Nina Lykke and Angela Last
AL: In your monograph, Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing (Lykke 2010), you talk about the institutionalization of feminist studies and how the debate about how to engage with the disciplinary nature of the university system was key to feminist politics in Academia. I get the sense, also from examples from critical race studies, that disciplines were perceived as domains and divisions where white men traditionally held power and continued to do so. You discuss how feminist research initially mainly took place in interdisciplinary centres, partly, because of the struggle with the tension between the desires to integrate gender into the existing disciplinary system and to let gender remain an outside ‘irritant’ to the system. Can you talk more about this tension that influenced your experience of interdisciplinarity?
NL: I was part of a socialist feminist group that started the first Women’s Studies Centre in Denmark in 1981. The format and organization of the centre was set up with US women’s studies centres as the model. This meant, first of all, that we saw interdisciplinarity as an appropriate way to study gender perceived as an area of study that was embodying severe societal problems. Using the gender lens to focus these problems meant addressing them from below, from an activist point of view, and not from above.
We also saw gender as an issue that could not be addressed properly unless it was done in an interdisciplinary manner. For instance, if you take the problem of gender-based violence, you could look at it as a psychological issue and locate it in psychology, but what activist practices showed was that gender-based violence is not just about people’s subjectivities; it is an issue that has links to wider social structures which need to be addressed as well. You could make the same argument around race, class or dis/ability issues. From activism, we learnt that societal problems are reduced if they are solely treated within the horizon of one discipline – they cannot really be contained and treated to the benefit of those who are hit by them from the perspective of a single discipline. If you had a traditional disciplinary outlook, you might think that you could solve these problems. With gender-based violence, for instance, you could say: I can come up with ideas about how to intervene here from a psychological point of view. But, activist practices, to which all these studies – gender studies, black studies, queer studies, etc. – had and have such strong links, generated the knowledge that these issues need to be analysed and addressed in a much broader way to benefit the people centrally concerned.
The activist connection was also a strong background for creating interdisciplinary gender studies units. In Denmark, they were created in the 1980s. The background for establishing gender studies units has, of course, been different in different contexts, but interdisciplinarity, generated through activist practices, was in many ways a shared feature. My activist practice came out of the socialist feminist women’s and students’ movements of the 1970s, and in both movements, interdisciplinarity was something that was promoted very strongly – precisely, in order to address societal problems which could not be contained by single disciplines. The ‘view from below’ was also very important: if you look at these problems from an activist point of view, from the point of view of the people who are experiencing the oppression or the problems, then it becomes clear that they cannot be properly understood against the background of existing knowledge divisions. These divisions prevent important interconnections from being grasped.
AL: At the moment, there are a few universities that do not just want to implement interdisciplinary studies or projects, but that are actually attempting to restructure the entire institution in an experimental way. How was the situation at Linköping University – how did the restructuring take place?
NL: Tendencies towards restructuring in a more interdisciplinary direction have been outspoken at Linköping University, and this is the reason that I applied for a professorship in gender studies there in 1999. But, of course, mainstream structures and disciplinary identities have also been very strong. Interdisciplinarity did not just come about without political struggle. At Linköping University, the Department of Thematic Studies (TEMA), which now includes a unit of gender studies and three other interdisciplinary units (for environmental studies, science and technology studies, and child studies), was originally inspired by the 1970s’ students’ movement. A particular inspiration was a university in Denmark, located a bit outside of Copenhagen (Roskilde University), which back then was a new university. There, the students’ movement was particularly strong, and had a strong impact on the organizing and running of the university.
