Structures of bridge-building

Readers will be aware that ISR publishes both unsolicited submissions and thematic collections. At the last meeting of the Editorial Board, with ISR’s criteria for interdisciplinary research in discussion, one of the members asked what unit is used to determine whether a submission is interdisciplinary, and so whether it qualifies for review. This question proved fruitful, as it raised the matter of the journal’s structure, or I should say, structures, according to which answering the question varies. At the meeting, I responded with a straightforward division into unsolicited submissions and contributions to guest-edited, thematic collections. Pondering further, other interesting problems arise. But first the criteria.

For an individual, unsolicited submission, we look for an approach to its research question that attempts to find or negotiate common ground between the author’s native discipline (rarely, disciplines) and at least one other. Merely poaching a technique or result from one field and applying it to a question in another is not merely insufficient but acts on the wrong idea of interdisciplinary research. In other words, interdisciplinary research is cross-cultural: it seeks common ground between different intellectual cultures, crucially not assuming but making visible the different assumptions inherent to them.

The structure of a thematic issue varies but usually fits one of three kinds. It may be a relatively un-orchestrated collection from diverse perspectives, the theme brought out and discussed by the guest-editor’s initial essay. The next issue, The continuous in motion: Music and/as science, is an example. For the second kind, contributors from different disciplines or specialisms are asked to comment on an essay written beforehand by a senior scholar, who may then reply in an afterword. For the third, contributors respond to the interdisciplinary work of such a scholar (but not in the manner of a Festschrift). Examples of these three kinds are to be found in issues of ISR from the last dozen or so years. The structures I describe, that is, were not invented beforehand but came from proposals, or in at least one case, from an explicitly interdisciplinary lecture series unified by its theme.

The problems I’ve called ‘interesting’ have to do precisely with that common ground, or as Marilyn Strathern put it in the title of a book, Commons and Borderlands: Working Papers on Interdisciplinarity, Accountability and the Flow of Knowledge (2004).

Three painful truths: professional reward for genuinely interdisciplinary research is rare, understanding of what it entails hard to come by and doing it well exceedingly difficult. Once you eliminate the imperial panoptic illusion, as Stanley Fish instructed (1989) – that from a neutral stance all disciplines can be contemplated and drawn from at will – you are faced with the job of bridge-building, of ‘becoming interdisciplinary’, as I wrote some years ago (2016a, citing excellent writings on the subject). I use the participial form here for two reasons. The first is that intellectual growth is never completed, only continued or abandoned. The second (with an eye to the resources we now have, literally at our fingertips) is that old ways have been shoved aside by new means. Historian Roy Rosenzweig called this the problem of abundance (2011), which is not just a matter of volume but also of use: how fairly to sample and be understood as doing that? Even as I was writing my doctoral dissertation in the early 1980s, the assumption that I would ‘read everything’ (compassionately, limited to the large research library in which I worked) was an absurdity. What idea of competence has replaced it now that ‘hits’ number in the millions? Go wide, gather in many voices, rather than go deep for one, Richard Rorty has argued (2004). The practical answer will likely vary by discipline. And so another difficulty: becoming interdisciplinary is not one way but many.

That’s on the one hand. But on the other, buoying up the struggling adventurer, is this: that against all the difficulties thronging at the gate, signifying the peril to be undertaken, becoming interdisciplinary is intellectually rewarding out of all proportion to the costs. Many issues of ISR, especially the thematic ones from 35.3–4 onward, provide the evidence.

Finally, at the start of the journal’s 47th year, a welcome to ISR’s first Managing Editor, Dr Tara Mahfoud, Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Essex University is long overdue. Our thanks to ISR’s publisher, Taylor & Francis, for the generous assistance last year in making a new position possible. I would also like to thank Professors Dame Gillian Beer (Cambridge) and Alice Jenkins (Glasgow) on their retirement from the Board for their long and valuable service. They will be missed. In addition, our thanks to the outgoing Communications Editor, Dr Jin Gao for the work she has done to spread the word.

Willard McCarty

Editor-in-Chief