipline, the big questions, the threshold concepts of your discipline, then what you have understood, come to understand, about the world is relatable to any complex problem that anybody is experiencing. There is something relatable. And I think we often close that off and don’t have that kind of audacity to think that, “You know, studying soil science, I have nothing to say about homelessness.” Not true. You do. There are metaphors that you’ve come to understand through biology that you can actually apply to the complex problem of homelessness. And it’s a matter of you having the space to be imaginative and creative to start to understand what that looks like.

Marcus Weakley:

Yeah. Go ahead, Troy.

Troy:

I was going to ask… I think what you brought up there with the idea of metaphor, I think that gets to a lot of, I think, some of the questions that often surround transdisciplinarity. It’s like, of course you can, building on your own disciplinary knowledge or personal background biography, come up with metaphor for that. But does that turn the exercise of transdisciplinarity into just a rhetorical term? The idea of that, “Well, it helped us imagine.” So is transdisciplinarity, is it a problem-solving metric? As some of these folks have… You talked about the utilitarian push. Or is it a kind of a guiding star, this idea that, well, we all have the right metaphors to get there? Or is there a there there?

Dr. Andy Vosko:

So let me take it back from this theoretical space, and let’s talk about the reality of how these definitions have come to pass. When originally the term was coined, it was in the 70s from Jean Piaget, and he was speaking flowery and beautifully and said, “You know, we need to go beyond interdisciplinary study. We need to go into transdisciplinary study.” And I’m not sure to the level of which he was really choosing his words intentionally or not, but there were a couple French philosophers who took it and ran with it, and they turned it immediately into this space, and they were coming from a physics background, on it about there’s multiple truths, that there’s something about the space in between. And they wrote beautiful prose, sometimes hard to understand, about what the theories of transdisciplinarity were. I will say, honestly, there’s an essence of navel gazing that it can get into really quickly.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

What then happened was there was a Swiss group that had listened to this transdisciplinary dialogue. And they like, “You know, this could be much more applied based.” And so they turned, with the initial snippets of the philosophy, and made it very practical. And so it became an algorithm of what it worked. And there were two schools that emerged; there was the French philosophy school and then there was a Swiss applied research school, which really encompassed sustainability studies. From what they had figured out in sustainability study, they merged the philosophies of sustainability to go into that and created a list of seven things, or eight things, that transdisciplinary scholarship looks like. Now we’ve evolved to transdisciplinary pedagogy and what that looks like.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Well, those two, that dichotomy, still exists. There are fewer people on the philosophical side of the argument. You get some papers as chapters every once in a while, refer back to it. Most of the time people are worried about, how does the output look on it? When people ask the definition, that itself is already a problem. I came from the field of sleep studies. When someone asked, what is the definition of sleep? That’s a tough one; this actually created a huge debate because it’s one of those things you know it when you see it. Now, there are definitions that have since come out.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

But in the transdisciplinary world, this is a young enough field, we’re still fighting over it of what it actually means. You go to a conference and people have come up with really simplified ways to do it. It means you have a non-academic actor as part of your research team. That’s like the simplest one that people have gone to. It’s anything collaborative. It’s blank. And you see people taking it on a different… It’s really just a form of interdisciplinarity.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

None of these things are by themselves, true, because none of them encompass the breadth of what this was, I think, trying to get. So when the question of what is transdisciplinarity, I would better say, what does transdisciplinarity look like in CGU or at your institution or in your society? In the U.S. transdisciplinarity almost always focuses on medical things, and it becomes what’s called team science. When you look at Europe, it’s all about sustainability, but they’re practiced by universities that are coming from very colonial spaces and for the first time are using these anthropological, self-reflexive kind of exercises in their research. So that they’re saying like, “Whoa, it turns out that continental philosophy wasn’t the only thing that should be dictating our approach to this problem.”

Marcus Weakley:

And the mind is blown.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Every space you see it, it’s different still. It’s just different. And I think that…

Marcus Weakley:

So by narrowing the question you’re, in part, providing an answer more or less to the broader question of how is this defined.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

And here, I think that the future of this is to integrate the philosophy and the applied algorithmic utility-based approach.