InterdisciplinrThe interdisciplinary PhD degreeaity was considered very important there, and interdisciplinary Bachelor degrees in humanities and social sciences became the foundation of the university. The whole Bachelor level of study at this university was built on interdisciplinary grounds back in the 1970s. This happened just before the introduction of thematic studies (TEMA) at Linköping University. A group of radical teachers from Linköping University basically went to Roskilde University in Denmark to see how the interdisciplinary degrees were set up there. It was pretty impressive back then to have organized all of the humanities and social sciences on an interdisciplinary basis: no learning processes split up into disciplines until the Master’s level. However, after the Linköping group had visited Roskilde University, they, nevertheless, decided to take a different route to interdisciplinary organizing than the one chosen in Roskilde. Instead of making the Bachelor degree interdisciplinary, the Linköping group decided to set up an interdisciplinary PhD programme. So, in Linköping, they started the other way around so to speak.
The interdisciplinary PhD degree, set up in Linköping, became very famous and successful. The PhD programme has always gotten very good evaluations and the hundreds of PhDs, who have graduated from the programme over the years, have got good jobs inside and outside of Academia. TEMA became part of the branding of Linköping University as an interdisciplinarity-friendly university. It’s not that all of the university is organized in an interdisciplinary way – TEMA is just one, albeit big and influential department – but the success of the TEMA department in terms of research, PhD degrees, research funding, new Master’s programmes, etc., have made a strong impact on the university.
AL: So the success of Thematic Studies influenced the other parts of the university?
NL: Yes, it definitely did. Because in these neoliberal times, what speaks is very much money, research funding, and successful candidates, and the TEMA department has been very successful throughout the years of its existence. This led to the university becoming more interdisciplinarity-friendly overall. You do not have to fight so much for interdisciplinarity here. If you have an idea for an interdisciplinary project, it is approved and encouraged.
AL: Earlier on, you mentioned political struggle around interdisciplinarity. Can you expand a bit on that?
NL: Yes. I don’t know if you are familiar with the reflections on knowledge production in terms of mode 1 and mode 2, that is, the conceptual framework put forward by Michael Gibbons, Helga Nowotny and others (Gibbons et al. 1994; Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons 2001). As you may know, mode 1 is the disciplinary model, organized against a background of knowledge-seeking for the sake of gaining new knowledge, that is, basic research. The mode 2 model of knowledge production is more issue-focused, inter- and transdisciplinary and also focused on applicability. When you have a university structured according to a mode 1 model, there are likely to be clashes when a mode 2 model is introduced. The mode 2 model is very much in tune with neoliberalism. But it is also worthwhile noticing that there are certain resonances between the politically radical interdisciplinarity that I’m arguing for and that goes with social movements and activism, and what, by the authors mentioned above, is defined as the mode 2 university, even though this latter university model is also very much part of neoliberalism. We may talk about strange bedfellows here.
There are certain features of neoliberally organized universities that actually provide a better context for interdisciplinary work, not only in a technocratic sense, but also when it comes to the deeply critical, activist inspired, radical interdisciplinarity that I am talking about in relation to gender studies, queer studies, black studies, etc. What I argue, in the context of my long academic feminist career, is that it is possible to do activist feminist, queer, anti-racist hit-and-run-interventions in the neoliberal university. By this I mean doing interdisciplinarity in different kinds of ways which hopefully can make a difference.
AL: This reminds me of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s comparison of Utopia U and Utility U (2015) – the different ways that the university is imagined, either as a mind expansion for the greater good or as a means to simply get a better job and help improve the economy. Your phrasing of ‘hit and run’ also makes me think of the debate around the spectrum of positions towards the academy that one can occupy, especially as a politically engaged and/or marginalized scholar. Possible positions include rejection, decolonization and integration. In particular, I think about Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s conclusion in their book The Undercommons (2013) namely that the only possible relationship with the university nowadays is a criminal one. They talk about being in, but not of the academy and its system.
NL: That sounds like the things that I’ve been talking about. I also think a problem lies with what you talked about before we started the interview, about people paying lip service to interdisciplinarity in addressing their research problem. This is the dark side of the coin – that neoliberalism reduces interdisciplinarity to essentially a technocratic device.
