Yesterday I came across an interesting new blog on environmental economics (one of the pioneering transdisciplinary efforts these days) here that addresses the question of authorship I posted about the other day. Leaders of groups or teams that bring together people of differing disciplines may have a tendency to impose their own perspectives on the group, at worst, or simply fail to uncover their hidden assumptions by how they put the group together (hard lessons to learn that I'm still working on). Roderic Gill, the author of the post and director of the Centre for Ecological Economics & Water Policy Research in Australia, makes the important claim that the "fundamental questioning of deeply held assumptions should be the main purpose of transdisciplinary work." It is risky work, he argues, prompting all kinds of defensiveness as if deeply held religious beliefs were being challenged (and don't we all hang on to our disciplinary assumptions as if they are articles of faith).
He goes on to argue that philosophers, especially philosophers of science and epistemology, are important elements of a transdisciplinary approach precisely to help in this questioning. I also mention this point because it illustrates nicely an argument I made at our university's faculty retreat last month: that although transdisciplinarity began as an outreach from natural sciences to the social sciences, it cannot be complete without a similar inclusion of the humanities. This is the bold and risky work we hope to facilitate as well: to transcend the assumptions within our own disciplines by breaking them open to examination and questioning by others in a spirit of mutuality. As Paul Groh pointed out to me at the same faculty retreat, there is a kind of transdisciplinary temperament that is required to undertake this work, one that is willing to put even one's own sacred cows on the altar.
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