Using a spatial metaphor, boundary work is research or teaching that take place at the outer limits of the territory that is defined and colonized by an academic discipline. Boundary work recognizes the cultural, epistemological, and methodological territory of the discipline and the different territories occupied by other disciplines. Boundary work often suggests, or actively involves, interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary research and different teaching cultures. It also frequently requires venturing into the non-man’s land that lies between disciplines and which is claimed by none.
Published in Chapter:
Bricolage: Excursions Into Transdisciplinary Territory
David Starr-Glass (University of New York in Prague, Czech Republic & SUNY Empire State College – Prague, Czech Republic)
Copyright: © 2019
|Pages: 15
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-9531-1.ch016
Abstract
Disciplinary work is conducted within a socially constructed framework of assumptions, processes, methodologies, and discovery that are particular to, and embedded in, a specific discipline. Disciplinary paradigms define the discipline and provide it with a cohesive integrity, but they also operate as barriers for those outside the disciplinary community. For collaborative explorations and research—whether in the form of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, or transdisciplinary work—it is necessary for those involved to first recognize and appreciate these paradigmatic boundaries before negotiating them. The approach of the bricoleur is different. Bricoleurs make do with fragments of previous knowledge, analogous encounters, and different disciplinary experience and use them to gain new insights into the problem at hand—insights that may be partial but which are also both pragmatic and functional. This chapter considers the nature of bricolage and the approach of bricoleurs in conducting explorations of transdisciplinary territory.