AL: Yes, you cannot really think education and topics outside of the context that they are embedded in. You also speak about interdisciplinarity being an ‘empty signifier’. Do you feel it can still have a radical potential, given what has been happening?
NL: Yes, I think that if you frame problems in a political, activist, social movement fashion, and if you want to address these problems properly, you cannot do it from the point of view of one discipline, and you also cannot solve a problem if interdisciplinarity is treated merely like a technocratic device. I think lots of exciting things are happening in areas such as, for instance, gender/medicine/health, gender/climate change, anti-racism, trans-feminism, decolonial studies, critical disability studies, etc., that are highlighting currently vibrant political dimensions and alliances between academic research and activism. Again, the argument here is that you cannot just do research in these areas from the view of a single discipline – you have to involve other disciplines and their points of view. I often think of Bruno Latour’s famous question (Latour 1993): What is the hole in the ozone layer about? Chemistry, meteorology, politics, economics? And the answer is, of course: all of them! They are entangled. If you then look at how climate change research is often specialized, and if you compare that with what happened around Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, you really see how this ‘weather phenomenon’ is intertwined with race issues, class issues, gender issues, disability issues, etc. Nancy Tuana (2008) wrote a brilliant, critical analysis of this. You cannot do a proper analysis of these problems without interdisciplinarity, and I also believe that interdisciplinarity can work as a political tool in such contexts.
AL: Could you tell me more about how this relates to what you call ‘visibility raising’? It seems to relate to your political approach.
NL: Well, visibility raising is about recognizing the problem. For me, there is a strong connection with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s classic article, ‘Mapping the Margins’ (1995) that takes intersectionality as a point of departure. In this article, Crenshaw talks about ‘stories that resist telling’. The stories that she referred to here were stories about violence against women of colour. In the article, Crenshaw highlights how, on the one hand, white feminist movements against gender-based violence are not taking the specific issues of women of colour into account, and how, on the other hand, anti-racist movements are not very keen on going into the issue of gender-based violence, arguing that this might take a bad racist turn. This way, the stories of gender-based violence that affect women of colour ‘resist telling’. I think this is a very good example of the ways in which certain problems need to be made visible, before they can actually be addressed, theoretically as well as politically.
But of course, you need to do more than just make things visible. And I think this also links back to what we talked about earlier concerning the relationship between epistemology and the structure of the university. If you are embedded in a traditional disciplinary structure, and you become confronted with a problem like this, you may be forced into a mere ‘add and stir’ approach. But ‘add women and stir’, ‘add race and stir’ do not really do the job. You need to reorganize the university so that you can address problems without being hindered by traditional, disciplinary divisions of knowledge production.
I have been discussing these divisions also with my colleagues from the Medical Faculty at Linköping University with whom I collaborate, and we agree that there are such strong borders between, for example, the approaches used in medicine and those used in humanities/social science. To transgress the borders is really hard work. We do, indeed, have hybrid research areas such as medical humanities now, but, as I see it, we are still only scratching the surface in terms of actually understanding how comprehensively universities have to be restructured in terms of being able to respond adequately to the challenges posed by a complex world which cannot be understood properly from the compartementalized views characterizing today’s disciplinary outlooks. For example, if you raise questions such as, ‘How and why is cancer unevenly distributed over the world?’ and ‘How and why are carcinogenic pollution and toxic embodiment unevenly distributed over the world?’, you cannot give meaningful answers from either a medical or social science perspective. And you actually need not just collaboration between medicine and social science, but to rethink epistemologies, ontologies and the overall structures for knowledge production to address such issues adequately.
AL: Speaking of epistemology, you are very invested in the theoretical and methodological openness and challenges created through interdisciplinarity. First of all, I find the reference points in your work very interesting, which include authors such as Sandra Harding (The Science Question in Feminism, 1986), Judith Butler (Against Proper Objects, 1997), Hélène Cixous (Coming to Writing, 1991) or Julia Kristeva (Revolution in Poetic Language, 1984). Could you talk more about the relationship between theory and method in your work? I am interested in this, because I feel that theory is always valued more than method, with method frequently getting too little attention in terms of how it matters and affects relationships with participants or the rest of your research. For me, the material asks you to use a certain method, but researchers often do not make the connection and do not seem to listen to the theories they employ.
