objective in this chapter is to demonstrate the presence of transdisciplinarity within existing scholarship and call for all scholars to embrace it, whether one self-identifies with its innovative research agendas or not. We feel that such an embrace is absolutely essential given the prevalence of corporate pressures within universities to “dice disciplines, faculty, and students, and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments” that prevent scholars from thinking holistically and creatively, and engaging with “the most pressing moral, political and cultural questions” of our times (Hedges 2008: 89–90). Embracing transdisciplinarity offers a way to overcome what has been called the “balkanization of the academy into narrow enclaves” (Hall 2010: 27). Embracing transdisciplinarity is one way scholars can explicitly “engage in and generate deep critical thinking” that seeks to better understand our complex present (Hall 2010: 27).
DISTINGUISHING INTERDISCIPLINARITY FROM TRANSDISCIPLINARITY
Though lesser known, transdisciplinary scholarship developed concurrently with that of interdisciplinary scholarship. It was Swiss development psychologist Jean Piaget who formally introduced the concept of transdisciplinarity in 1970. In his writings he used the term to refer to scholarship that “would not only cover interactions or reciprocities between specialized research projects, but would place these relationships within a total system without any firm boundaries between disciplines” (Piaget 1972: 138).2 As Basarab Nicolescu notes, this description did not mean that Piaget advocated dismantling conventional disciplines in favor of a new super- or hyperdiscipline. Rather, Piaget was interested in “contemplating the possibility of a space of knowledge beyond the disciplines” (Nicolescu 2008: 1).
According to the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research, which was founded in Paris in 1987, transdisciplinary research complements interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research but is nonetheless distinct (fig. 7). Multidisciplinary approaches use the perspectives of a number of different disciplines with no necessary overlap, while interdisciplinary approaches use the methods and theories of one discipline to inform other disciplines. In contrast, the goal of transdisciplinarity is to move beyond the limits of both the disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches to provide new ways of organizing knowledge and modes of thinking (Blassnigg and Punt 2012; also Gasper 2010).
Figure 7. Transdisciplinarity.
One of the important elements of transdisciplinary work is that it is problem based and thus concerned with the practical applications of knowledge in the real world, where issues tend to be multifaceted and call for multiple analytical perspectives. Transdisciplinary scholarship also explores how knowledge is constituted in the first place as a reflection and product of particular worldviews, ideologies, and cultural biases. According to Rosemary Johnston, transdisciplinarity “overtly seeks ways to open up thinking to ‘maps of unlimited possibilities’ … to create mindscapes that are unfettered by traditional patterns and procedures” (Johnston 2008: 229–30). Transdisciplinary scholarship is potentially emancipatory in that it explicitly seeks to free up modernist ways of thinking and our organization of knowledge in the academy by incorporating Western and non-Western knowledge into a more holistic approach to pressing contemporary issues. Adds Patricia Leavy, “Transdisciplinarity produces new knowledge-building practices … that [are] vital for making academic research an authentic part of the globalized world it claims to study” (Leavy 2011: 14).
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