This short essay was written on 12 January 2024, when I was in Linz, Austria, as a student of the IT:U x Ars Electronica Founding Lab. It was a contribution to the book “Starting a University”, recently released during the Ars Electronica Festival 2024. Student essays ended up not making the final cut of the book, but I liked this piece, so I decided to share it. There are no specific citations but I will list at the end the main references I employed as I wrote this. Special thanks to my trusted editor Ashley Chong for reviewing it before submission.

Inattentive watchers (and dishonest ones alike) can be quick to dismiss “interdisciplinarity” as a trendy buzzword that embellishes hefty grant proposals. The history of the creation of knowledge shows a different scenario — several disciplines, if not most of them, have started out of interstitiality¹, some space in-between different practices of their time, which was slowly revealed as a site of difference, until boundaries were agreed upon. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t semantic traps along the way. Interdisciplinarity, much like words such as “citizenship” or “freedom,” holds a type of universalist appeal, with enough multivalence and ambiguity to serve different purposes, according to the person who employs it, and wields it. These divergences are natural and expected, but they can also make or break a team’s ability to move forward together.

The Founding Lab, as a moment in time, and as an ongoing process, has been both a site of exploration, discovery and change, as well as the source of the type of reflection which separates things that ought to be reshaped from things that are better off nurtured as they are. Even though, as I write this, we still have a lot left to do before we wrap up the activities, I can already describe several important personal gains. In addition to joining a global network of innovative thinking, it has been the catalyst of decisive transformation in my process of transitioning fields as a graduate student. Thanks to this space, I was encouraged to dive deeper into the methodological questions that still challenge my ability to go beyond the thinking patterns of Architecture, to discover my place as a sociologist. On a higher level, the process of constant exchange with peers from both similar and different disciplinary backgrounds has been enlightening. It serves as a reminder that the boundaries defining disciplines aren’t as clear-cut as we might wish, and no field is entirely coherent or uniform. 

Experience tells us that there are productive ways of collaboration that don’t necessarily entail what interdisciplinarity tries to do, which is bringing about innovative epistemic change by associating, contrasting and integrating different elements from disciplines and practices. This is why “interdisciplinarity” can be so easily reduced to a set of performative displays of pluralism that don’t accomplish the tasks that require new ways of thinking about problems. So, for this new university to live out its purpose, it is paramount that, as the years go by, the image of interdisciplinarity by which its members and associates are possessed is always conducive to collaboration that isn’t just for show. This involves cultivating values, skills, and a culture of asking the difficult questions, and pursuing the realisation of their equally difficult answers.

My biggest hope for IT:U is for it to become a community of knowledge whose members and associates are brimming with the willingness to do complicated things, of which the hardest might be approaching a new field with openness, understanding, and, most importantly, patience. These skills are far from being merely social, but they are, indeed, crucial as rhetorical devices in articulating relationships in cross-disciplinary settings. They are the requirements which ensure that disciplinary interactive processes will be mindful of the time and energy that it takes for one side to understand enough of the other in a way that teaches the different parties to see the world through different eyes. Several boundaries between disciplines are blurry formalities that serve organisational purposes. Still, they signal implications that are deeply entrenched into practitioners. Entrenchment poses big challenges to constructive collaborations, but this is precisely why professors, students and staff at IT:U ought to be aligned in attitude, informed by the image of interdisciplinarity by which they abide, and what goals our collaborative efforts are expected to amount to. 

One of the biggest takeaways from the spaces we constructed during the Founding Lab is to not skip talk and confrontation when necessary, before sketching out any plan of action. Interdisciplinarity isn’t for everyone, just as performance arts or quantum physics aren’t for everyone. So, for those who are up for the task, those who will choose IT:U as the setting for their undertakings, the rewards will be contingent upon their awareness of their position, in relation to peers and to other disciplines, and the field of the production of knowledge as a whole. And this awareness is more than something cultivated on the individual level – it has to be a collective construction, which also responds to the collective’s ability to accommodate differences, and, most importantly, separate the things that ought to be reshaped from the things that are better off nurtured as they are.

[1] The word “interstitiality,” and most of the argument made in the first paragraph, came from Andrew Abbott’s “Chaos of Disciplines.” The featured image on this post also comes from the cover of the book, the 8-circled cross from the “Book of Kells.”

Abbott, Andrew. Chaos of disciplines. University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Abbott, Andrew. “Things of boundaries.” Social research (1995): 857-882.
Brint, Steven G., ed. The future of the city of intellect: The changing American university. Stanford University Press, 2002.
Fuller, Steve. Social epistemology. Indiana University Press, 2002.
Lamont, Michèle, and Virág Molnár. “The study of boundaries in the social sciences.” Annual review of sociology 28, no. 1 (2002): 167-195.