NL: I originally came from a background in literary studies, where methods were not much talked about. But when I came to this very interdisciplinary TEMA department at Linköping University, I was suddenly confronted with the question of methods, especially by my colleagues with backgrounds in the social sciences. Retrospectively, I also found out that there are a lot of methods in my own original discipline, literary studies, but, as in philosophy, ‘methods’ is very much a ‘bad word’ there. So, on the one hand, there are disciplines such as literary studies and philosophy that really hate the term ‘methods’, and on the other, there are disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, etc., that really fetishize ‘method’. In an interdisciplinary setting this can become a real clash. So, because I have committed myself to an interdisciplinary space, I have been confronted, on the one hand, with reductive aspects of a focus on methods – how they can be handled rigorously and in a policing mood from disciplinary points of departure, ending up in tunnel vision. But, on the other hand, I have also learned to respect the way in which you really need to think in-depth about the analytical strategies and thinking technologies you mobilize when you grapple with your material.
In particular, you have to think these analytical strategies and thinking technologies through extremely carefully if you want to pose and address research questions in alternative, interdisciplinary ways. It is not enough to think about theory and epistemology, you have to think about how you actually interview people, interpret textual materials, listen to music, look at what’s going on in a laboratory . . . You really need to pay attention to this – to the doing of research. In this sense thinking about methodology and the methods you apply is very important. Some of the many students whom I encountered through teaching and supervising were very interested in theory and particular theorists, but got into problems when it came to the choice of analytical strategies. And, although I do think that it’s central not to make an artificial cut between empirical work and theory, I also argue that it is very important to think carefully through which analytical strategies to choose and how these strategies resonate with your chosen theory. Sometimes I meet students in whose work theories and analytical strategies get to contradict each other, and this is of course to be avoided. Such contradictions do, for example, occur when methods are being employed in a traditional way that clashes with the untraditional theories which the student is relying on. Let me give an example: it would be contradictory to build theoretically on Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1991) and then construct an empirical analysis, where, instead of dialoguing at eye level with your research participants, you start talking about them as if you were situated ‘above’ them. Researchers (and not only students) are, indeed, doing these contradictory sorts of moves all the time – no one is immune to them. But if you then think about and discuss these problems, you notice how things do not fit together and this insight could be used as a first step toward exploring ways to do things differently.
Of course, you need to think through all the levels of research, and this is an area where I actually think that writing as a method of enquiry (Richardson 2000) has a lot of potential, because it is a very good tool for breaking up traditional methods and for breaking up traditional cuts and dichotomies between theory and empirics.
AL: I always find that, in terms of methods, there are things that are not discussed enough. For instance, how you present or represent your work. I could do this interview transcript in so many different ways, and each different style of editing will most likely create a different impression. You see this effect in a lot of official reports, where ‘experts’ tend to be edited more heavily to come across as knowledgeable and ‘faultless’, whereas representatives of other publics are not as heavily edited to give a more ‘person on the street’ feel that has an asymmetric relationship with these experts. Also, academics can be rather anxious about disciplinary boundaries despite methodological overlaps. There is also the question of whether the specific disciplinary belonging of a lot of so-called disciplinary methods is an illusion in the first place – surveys, interviews, observation and so on do not just belong to one discipline. Despite these shared methods, boundaries are often being policed in an unhelpful way, e.g. ‘this is not geographical, this is not sociological, etc.’, whereas what people should really be looking at are crucial questions such as: What methods does this project need? How do I cultivate the sensitivities necessary to give justice to my project? Or, as you mentioned earlier, how do I interact with my research participants – how do I situate myself?
