Hi there, my name is Ethan and I’m an archaeologist. Well…maybe not exactly. I haven’t run an excavation in years, and I don’t teach in an anthropology department. Ok, lets try this again. Hi my name’s Ethan and I’m a digital historian. Ok, thats a little better, its got the “digital,” and I also live (mostly) in a history department. But, my PhD isn’t in history. Hmmmm…ok, how about digital humanist? Well, its got the “digital,” so that’s good. I also “live” in the digital humanities community, work with many people who identify themselves as digital humanists, and have received digital humanities grants. The problem is that I’m not a humanist. Ok, mmmm…Game designer? No. Serious game designer? Not really..its what I work on, not what I am. Oh bother, what the heck am I?
The problem, dear readers, is that I’m an interdisciplinary scholar. I sit on the happy intersection of several domains (both traditional and “progressive”). As such, it is always a challenge for me, as well as many other who swim in these crazy interdisciplinary waters, to build and maintain an academic identify.
In many ways, the institution is at the root of this problem – not the scholar. Many institutions pride themselves on encouraging interdisciplinary scholarship (I would hold up my institution as an example of this). However, the reality is that its a heck of a lot easier to have a traditional, one field identity (English, Geology, Physics, etc) than it is to create and maintain an interdisciplinary identity. The very structure of most universities are based on a model of one scholar = one discipline (the unit of “discipline” being the department). Departments are usually walled gardens, little islands of thought and practice that are surrounded by moats filled with sharks and patrolled by giant killer robots with instructions to kill on sight (what? your department doesn’t have giant killer robots?). Tenure & promotion standards (which guide the activities for junior faculty – as well as many tenured faculty) are based in the department (and usually vary wildly between departments). On top of that, there is a lot of discipline/department-based inflexibility when it comes to teaching in an interdisciplinary space. Departments are often quite territorial about subjects that they see as their own (try teaching a class that has “Computer Science” in the title when you are in an Fine Art department, for example) Some universities don’t even have a mechanism for recognizing team teaching – which is a hallmark of instruction in many interdisciplinary spaces.
You also have to factor graduate education into the equation as well. You are admitted to a department (or perhaps a program), and in that department, you are educated in the arcane arts and secret handshakes of that discipline. In the vast majority of your graduate classes, you only mingle with initiates of your own secret academic society. You becomes familiar with a specific set of journals and a specific set of conferences. The end result are graduate students (who turn into professional scholars of one kind or another) who are firmly rooted in one particular discipline.
Obviously I’ve set up a bit of a straw man here. There are many exceptions to everything I’ve said. There are departments that tangibly embrace interdisciplinary scholarship and teach their grad students (from the ground up) how to be interdisciplinary scholars. However, I would argue that these cases are the exception, and not the norm. Now, its important to realize that I’m not trying to launch a wholesale indictment of university practice. I am, however, working hard to reveal some of the challenges involved with forging an interdisciplinary identity.
So, what is an interdisciplinary scholar to do? The bottom line is that you have to work hard at building an interdisciplinary identity, and work even harder to maintain that identity. In this context, here are three strategies for doing just that. As is customary, this list is hardly comprehensive. These are essentially the result of my own personal ruminations (some of which I’ve personally put into practice) – so, take them in the spirit that they are given.
Develop a Brand: Brand is incredibly important. I know this sounds crass and super “stupid PR marketing speech,” but its true. Let be honest here, brand is really another word for identity, and identity is what we’re trying to get at here, right? Your brand serves as a foundation upon which you construct your scholarly house of cards. In many ways, your brand will serve as your measuring stick when you go to make choices about things like the journals you’ll submit work to, the grants that you’ll shoot for, and the collaborations & partnerships you’ll enter in to. Don’t know the best way of coming up with your academic brand? Ok, try this little exercise. Google “building a brand” (or some such phrase), and you’ll get a list similar to the one below. Answer all of these questions (replacing words like “company,” “product” and “service” with more academic-y words), and you’ll be well on your way to developing your own personal scholarly brand.
- What products and/or services do you offer? Define the qualities of these services and/or products.
- What are the core values of your products and services? What are the core values of your company?
- What is the mission of your company?
- What does your company specializes in?
- Who is your target market? Who do your products and services attract?
As an aside, when I was writing this, Tom Scheinfeldt pointed me towards something he wrote on his own blog called “Brand Name Scholar” (http://www.foundhistory.org/2009/02/26/brand-name-scholar/). The piece has some great points, and is well worth reading in this context.
