Why I don’t do the ‘I’ word [rant]

The advantage of writing entries days in advance is that when you go over the top there’s time to re-think before the post goes live. It’s handy because ‘interdisciplinary’ is a word that can make me rant. I didn’t know exactly why for a while until I read Steve Grand’s Growing Up with Lucy

. It’s because ‘interdisciplinary’ is usually a synonym for rubbish. It should be an approach, but it’s a buzzword and it leads to bizarre things like this below.

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research. Photo by Pascalichouchou

A centre for interdisciplinary research. Like Peter Cook, is it really going to specialise in the universe and all that it contains?

Steve Grand has argued for using the term non-disciplinary for interesting stuff. For him, and me, it’s the problem that’s interesting and then you grab whatever academic tools there are to solve it. Interdisciplinary work on the other hand starts out by thinking the various disciplines are meaningful blocks and that you can grab bits from both to examine some academic netherworld between the two where the rules from neither matter because it’s all so interdisciplinary. I got this during a meeting where someone was espousing the values of training students to be interdisciplinary. They announced that a joint English – History project couldn’t get History funding because the relevant body said the work wasn’t worth the money, but was able to get it from the English body. To my mind that’s dishonest. If it was bad history before then it’s still bad history now. As far as I’m concerned if the work is going to be meaningful then it has to adhere to all demands from both disciplines, not pick and choose the rules. Archaeoastronomy is can provide excellent examples of interdisciplinarity gone wrong.

I do like the Tiverton Astronomy Society’s page on Stonehenge astronomy. It does a brilliant job of explaining the astronomer’s approach to Stonehenge. But these ideas have no lasting significance. They’ll be discarded in favour of some new fad because, while they’re astronomically sound, there’s no archaeological basis. Without this the accuracy and effort in the astronomical work is a waste of time.

Archaeologists aren’t just the victims of interdisciplinary work. They can dish it out too. I was told recently by an eminent archaeology professor that in mathematics chaos and surprise describe the same thing, which came as a complete chaos to me. This will probably be published and it’s hard to know how to react because there’s no polite way of saying “Your work is utterly without foundation and is in every meaningful way incorrect”. However it doesn’t seem to be perceived as a problem because at the moment interdisciplinarity allows you to pick and choose what rules apply to you. I want my work to have some meaning when fashion has moved on. So as far as I’m concerned I can’t accept that mindset. To produce work of lasting significance I have to be right, or at least plausible, in every discipline I work in. Until the academic mainstream adopts those standards then I’ll do integrated and hopefully intelligent, but I won’t do interdisciplinary.

It’s going to be a long while before that happens though. The AHRC is pushing on with plans to train all PhDs to be interdisciplinary. It takes seven years to be a PhD archaeologist. So long as you can pick up a working knowledge of Genetics or whatever in a couple of afternoons then the AHRC will successfully train interdisciplinary Genetic (or whatever) Archaeologists. If it takes more than a couple of afternoons to pick up a second subject…

I’m slipping back into a rant aren’t I?