Marcus Weakley:

To me the process seems difficult from what I’m hearing, even from the varying definitions or the varying applied realities of it in the world. And if you are going to make it not about the disciplines, while acknowledging that your entire life has been more or less formed by disciplinary education up until that point, and you kind of have to wrestle with that transform play on the liminal space of creativity and transformation to rewire your own thinking in order to resist the urge to simplify in order to solve, or define, but to try to break open and understand connections, complexity. It seems like a challenging mental process as well as a challenging research process, so how do you ensure that everybody’s doing that work well enough? What are some of the ways that we can, without pigeonholing transdisciplinarity and making it a discipline itself, which of course is going to be-

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Which has happened.

Marcus Weakley:

A tendency that’s through a definition, set methods, and approach this a certain way. Besides referring to it generally as being like, “Okay, people need a critical, reflective edge and to be able to understand their own disciplinarity to move beyond it” and things along those lines… That’s nice, but then some people reflect better than others and some have no idea how to do that. And then from a more open space and apply it to a problem, collaborating with others, collaboration is hard.

Marcus Weakley:

So what are some of the things that can be done, excuse me, to address these difficulties?

Troy:

Well, I think, kind of going back to the idea of the multiple definitions that we’re working with and the multiple, almost kind of prescriptive, elements of like, “This is what transdisciplinary ought to be.” I think a big part of almost the checking in on the project to transdisciplinarity that you’re talking about is desegregating its different projects, right, because so many of the definitions we’ve talked about… I don’t, I’m dumb, but I don’t see why they’re coherently linked, right? The purpose of community-based participatory research, of integrating communities that have otherwise been marginalized and targeted by the university for research fodder, that’s a noble pursuit. The idea of, we need to do something about kind of the vertical kind of hierarchy at the university.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

I think we overdo.

Troy:

Right, yeah. That’s a different project than saying, “Oh, wow. As an economist, I don’t understand all… I only understand the world as an economist,” right? Those two projects to me, they don’t have a coherent linkage beyond saying, “There’s something about the university as imagined in the modern space that needs to change.” And so I think a big part of it has to come from attacking this as something, not saying I’m working as in the service of transdisciplinarity, but in service to one of these many projects under the banner of transdisciplinarity.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

I think that’s how it often goes. But there are some of us who will take it to that further extreme and want to turn the university on its head because it goes back to what a mission of the university is. And sometimes when I think about it… It’s funny. You realize when you get into the complex system itself of a university, the mission was, was, to be pursuing knowledge. That is the mission, and it should be giving back to the people who are supporting it. Oftentimes we’ll see a university as a space that is supporting tenure and promotion or a space as promoting donorship or a space that’s promoting-

Marcus Weakley:

Itself

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Itself. I mean, the university is a complex system, which is what happens with complex systems, is they come up with their own intrinsic connections such that their survival is much more robust given all of the things thrown at it. And its main mission becomes its survival rather than the mission that was given it by its founders. And in a lot of ways universities have become that, so the universities are now intrinsic to our social system in the United States.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

We’re seeing some real problems with this. We’re seeing the student debt that comes out of it. We’re seeing the idea of an ivory tower that’s out of touch with the problems of the world. And we’re seeing an anti-intellectual movement that comes up. And I think, while on the conservative side, the complex problem base is a very safe way to apply transdisciplinarity because there’s nothing you’re going to lose at this point. Nothing else has worked. So why not try it? Let’s see what happens.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

But then this bigger conversation… I’ve been to transdisciplinary conferences where there’ve been people who’ve been around the block who are big in education will say, “This turns education on its head, and it’s something we need. It’s an exciting movement that the world is going to take on because what we’ve been doing… When you think about how long education has been around, it’s been a long time and we’re not really sure that we’ve changed it all that much. And we’re not really sure that we’ve been that successful in how we’ve changed it.”

Dr. Andy Vosko:

And so it can be very bold depending on what’s permissive of the space that one is working with. And of course you’re working in the complex system of a university or even a public K-12 kind of institution. It’s got its foundation. It’s there, it’s linked to so many things to ensure its survival, the way that it’s been set up. So the change is going to have to be one, if it’s going to be made, where it’s touch and go. We see if things are changing; we see how people are embracing it.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

And the world tells us if it’s working or not. If we do make a dent in climate change or in sustainability, then yeah, it’s a very powerful tool, a set of tools, to go through, and it will be a proof of concept. But we’re still so young in what we’re doing on this that there’s a lot of potential, there’s a lot of anxiety, there’s a lot of mistrust and skepticism. We’re experiencing anything like it would be in its nascency, and I think that’s kind of fun and exciting.