Give your “discipline” a name: If you were at a cocktail party (do people really have cocktail parties anymore?) filled with other academics and were asked what you did, you would want to be able to bust out a 2-3 word name for your “discipline” at the drop of a hat (n.b. this is really part of the “branding process,” I just thought it should stand alone because of its importance). You don’t want to be fumbling around trying to explain what you do. You could be the smartest person in the room, but if you can’t tell people what you do (quickly and succinctly), then no one is gonna take you that seriously. So, give your “discipline” a name, and become practiced at describing it whenever prompted. For me, its “Cultural Heritage Informatics.”
Fight for more flexible tenure and promotion requirements: For all the obvious reasons, this is a tough one. On one hand, the ways in which department’s reward scholars with promotion and tenure is very closely linked to maintaining an interdisciplinary identity. On the other hand, agitating for more flexible tenure and promotion requirements is often the game of those who’ve already been tenured.
By way of example as to the impact that tenure and promotion requirements have on an interdisciplinary scholarly identity – one of the most troublesome trends as of late at my institution is that department are being asked to provide their Dean with a list of the AAA journals in their field. The (not particularly well hidden) subtext here is that if you aren’t publishing in those journals, you aren’t doing high quality scholarship. And if you aren’t doing quality scholarship, your chances of being promoted or tenured aren’t particularly good. The problem is that the journals that are usually added to such a list are what you would call “traditional core journals.” The result is that many of the journals relevant to your particular out of the way interdisciplinary patch of academic ground won’t garner the same level of respect or “tenure credit” as you might get if you were publishing in one of these core journals. What’s worse is that your work might be completely inappropriate for any of these journals. So, what what are you supposed to do? Fight for more flexible tenure and promotion requirements, that’s what!
Ok, now its your turn. Are you an interdisciplinary scholar? How do you maintain your identity. Are you trying to become more of an interdisciplinary scholar? How are you building your identity? C’mon now, don’t be shy, feel free to share.
Image by Flickr user Mykl Roventine / Creative Commons licensed
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7 Responses to Building an Interdisciplinary Identity in a (Mostly) Non-Interdisciplinary Academic World
Rana - April 4, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Although you’ve focused mostly on the experiences of the already-hired scholar, these dynamics, to an even more pernicious degree, also operate during the job search itself. What I found, when I was actively on the market, is that it’s all too easy to fall between two stools if your work is genuinely interdisciplinary (as opposed to discipline based with a hint of something else).
In my own case, I consider the work I do to be environmental studies, albeit a form grounded in environmental and cultural history, and found it nearly impossible to effectively market myself according to my strengths. Many ES programs (and they are almost always programs, rather than full-fledged departments) are managed by the sciences (biology, most frequently) which means that the department responsible for the program is unlikely to have suitable job openings. On the flip side, departments that are a better match for my degree don’t want to hire someone who they think can’t or won’t do their basic survey courses – if you play up your special interdisciplinary strengths, you run the risk of coming across as a spoiled prima donna who will only teach upper level “specialty” courses. Of course, if you present yourself as more conventional, then you run into the risks you outline here, of either being stuffed into a slot that doesn’t fit well, or upsetting colleagues when you try to let your interdisciplinary freak flag fly.
And then there’s the worry that if they do hire you, they might lose some of their valuable “FTE” percentage to the program – that is, they searched for a 100% historian, say, but ended up with a 80% historian instead, the other 20% being “lost” to the program. If it’s not clear to them how this might come with beneficial trade-offs (which you, as a candidate, cannot speak to) then they’re not going to take that risk.
Infovoyeur - April 3, 2010 at 10:37 pm
Wow the political realities of academe, the article (& comments) elucidated these shadowlessly…
More experientially…I got English Lit Ph.D., taught lit, comp, thinking–but before, detoured into social sciences–cultural anthro, humanistic sociology. Wrote a 1975 dissertation for UW English Dept. in re “Rhetoric of ID Endeavor, World-View of the Hums. & the Soc. Scis., and Sociocultural Realism in Forster’s Novel A Passage to India.” 520 pages. Amazingly for that date the committee let it through–with no discussion but a thank-you. Guess they saw something emerging there even though out of their Box–then.
I think I and maybe others formed their own Dept. sub rosa under the stealth radar, I called mine the “Dept. of Integrative Meta-Stenology.” So true is the “geopolitical” analogy for ID: turf wars, transnational cooperation but also colonization, etc. I also use the “genealogical” comparison: like socio and psych are “close neighbors,” but what of aesthetics and evolutionary psychology, “distant strangers,” well the “prospect and refuge theory” of landscape appeal, but at times “reaching.” Like literary Darwinism, mate-selection in Jane Austen or fitness in the Iliad, but this effaces the essence or epicenter of literature which is “the aesthetic use of language,” Horrors politically-inkorrekt eh… But E. Dickinson’s scrimshaw carvings, W. Whitman’s oceanic wave-lengths, G. M. Hopkins’ cubist bramble-bushes–irreducible!