NL: I agree very much with you on this – you cannot just stick to a disciplinary tunnel vision and ignore what is needed for a project. Instead of going ‘this is not geographical, this is not sociological’, you should ask: ‘Is this a suitable method? Is this an unsuitable method?’ You have to argue why something is a good method with an open mind – you have to cut through disciplinary boundary concerns. Heavily interdisciplinary organizations are ideally places where no discipline has the final say. If you are in a more traditional place and you do interdisciplinary research there, your colleagues might say: ‘you do very interesting work’ – in the sense of ‘you do your work, and we do ours’ – but it is still the disciplines that set the agenda and lay down which methods and forms of representing your work are allowed. But when you are in an interdisciplinary setting, like the TEMA department at Linköping University, then no discipline has the final say. I really think organizations, in that sense, can deconstruct the claims or right to police boundaries, and I think this is important.
AL: You also talk about experimentation in your work – this is something that I, too, am very interested in. You can, of course, do a lot of experiments by yourself, regardless of what anyone else is doing around you. But often, the structure and ethos of the institution that you are embedded in, has a strong influence on what you are doing and how you are experimenting. I don’t think that there are any particular rules around that – I even think that, often, a more restrictive environment can make you more experimental. We also had some discussions amongst the editorial team of this book on whether there is such a thing as ‘interdisicplinary methods’ or whether ‘interdisciplinary methods’ are really a case-by-case experimentation. I wondered if you had any thoughts on that?
NL: It brings a lot of things to my mind when you frame your question like this. First of all, I agree with the people who say that methods today have become attached to and been claimed by disciplines. For this reason, too, it is important to deconstruct the disciplines. The deconstruction of the disciplines is important to get to more open-ended understandings of methods and to counteract boundary policing ways of using methods. In my book (Lykke 2010), I emphasized a distinction between interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and postdisciplinarity. In this framework, interdisciplinarity is between multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity – interdisciplinarity here represents a step beyond multidisciplinarity, where you stay with the disciplinary outlooks, adding them to each other. Though, when you talk about interdisciplinary methods, it can very easily be reduced to what I would call ‘multidisciplinary methods’. You end up taking this method from that discipline, and that method from this discipline, and then first carry out this analysis and after that this analysis, and you then end up with a more complex result than if you had performed this from within one discipline. BUT, still, you remain within the framework of disciplines – you have not made the epistemological deconstruction that I talked about earlier. So, therefore, I would prefer to talk about ‘method’ in a ‘postdisciplinary’ or ‘transdisciplinary’ sense, where you do not refer back to disciplines.
At the same time, I think that it is important to keep up a respect for multidisciplinarity. There are people working on multidisciplinary grounds who are doing good work. However, I would very much like to see a book like the one that you are working on, that does not reduce interdisciplinary methods to mere multidisciplinarity in the above sense. I think that really important things are happening in the area of what I call ‘trans-and postdisciplinary methods’ – i.e. methods, of course experimental, mobilized in spaces and vis-à-vis research questions which are not defined within disciplinary frameworks. In such contexts, you cannot just take ‘a method of inquiry’, be it for example discourse analysis or surveys, and then ‘apply’ it. You have in such spaces to effectively rethink the whole discourse about methods as well as the connections between epistemology and methodology, ethics and representation. To in-depth question and scrutinize these connections, and to make sure that there is alignment all the time, is a totally different way of looking at methods compared to what you do in the case of multidisciplinarity, and this is, in my view, very important.
AL: Yes. I am also very sceptical of the ‘magic bullet’ approach to interdisciplinary methods. What the Inventive Methods book (Lury and Wakeford 2012) and this book are trying to do, for instance, is to make suggestions for different possibilities of how one could think about interdisciplinary methods in terms of shared devices or processes. These are provocations – that might be rejected, taken up, considered, re-appropriated . . . they want to be in dialogue with other provocations. I think thinking about methods is always developing – I can certainly notice it in my research and teaching – and it is always interesting what happens next. At the moment, the ‘decolonizing methods’ provocation from people such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012), for instance, is gaining an interesting momentum and is hopefully gaining traction in wider Academia. It was something we also discussed in relation to the book, including the possibilities and difficulties in interpreting and applying this aim in relation to individual entries and the demands of internationalization.
