[transdisciplinarity and academia]

With my new job starting on the 1st of August I'm getting ready by reading (and reading and reading!) about transdisciplinarity. Although my post is going to be more focused on a kind of academic transdisciplinarity and creating a context/facilitiating conversations between various disciplines, I'm interested to read/learn/hear/see how other knowledge institutes are grappling with the demand to share information while having to cross (sometimes) radically different research cultures (enter: knowledge translation theory "exchange, synthesis and ethically sound application of knowledge—within a complex system of interactions among researchers and users"). I've just come across a set of interview questions that were posed to Mark Linder (Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at Syracuse University) in January this year. On the blog: Critical Practice for the Next Generation, most of the questions seem to broach issues of transdisciplinarity...how is architecture transdisciplinary, should it be *more* academic or more *businessey.*

In his book, Nothing Less than Literal, Linder has this definition of transdisciplinarity:

"the exchange of concepts and techniques between established disciplines through translation and transference" and one of the interview questions asks: "What would this 'exchange of techniques between the established disciplines' look like, in a practical sense? Are you proposing that the architect take on the roles of the painter, builder, or other professional in order to widen the scope of what is currently considered the 'architects job?'"

I think it is precisely this anxiety that to be transdisciplinary one must be able to wear many hats and wear them well. I suppose this is what the students on the Creative Writing and New Media Master's course at DMU must grapple with. As authors of new media works, must they also be well versed in Flash, html, java, image design etc...? I think this mirrors the development in science from Mode 1 knowledge production and the move to Mode 2:

Mode 1 refers to the more traditional practice of science,

created within a disciplinary, primarily cognitive context” (p. 1), situated within universities, and characterized by a polarization of discovery and application. In contrast, Mode 2, also referred to as “postacademic” and “steady state” (Ziman 1994, 1996) “is created in broader transdisciplinary social and economic contexts” (p. 1), and is based on the principles of convergence and synthesis.

Of course raising the idea of Mode 1 and Mode 2 is not value-free nor does it lack an "imperializing" stance as Mode 2 seems to be the preferred system in the hierarchy (at least according to Gibbons et al. and not that I disagree either...but how to avoid hierarchies in transdisciplinary practises and is it even necessary?)

I wonder how disciplines other than architecture and science are managing issues of transdisciplinarity...