BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT — Practising Interdisciplinarity: Convergences and Contestations

Babu P. Remesh and Ratheesh Kumar

The Book, Practicing Interdisciplinarity: Convergences and Contestations has been published by ROUTLEDGE in 2024. Click HERE to visit the Publisher’s page

How can the debates on the ‘disciplinary crises’ in the social sciences and humanities in India be revisited in light of the most recent reclassification of knowledge domains? How is the global restructuring of disciplines and the increasing demand for interdisciplinarity  reflected in the reconfiguring of academic fields in both new and old institutions of India’s higher education — the universities in particular? How one can trace the modes and meanings of convergences and contradictions in conceptualizing and implementing the principles of interdisciplinarity in policy and practice with reference to select institutions/universities? What are the qualitative differences that were brought under new nomenclatures such as ‘liberal arts’ when it comes to the acts of convergences and collaborations among intellectuals, researchers, institutions and ideas? How can the indistinctness in conceptualizing and comprehending ideas on subject matters and methodologies within the old social sciences and humanities and the new liberal arts be mapped for critical scrutiny? 

Interdisciplinarity is one of those freely-floating and frequently recurring terms of present-day academic discourses around the world. Being recognized as a progressive formulation on the practices of knowledge, pedagogy and research, the term ‘interdisciplinarity’ has gathered momentum in recent decades. However, the idea has remained  ambiguous in terms of its application in institutional settings and among its practitioners. The emergent knowledge domains which are unconventionally situated on the border lines of existing disciplines brought further tensions and contestations in their relation to each other in particular geographical and institutional contexts.  In this backdrop, this book offers an account on the historical, political and institutional dimensions of disciplines and their transitions in the time of emergent interdisciplinary trajectories with reference to social sciences and humanities in India.

The prominent shifts in the structuring of academic disciplines can be perceived at least from two angles. First, there is the formation of interdisciplinary domains like Post-colonial Studies, Area Studies, Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, Labour Studies, and so on, which stem from one or more conventional disciplinary structures, by retaining or disowning certain modules of theories, concepts and methods. The other is the relatively inconsistent and never-ending movement of subject matters and methodologies within conventional disciplines, entering into other territories. These modes of intersection and expansion give rise to the restructuring of disciplines and made their conventional meanings superfluous in the context of making sense of knowledge, pedagogy and method in emergent institutional settings.

The advent of new disciplines in various historical settings was accompanied by the significance and distinctiveness of the themes and approaches they addressed. The growing tensions and disceptations in the disciplinary boundaries witnessed in the late 20^th Century, and the increasing demand for interdisciplinarity in the fields of humanities and social sciences have accumulated additional crises. These points of crisis are closely linked to state policy, political and historical contexts, regional and linguistic variations and thus can be examined only in specific national/regional settings. Though the idea of being interdisciplinary is valued and celebrated in contemporary academic practices and overwhelmingly encouraged by funding bodies, certain institutional traditions and rigidities bring academic restraints and make both teaching and research a trying task entangled with a great amount of uncertainty. By mapping such ambivalence in the processes of doing and undoing with disciplines, this book brings together critical engagements from different vantage points on practicing interdisciplinarity with reference to humanities and social sciences in India in the 21^st Century.

Of late, there have been increasing trends of acknowledging the limitations of following single disciplinary approaches while seeking answers to research questions, which are not amenable to strictly defined frameworks of any particular discipline or stream of specialisation in knowledge. This realisation has led to an overwhelming recognition on the utility of engaging interdisciplinary approaches, in the areas of higher education, learning and research.

Being interdisciplinarity involves a process of transformation in the disciplinary path, understanding the strengths, limitations, constraints and possibilities of one’s own initially chosen discipline of specialisation.  It is a process of transition between disciplines, where the practitioner continuously experiments with the theories and methods of conventional disciplines in search of more convincing approaches in pursuit of a specific academic theme or a research problem, which does not fully fit into the framework of any of the conventional disciplines. Here, the researcher’s disciplinary understanding evolves, along with a blurring of boundaries of conventional disciplines and inclusion of theories and methods of `other’ disciplines.  Obviously, this act of disciplinary transformation varies from one to another, as tones and shades of interdisciplinarity are unique for each  individual practitioner of pedagogy and research. Given the highly heterogenous nature of interdisciplinary teaching and research, an in-depth understanding of `practising interdisciplinarity’ is possible only through  effective experience-sharing about interdisciplinary travails of different researchers and practitioners, who dared to cross the boundaries of conventional disciplines, to seek more convincing meanings and answers for their research questions. This book contains 19 essays from 21 researchers/teachers who practice interdisciplinarity in their own distinct institutional and independent academic settings. The book is an attempt towards documenting meta-knowledge by practitioners of varied fields, who chose the roads less travelled in the broader map of social sciences and humanities. It brings together the pleasure and pain of experimenting with interdisciplinarity and explains the disciplinary-inertia faced by the contributors of this volume in different fields including educational studies, international relations, translation studies, disability studies, childhood studies, women’s studies, labour studies, cultural studies, media studies, urban studies, development studies, public health and so on. It is expected to be in dialogue with a range of audiences including academicians, social researchers, practitioners in the development sector, activists and policy planners.

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_{Babu P. Remesh is currently Professor, School of Development Studies; Dean (Research & Development) and Director, Centre for Research Methods at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD). Earlier he worked as Associate Fellow/Fellow at V.V. Giri National Labour Institute, NOIDA; and as Associate Professor and Director, School of Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies at the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), New Delhi.}

_{Ratheesh Kumar currently works as Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He has previously taught at the Department of Anthropology, University of Hyderabad and at the School of Interdisciplinary and Trans-disciplinary Studies, Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), New Delhi. He was a Charles Wallace India Trust Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge (2021-2022)}