NL: I think this ‘search for the magic bullet’ is also one of the problems. People think that they can find it, and that is like looking for a cure for cancer. You cannot find it in one place or by using a universalizing approach.
AL: I guess you could say that the opposite also holds true – being too particular. The two also sometimes combine in a very problematic way. I have to admit that I have become very frustrated with a lot of publications about interdisciplinarity. Perhaps I am judging to quickly or harshly – I feel like I should be more sympathetic to a spectrum of positions – but some publications, in my view, go too excessively into the details of particular interdisciplinary projects – the types of coffee cups on the table at meetings, people’s body language, etc. I know that these very science and technology studies (STS) style observations serve a purpose – which has even been framed as a decolonial project – but, for me, that purpose or bigger picture often gets lost. You end up with a degree and type of reflexivity that does not put the overall framework into question. I know that you also partially come from this direction. I was curious about your thoughts on that.
NL: I have never considered myself as a ‘proper’ STS scholar. I think I am too little a sociologist, and too much a literary scholar here. But I have been collaborating a lot with STS scholars and, therefore, I know the field pretty well. My position on STS is that, on the one hand, the field is carrying a strong deconstructive project – decolonial is perhaps too radical a way of characterizing STS endeavours, though. All this looking at coffee drinking, choreographies and how people take things from one end of the lab to the other, is actually, as I see it, part of a very experimental form of deconstruction. As it has been pointed out by a lot of feminist critics, in not all of STS but in some more mainstream STS, analysts forgot about power when developing their methodological approaches, and ignoring intersectionality as well. An example is the kind of critical discussions that Donna Haraway has had with Bruno Latour and other STS scholars, where she is bringing out very forcefully issues of power and power differentials in terms of gender, race, class, sexuality, pointing out that these important intersections were not well dealt with in mainstream STS. And, of course, this is a major flaw in STS. I think that Donna Haraway and other feminist STS scholars, such as for example Amade m’Charek, Celia Roberts and Maureen McNeil, have let themselves be inspired by STS, but they have also integrated intersectionality and power relations.
One could say that, from the outside, analyses of power relations were not integrated well enough in STS. However, if STS methods are constructed in a more experimental way all the way through, like many feminist STS scholars have done, then these methods might become something different. In When Species Meet (2008), for example, Haraway takes inspiration from the ways in which STS calls for an attentiveness to all kinds of nitty-gritty details – how it matters if the dog runs like this or comes back like that, the use of the leash or other technologies – but she takes the analysis further into intersectional power relations. I did an interview with her once (Haraway 2004), and here she framed her relationship to mainstream STS like this: although she is very well known and in no way marginalized, she said that she felt that people in mainstream STS had difficulties ‘digesting’ her ideas and approaches. This says something about the ways in which mainstream STS threatens to congeal into a method, rather than stay open to issues of method, and to provocations from feminism and other kinds of activist approaches. In fact, people sometimes become quite anxious in terms of ‘this is STS’ or ‘this is not STS’, and we are then back in the old way of handling method as a fixed thing.
AL: This reminds me of something that I recently read in the Chimurenga Chronicle (Hardy 2013). It was an article about the black classical composer Julius Eastman and his relationship with the emerging new establishment at the time – self-proclaimed rebels such as John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff. Some promoter wanted to ‘diversify’ the representation of classical music in a rather superficial way by ‘adding black and stir’, as you might put it. He invited Eastman, who was a composer in his own right, to perform the work of Cage and other ‘rebel’ composers. Of course, he was angry at first, but then decided to turn this insult into a challenge. What he did was that he performed the Cage piece he was hired to do in such a way that he called out the composer on his lack of attention to power relations. Of course, he got blacklisted as a performer after that, but the challenge to the illusion of anti-establishment gestures could not be erased – he had really managed to nail the problem. Also, it is methodologically interesting in another way: even if some people only get it decades later, this performance will echo on. I thought this was fascinating, because, even as a musician, I often do not think about music being connected to these kinds of methodological possibilities, especially politically informed ones, but of course it makes sense.