But I end by saying that even as institutions fragment ID work, so also I was personally fragmented a literary person studying social science. Different worlds–although cheers for intrAdisciplinary identities, realities, culture. “It was as if you can sleep overnight in only one house or the second, not both simul.”
Oh no, I do end with 15-second Rant: A scandal it is, that valid Lib. Arts. / Gen.Ed. schools do not pr-offer a Senior-Year Capstone Course on roundly ID perspective. Take any topic from “design a good city park” to much more challenging, and have it, sharing perspecftives. Great bookend to any earlier Core Courses, for solid closure. Only one tiny problem, two stakeholders would object. (1) Faculty, takes them away from their Research ["X % of Research = careerism"], and(2) Students, who don’t want to sit around for 3 credit hours, want to get on with their careers. Understandably [though "Undergraduate Research" is100% vocational education only, the DNS degree, "Dig Narrower Sooner..."]
ID endeavor remains the necessary eagle’s nest which–but the choir sings well, why preach any more to it. CHEERS for our efforts, and for this forum which putatively stimulates some outliers to excessive megaloquacity…
JoVE - April 1, 2010 at 11:12 am
Great article. I think the institutional pressure for disciplinarity is a very important constraint on interdisciplinary scholarship. The biggest hurdle is probably getting a tenure-track position to begin with. Because many interdisciplinary programs are taught by faculty from disciplinary departments, or if they have faculty they are joint appointed to a disciplinary department. So you end up with pressure to hire discipline specialists with interdisciplinary interests rather than interdisciplinary scholars that don’t fit neatly into an existing department.
That probably also accounts for why so few graduate programs prepare students for interdisciplinary careers.
And it is tenured folks who see the value of interdisciplinarity that have to do a lot of the political maneuvering to change the hiring, tenure and promotion guidelines. Senior people doing this kind of work need to look around and ask themselves “if I had been doing this as a junior scholar would I even still be here” and then do what they have to to make sure that this kind of work is recognized in the processes.
That takes time and effort and means going to a lot of meetings. And everyone hates that. But that is what collegial self-governance is and if senior people don’t participate, you get the institution that the people who do participate want.
Kelli Marshall - April 1, 2010 at 10:49 am
You write that many schools “pride themselves on encouraging interdisciplinary scholarship,” yet “a traditional, one field identity” is much easier to maintain. Agreed.
My PhD is an interdisciplinary humanities degree, Shakespeare and film specifically. As a result, I straddle both “high” and “low” culture. When I made the decision to seek an interdisciplinary degree, I thought that it would be extremely marketable; I kept telling myself that I could be hired by an English or a film department or one of those English departments that includes cinema studies. The latter is likely my best option, but such schools are generally smaller and need only one professor of my type. Consequently, the road to a tenure-track position for someone with a hybrid degree does seem to be bit more challenging than it is for a candidate whose field is strictly modern American lit, child psychology, or New Media. Not that the job market is great anywhere, mind you…
In any case, you’re right: having an interdisciplinary degree is more complicated than it appears. It is, however, fun and rewarding to be able straddle the disciplines I do; I wouldn’t trade it, in other words. And it is my hope that as we move forward in this world of increasing hybridity, institutions will ultimately adapt.
OPIEWeb - April 1, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Are you really sick of Branagh vs Olivier conversations or do you want to duke it out here?
Josh - April 1, 2010 at 12:23 pm
When I was an undergraduate I took a fabulous class about the legal statuses of indigenous peoples around the globe. The professor was an accomplished JD faculty member of the law school who also worked for the United Nations. He could not develop interest in his work into an interdisciplinary program with anybody else at the school (various ethnic studies, social sciences, etc.) because of territoriality among departments.
His complaint: there is no “UNI” in university. The system of rewards generally promotes diversity. That said, he didn’t “brand” his services and his approach as you suggest, and ultimately he left and continued his career with the UN and with other entities.
The lesson I took from him is related to your message of services. Few people will intuitively recognize the value of a hybrid XY to X or Y without specific branding (as you put it). Also, be aware of potential fallback careers … and how to brand yourself to them too.
Kelli Marshall - April 1, 2010 at 7:18 pm
Nope, I’m never sick of conversations that involve Kenneth Branagh. =)