Marcus Weakley:

I agree.

Marcus Weakley:

Shifting a bit. Question, the chemist who’s always viewed himself or herself as a chemist, does some transdisciplinary research. They get into it; they’ve done it for a while. Self-identification. What ends up happening? If things are flipped, I’m interested in this, in the identity part of it, what do things look like in the future then in this university or in this… I mean, I’m very supportive of these notions personally, right? Do you view yourself, still, as a chemist in that scenario, but you’ve redefined what it is to be a chemist or that has been redefined, there’s a different social agreement given the new dynamic of a university? Do you view yourself as a transdisciplinary researcher first and then chemist second? Does it matter?

Marcus Weakley:

I’m interested in how this… Because the perpetuation of the present system has happened through a process of self-identification where the disciplinary education and attitude has really consolidated around forms of self-identification as well, right? There’s something, and we’ve chatted about this too as well, Andy, where people will refer to, “Oh, in my discipline we do it this way.” There’s a sense of pride and self-identification and being something in viewing oneself as something that is set apart from others.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Right.

Marcus Weakley:

And you’ve got your own neat little group. And then oftentimes there’s a hierarchy of value at different times in history, in different parts of the world. Does transdisciplinarity need to get to the top of that hierarchy because then it’s becoming its own discipline, right? Or is there some other way that… Is it an integrated through the existing disciplines and, therefore, people will view themselves as what they viewed themselves as before, but the process of doing that disciplinary work is inherently transdisciplinary? Therefore transdisciplinarity is not a discipline in and of itself. It’s through the existing disciplines.

Marcus Weakley:

Or, does it need to be that I’m a transdisciplinary researcher first and foremost. I identify as such; we’re the coolest right now. I’m a chemist second because, you know, that’s what I studied when I started. Does it matter? Would one perpetuate the existing need to have a certain consolidated set of power dynamics within an institution like a university? Are we trying to rewrite a fluidity of power dynamics altogether? More or less, that’s my question.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

It’s a lot in there. Marcus.

Marcus Weakley:

It’s a good question.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Maybe.

Troy:

Give yourself that one.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Yeah. Okay. I’m going to use a-

Marcus Weakley:

Questions are often more important than answers, but since the person asking the question-

Troy:

That’s what we say in discipline.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

That’s right. My disciplinary background says…

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Okay, metaphor. And I’m going to use my disciplinary background to give the metaphor because it has its uses.

Troy:

It better be it’s meta.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

It’s meta. So for a long time, when Hook had first identified cells themselves, the thing that everybody in biology was studying was cells. In fact, most people are still assuming the unit of interest in biology is a cell. You can go even deeper into the cell if you’re studying a nucleus or whatever else you’re studying, but it’s the cell. But, you know, we kind of came to understand that the cells are interesting, but the interstitial space between cells is equally interesting because not many people, not as many people study that, of course. But, the space in between gives you a whole perspective of what’s going on in the cell, how things communicate with each other, how it gets signals from the outside. It’s a really cool, fascinating space. And then you realize that it’s not just about studying the interstitial space or the cells themselves, but, actually, there’s kind of a unit that happens between the cell, the interstitial space, the fluids that course through the body, the environment itself.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Okay, that’s the metaphor. Your cell is your discipline. It’s got boundaries around it. The interstitial space is what an interdisciplinary approach to something is. It’s what going on between this intersecting point, which is also really interesting.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

And then there’s this kind of zoomed out point of view. And it’s true, there are people that are going to want to put boundaries around what the transdisciplinary approaches are to create this giant cell, or the human body around it, and say, “That’s what I’m studying.” And that’s fair enough in itself, but the theories around transdisciplinary approaches are to actually be very intentional and cognizant that we’re studying something that can be put together as a unit and disassemble to be their component parts.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

And I think that that kind of metaphor is a healthier understanding of what it is rather than choosing, you know what, yeah… All what you’re saying is true, and they do have their own questions; they have their own scholarship around them, but it’s to be cognizant of the fact that the second you create a discipline, you can’t avoid creating a transdisciplinary space. You can’t. It’s part of it; it’s intrinsic to it. Once you put boundaries around the sandbox, you’ve got the space between the sandbox and something else. And you’ve got the bird’s eye view of what that sandbox looks like.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

And so rather than saying which one’s best, you have to acknowledge that it exists. And that’s the point of all of this kind of inquiry.