NL: I think this is totally interesting. I think breaking the boundaries between ‘the academic’ and ‘the creative’, and letting methods and approaches spill over from one to the other, is very important. That goes for all sorts of creativity – visual art, music . .. my own medium is poetry and creative writing. For instance, I think that the non-verbality of music can be a strong area of expressing what you cannot deal with in other ways. Music is one of the areas that is sadly less integrated in the social sciences – you are much more likely to encounter poetry, although it is often considered ‘radical’ or at least ‘non-scholarly’.
AL: In Geography, we have been integrating these practices more and more, but I often feel that, in many cases, it is done in quite a polite way, compared to the challenges that are coming from the music and activism crossover scene, which is challenging people through performance, but also through teaching others how to perform across established boundaries – training female DJs and producers, for instance. But sometimes, I feel, it is precisely the lack of institutional support that makes you more inclined to do something more performative, more controversial, because you need to express this lack. But there are other institutional conditions that affect performance and registers of creativity in academia. Also, you sometimes end up importing stuff that you have done outside of academia into your academic work – often it is something that you would never have been able to get funding for, because it does not meet particular definitions of academic performance of creativity. Actually, one of the things that I wanted to ask you earlier, was about funding and the problems you encounter with funding interdisciplinary work.
NL: Funding can be a really tricky issue. I think it is a place where the old disciplinary structures are pretty heavy, and there is a lot of lip service paid to interdisciplinarity in the discourses of funding agencies. But when it actually comes to distributing the money, disciplines take the front seat again. I have discussed this with a lot of colleagues, not only in gender studies, but also for instance colleagues at TEMA’s other units (child studies, environmental studies, science and technology studies). And we share a lot of common ground in terms of wishing to pressure the research councils and funding agencies more broadly to recognize interdisciplinarity. From the most humble multidisciplinary approach to the most radical postdisciplinary one, there is a need to go beyond the rather empty buzzword ‘interdisciplinarity’. But as pointed out with annoyance by one of my colleagues, at a recent TEMA department meeting with a reference to an interview in the Times Higher Education Supplement with Professor Ian Goldin, Oxford Martin School (Goldin 2016) so very much in today’s academic world – from journal rankings to funding to appointments – is still governed by disciplines. A good thing about being in an interdisciplinary department is that you are not alone in the frustrations as regards the ways in which the strong disciplinary powers govern today’s academia.
It is interesting to see how external funding schemes, for example, can continue to develop along disciplinary lines despite strong tendencies for universities to transition from mode 1 to mode 2, which, according to Gibbons et al. (1994) and Nowotny et al. (2001), is supposed to lead to inter- and transdisciplinarity. The old mode 1 universities, which effectively were institutions with small student populations mainly composed of elite white European men, and which had very exclusionary practices in relation to all Others, have, on the one hand, been eroded. But, nevertheless, on the other hand, some modes of funding, appointing, etc., are strictly keeping up some of the old structures, such as certain forms of disciplinarity. It is thus the case that you can get funding for a project that appears interdisciplinary, but is actually a very technocratic multidisciplinary project that does not go into the real complexities of the problem, because this possibility is blocked by old-fashioned outlooks. My experience is that a lot of funding is channelled to such projects.
AL: Yes, a lot of the time, you end up writing a really straight project, with the intention to do the interesting stuff covertly. There is then, of course, the question whether this perpetuates the system or whether the alternative results can effect a change in funding criteria in the long run. I guess this is an experiment in itself!
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