Wednesday, June 18, 2008

You are the light by which I travel

In tracing my own academic roots, I remember my encounter with Feminist Studies (as it then back in 2001 happened to be termed at The Centre for Women’s Studies) as a sort of epiphany. Not merely due to the fact that I for the first time felt the connections to my own life and could identify with the theories/lives that had been translated into text, but also because the itching, aching lump persistently residing in my body and under my skin during the disciplined/ing literature studies suddenly dissolved when I realised the possibilities for a different way of producing knowledge. Gone was the confinement to single theories, solitary methods and obsessions with singular male geniuses! For some years I lived, breathed, ate and dreamt feminism (professionally and in private life), nevertheless, due to various reasons I decided to retreat into the realms of a mother discipline. Although I at occasions found joy and challenge in conventional linguistics, my heart never skipped any beats for it. Like so many others, I genuinely thought that the crosscutting themes I was interested in could not be transformed into an academic career for real – this was echoed by my father’s voice inside my head that I also should be vary of becoming a “fackidiot” [pejorative term for a specialist in a narrow field]. So, the good girl writes her bachelor’s and her master’s, and thinks narrowly about her disciplinary future until an announcement for interdisciplinary PhD-positions in Gender Studies at another university suddenly catches her eyes.

Fast forward half a year (because I was appointed for one of the positions), the task for the course on interdisciplinarity is to reflect upon possibilities and restrictions when it comes to interdisciplinarity. Although in one sense I never consciously contemplated on interdisciplinarity before – I sort of took it for granted – I do recognize having a continuous, perhaps unaware, conversation with myself on the matter. Disciplinarity, for me, was proper science while interdisciplinarity (and hence effectively Gender Studies) was not. Me a doctor in Gender Studies? Haha! How on earth can I ever explain that for my parents (they barely understood what linguistics was)? And all the feminist critique of the positivist paradigm (with all its implications also on the structure of the universities) I had engaged in, contradicted my thinking on the necessity of disciplinary affilitation (cf Lykke 2004). Was disciplinary discipline not in fact a demand for surviving academically – and socially?

I do not think I fully understood what I got myself into when I accepted the appointment I now have. Nonetheless, to remain in a state of becoming gives certain comfort, and allow for openness: to explore, bridge, develop and invent. Intellectual mobility and “messiness” paradoxically brings forth security and stability. The remains of my disciplinary thinking (if I ever had one) rest now in peace. Instead I greet the freedom and inspiration of intellectual flexibility and of being able to think from different perspectives and angles (cf Pryse 2000). My current thought companion bears the name disciplinary reflectiveness (Pryse 2000) and challenges me to deploy several lenses in order to understand and responsibly engage, as well as identify commonalities and differences. I wish to grasp the potentials for building alliances and affinities, but also to remain respectful of possible restrictions and limitations. It is an extensive task, and I hope my companion will never leave my side. She has to continue to force me to be and remain updated, to dig deeper although my time does not allow it, to be always prepared (thank goddess I was a girl guide for twelve years!) and torture me to be specific, clear, stringent and up to the point.

My companion arrives in a time where the commodification of higher education and marketization of knowledge in Sweden has travelled far down the neo-liberal road. The changing nature of both the universities as institutions and the individuals attending them does not automatically entail that the interdisciplinary trend lands in the critical soil it perhaps is intended for. Interdisciplinarity per se is not critical, nor produce criticalness or different thinking, but can with the methodological help of my companion be defended as a strive-worthy mode of producing different kinds of knowledge (cf Gibbons et al 1994).

If, for some reason, my companion decides to retire, becomes fatally injured or, goddess forbid dies!, before I safely disembark in my first haven, interdisciplinarity meets a shaky fate. Everything’s presumed mixability (theories, ontologies, epistemologies, methodologies) is a slippery slope if not used ethically and responsibly. “Messiness”, creativity and eclecticism are, after all, dependent on rigour, order and stringency.

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