Marcus Weakley:

Sounds like you’ll need to fight against turning it into a discipline in and of itself.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

And that’s happening.

Marcus Weakley:

I mean a very active fight over a long period of time.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

It’s tough when you’re dealing with a ghost. It’s not really easy when your philosophy is based on something that you shouldn’t be able to define because the language that we use for that is based on definitions. So it’s kind of a balance, and those that are in the business of defining transdisciplinarity and moving forward with it in those ways, it’s important that they do that. And they should have space to do that because our meta level of understanding of what it is also needs to be progressed. But to understand that, again, that is a simplified version of it, it is not the meta, you got to be iterative in your research process. You’ve got to come back.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Now what happened since we put boundaries on it? Now what does that bird’s eye view look like of everything? And that should be a constant dialogue. And we don’t answer a question. We are re-answering questions all the time. We are not solving problems. We are resolving problems. And I think that that kind of need for storytelling that we have, that has a beginning, middle and end, is in some ways the enemy of what transdisciplinary outcomes are. It’s that there isn’t an ending. This stuff is going to keep on going on. Our universe is continually going to provide with us problems to resolve. So we’re not done just because you got a grant, and we’re not done just because he wrote a book. Yeah.

Marcus Weakley:

People like to tell stories, but they also like to check off lists, so it’s like, “Check. We’ve taken care of that one. You broke it down, handled it, let’s move on to the next thing in the list,” when, really, history and time has shown us the more we understand about certain things that that is not how research often works.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

So cancer is an interesting… I remember back in my, my, grad school days, long time ago, there was a really crazy graph someone had shown us. He said, “If you look at the amount of funding that’s gone toward cancer research since like a hundred years ago, I mean, it’s off the charts, crazy amounts of cancer funding. Then you look at the incidences of cancer over that amount of time. It’s also skyrocketed.” And so one would think simply that by providing more money for research on something that is clearly a complex problem, that we would get closer to understanding how that is going to be solved.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

The answer is not necessarily true. We have much more need for cancer funding, but at the same time, we’re not solving it. As we solve one kind of cancer, we’re able to come up with therapies for one kind of cancer, a new one springs up, mutation happens because it’s a complex biological system. So we’re not beating cancer. We’re having to beat an individual cancer, but as we’ve kind of covered up one leak, we’re seeing another one spring and then we have to go for that too. So it helps us understand the complexity in what we’re doing. Beating cancer is an over-simplification, but we need to address each cancer and each complication of cancer that comes up, and that’s why it’s important to have this kind of funding always going on.

Marcus Weakley:

That’s a good example. It’s about time for us to wrap up. Troy, are you feeling okay?

Troy:

Yeah, I’m okay. I just got a cough.

Marcus Weakley:

I would like to give you both an last opportunity if you want to mention anything about transdisciplinary studies. Troy, I know you’ve you’ve wrestled with this a bit. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken part in any kind of vertically transdisciplinary research, but a lot of what your research is, is crossing traditional boundaries in and of itself.

Troy:

I think that’s one of the things that’s difficult in some ways, not so much from the project transdisciplinarity that I think is really valuable, but from the perspective of, I don’t have a discipline, right? Religious studies isn’t a discipline, right? It’s a topic of study. And that’s increasingly common whether you’re in cultural studies, religious studies, there are topics of studies, field areas. Some universities-

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Africana studies.

Marcus Weakley:

It’s a good example that overtly pushes back against having a single methodology.

Troy:

Yeah. And I think that’s one of the things that I think is difficult for me from this perspective, is the sense that, again, kind of dis-aggregating the different projects that of transdisciplinarity, there’s one sense in which it aligns with what I think is a fairly dangerous tendency in the university, which is to undermine those disciplines for the purpose of creating faster majors, that we can pump people in and out of faster, undermining that disciplinary kind of either pedagogy or expertise in favor, then, of bringing in students who didn’t know necessarily that this is the direction that they want to go into in order to kind of create a faster pipeline in and out. And I do think you see that at universities that are saying, “Well, we don’t need majors. We need like interest clusters, and we won’t have departments.”

