How do you define interdisciplinary education?
Not sure this is a definition, but more like a more of a working definition, which is what I would do to produce somebody who I would say had an interdisciplinary education. And that is that I would train a student to have disciplinary depth and some exposure and experience with interdisciplinary work, which does not mean to our point to, to our prior conversation about knowing how the models work… it does not mean knowing how the model works exactly, but rather means having enough exposure to the language and the questions that are of interest in that discipline, to be able to effectively collaborate with people across disciplines. So I don’t, so what I don’t do is train somebody at the intersection of two disciplines to be disciplinary at both and therefore interdisciplinary makes sense. I don’t know if that’s actually a definition…
How do you describe your teaching “field?” (as in research field)
Political science, political science…and as a discipline is defined by a set of essentially questions or topics.
What creates a successful interdisciplinary education experience for Bren PhD program? Or how can we make it more successful?
So I think if I had to describe a phd student or like a graduating phd student who is the exemplar of, of the successful education and interdisciplinary education, I think it would be someone with deep disciplinary knowledge who is already producing disciplinary research, who has ideally had exposure hopefully to the point of collaboration in something interdisciplinary. Although I don’t necessarily think that’s required. Like I could imagine you having had a good interdisciplinary education but not having a paper with me. Right. But rather having a bunch of disciplinary papers. But having had like having been in the meetings, understood how we talk to each other. Gained that like understanding of what level of knowledge you need to have of another discipline in order to productively we collaborate like all that stuff, even if you haven’t gotten to the point of actually collaborating yourself. Cause I think that’s actually a big ask as a phd. There’s just not that much time and it trades off with doing other things. And so I worry about, you know, as a necessary thing. Hmm. And I think what people, what we need to be teaching in order to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration is something about how different disciplines approach, um, question … something about learning to understand what’s, what are publishable, what’s publishable in a discipline. Because if you don’t understand that, it’s really hard to collaborate. I think we also need to teach the importance of investing in language that allows you to communicate across the disciplines, which was quite specific, right? Both the disciplines and like can be quite specific to the problem that your engaged in like, yeah. Social scientists would not be, would not use the words hazard risk and necessarily in the same way. And so at some point we just have to like sit down and get straight. What are we talking about when we say fire hazard and are we talking about the same thing? Right. And if you don’t, it’s like, that can cause big problems. Um, and then, those for sure…maybe something about just collaboration.
It’s challenging to begin with. It’s challenging within a discipline, it’s way more challenging across when you don’t have shared perspective. One of the things that’s been really interesting about writing this book is that I’m writing it with colleagues in my discipline and more than that, we all went to Grad school at about the same time in the same place. So we have the same… we’ve read the same literature, we have the same like working vocabulary to describe the same phenomena. Like we have a…it was really easy to jump into the collaboration because we had all this built up shared stuff beyond even what we would have had if we had just been disciplinary collaborators. Um, and then you get further out, just gets harder.
Do you think that that every time you’re starting a new project you have to start from the ground up, or how much of it seems transferable?
Very little to my, in my experience. The structure like the, yeah, the structure seems to be what is transferable to me. Like the idea that you’ve actually kind of got to sit in a room and kick around ideas for a while until you kind of get enough about each other’s questions to be able to start to connect to the questions to each other…which is sort of time. And then also there might be ways of structuring that better or worse I’m sure. And I’m not sure what they are.
So right now we’re in an argument within the faculty, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, you know, we’re talking about this, right? We’re in a conversation about what kind of PhD Students, Bren should be training, and how. And the consensus is we want to train disciplinary experts who can collaborate across disciplines and now we’re trying to figure out what that means. And one of the arguments we’re having is whether one way to facilitate that is through methods training, or not, essentially. And my contention is that methods have never been the problem for me. It kind of goes back to the conversation we started with, which is how much do you really need to understand about like the nitty gritty, right? Like spending two weeks learning RHESSys just this doesn’t seem productive to me. Like I’m never going to be the expert. I have a sense of what goes in, what comes out, you know, and basically what it is. But that’s all I need. But who you should actually interview too is Kyle Meng, cause he’s been thinking about this. He thinks there’s a way to teach a methods class that basically get at…uses methods to articulate the ways in which different disciplines think about the same kinds of problems.
Every once in a while I’m like, it kind of appeals to me. But I think back to collaborations I’ve had, and Naomi and I, when we first talked about collaborating, I was working on a bunch of budget stuff, federal agency budgets. Um, we had this whole conversation about how my data and her data have a similar structure because budget data is like a, you can think of it as a, because you can think about it as a stream…well, in this case, I’m thinking about it as a stream going up hill from like big buckets that gets split into littler and littler and littler buckets, right?
There’s rounding there! And so we started talking about like how actually her data look like my data, but we couldn’t go anywhere with that. So we had a method in common in a way. Right. Or something that was methodological. But there’s no, there’s no question, there’s no sense in which those two things could be brought together. I mean, I guess if we’d wanted to write a methods paper, right, probably we could’ve come up with something cool and new, for at least one of our disciplines, like I could have imported something from her. She could have…you know what I mean? But neither of us were really interested in it…we’re interested in substantive questions. So anyways, so that bad example always leads me back to like, I don’t know, but you should talk to Kyle. Well, he hasn’t convinced me, but he’s very interested in talking about it.
I’m fascinated by the fact that you said that you all were wallowing in the abstract because I think if you talked to the crossroads…Grizly crossroads Grad students, they would say the same thing. That there was this period where we just wallowed in the abstract. Um, and I, I’m curious as to whether it’s a necessary step or whether it is a distraction from what…I mean cause there’s part of me that thinks that some of what’s going on is like we are coming to understand at an abstract level what the kinds of questions and you know, and the ways that our disciplines think differently about problems and issues and you know, and part of me thinks no, I totally get why the Grad students got frustrated because we’re often like definition land, you know, trying to like precisely understand what we mean in a very abstract world. Right?
And I see that a little in SERI, where we get really concrete sometimes to the point of like logistics or, I mean I think back to that meeting where we were like, okay, really what you need out of this month. You know like at what scale? At what time steps at what you know. And we get like super concrete in a…and that was interdisciplinary because it was like meant to link to things and then other times we, we go very abstract, right? We go like what other questions can we answer? What’s interesting about you know bleh…
[I reference a debate from a previous SERI meeting]
So this is where, I think this tension in interdisciplinary collaborations between your individual disciplinary self interest and like a vision of a bigger interdisciplinary project that is beyond the paper. That might be the crux of that project. It really bites. Right. And [persons] bent is always toward the self interested disciplinary, what do I get out of it? I am participating in this collaboration because I see this one paper that is not disciplinary interdisciplinary, but better than I could do by myself. I think Naomi and I both err on the side of like, yeah, this is like a bigger thing we’re creating and there’s parts of it that are like completely self interested and parts of it that just aren’t, and that’s just the way it is because hanging yourself interested in bits on something bigger is valuable and that is a tension for sure.