Troy:

And that seems well and good, all until now you’re being paid by hourly instead of as a salary worker, that tenure track or something. So I think that’s one of the things, coming from a non discipline, and seeing then the way that that non discipline also has transformed the labor market around what it means to be a researcher. I think there’s kind of that itch in the back of my head is making sure our projects, some of them under the banner of transdisciplinarity that I find really compelling about undermining kind of these “objective” strands of knowledge, and of integrating the community members, making sure community stake holding is respected is also the sense of, “Oh, are there any other projects that this happens to overlap with that I don’t find quite as satisfying?” And that might be one of them is the kind of almost Silicon Valley-esque, let’s reinvent the humanities even as we defund the humanities, kind of aspect. So that’s something I think a lot about.

Marcus Weakley:

Gotcha.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

I’m glad that you mentioned that, Troy, because I do think that the different types of disciplinarities often fall prey to people believing that there’s an inherent sacrificing of rigor that goes along with it. And when it’s done incorrectly, that can certainly happen. Because then you know a little about a lot of things.

Troy:

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

And that rigor is important. At the same time, you’re also illustrating a problem in university structures. When you’re a religious studies scholar and you are looking for the job, and you’re like, “There’s no department of religion.” And so you have to fit into literature, or you have to fit into history, or you have to fit into something in social science. And you’re like, “What in the world? “When you say you want an interdisciplinary scholar, you’re actually just asking for someone who studied religion in 19th century Zimbabwe under colonial rule.” You’re coming up with very particular things that aren’t actually interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

So there is a structural problem that needs to be battled because that doesn’t make the transdisciplinary approach any less wrong. It’s still a reality. It’s still something that is worth exploring. And just because there are structures in place that are barriers to some of it, that’s changing. And there are more people that are infiltrating these spaces. You get into your traditional department. And I will also say there’s a fair number of religion departments in the world that you could also become a part of that appreciate that kind of scholarship. That when you infiltrate, you start to… Once you’re in, you could both say, “Yeah, I need to understand the rigor of this. This rigor has been an invaluable set of tools for me, but I can also grow beyond this and turn it into something awesome.”

Dr. Andy Vosko:

The other piece of this is that not everything requires a transdisciplinary approach.You got to save it for the really complex. And if you’re always thinking that you need to be transdisciplinary about something, you’re never going to finish; it takes way too long. And one of the things that I try promoting in our program and why stress boundary crossing so much, is that you can boundary cross without having to turn it into a complete questioning of your bases of knowledge.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

And it’s okay to start with smaller… Inter-perspective things are great. If you want to take courses in one department and then another, if you want your dissertation to involve a lens here and a lens there, that’s awesome. And that will give us really important, really valuable, information. And to create a line around transdisciplinary studies themselves and say there is, or there isn’t, there’s an out or there’s an in, alienates people from actually understanding that it’s on a continuum of how we understand disciplines.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

And so you should both be grounded in the discipline. You should play in a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary space, and sometimes you should go into the transdisciplinary space. What’s important is you realize all of them are there. What kind of problems warrant what kind of approaches. And so when you’re on the job market, usually your approach is going to be limited in the transdisciplinary space unless you’re actually looking at a transdisciplinary job.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Now, when you’re in your position, that transdisciplinary attitude that you have, or the tools that you’ve taken with you, are so valuable. It’s once you’re in the door is when it’s your worlds really opened up. But because when you’re in kind of the early scholarly formation part of your career, you’re seeing what’s next and you’re not seeing what’s two steps ahead of you. And I think that that two or three steps ahead of you is where this really becomes useful, and it really pays off.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

So there are people that have cognitive blocks to what this is immediately because they’re thinking, “How does this relate to me? No. It’s either going to be under rigorous, or it’s going to prevent me from getting a job. Done thinking about it; it’s not worth it.” And that’s like deciding that you want to go on a major fasting diet so that you look good for the summer rather than kind of taking on a lifestyle of balancing your diet and exercise. And I think that the transdisciplinary approach is more of that. Keep the moderation in mind. Keep that balance in mind.

Marcus Weakley:

Or not using a specialized tool that exists for a job that makes a better tool. Why not add that to your toolbox?

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Yeah.

Marcus Weakley:

Andy, Troy, thank you so much.

Troy:

Thank you.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Thank you.

Marcus Weakley:

This has been Breaking the Shackles of Time. I appreciate your presence here very much from studio B3 at Claremont Graduate University. Thanks for listening.

Dr. Andy Vosko:

Thank you.

Troy:

Thanks.

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