A confession: I love small talk. Now, before you judge me too much, I don’t mean “nice weather we’re having—did you see the Sox game?” or other sit-com-worthy bad-first-date material. I mean that I love it when I start talking to a person for the first time and I’m able to share what I’m passionate about and what shapes my worldview, and start to get a sense of what’s similar and what’s different about them. The accompanying image in my head is one of a cocktail party, where I’m able to introduce and be introduced to acquaintances old and new, and, by talking about things that matter to us, start to form a connection.
These kinds of connections both define and challenge the views I take on my surroundings (both my literal surroundings and the socio-economic-political-industrial-what-have-you world around me). Sometimes, considering someone else’s perspective lets me see a problem in a new light, and lends itself to all kinds of new approaches. Sometimes, it makes me realize the approaches I had been taking are fundamentally flawed. But finding the intersections between perspectives is what makes this approach fundamentally realistic. Putting the views of the whole cocktail party together means that whatever intersectional approach I come up with is more likely to matter to a wider range of people, and that makes it eminently more usable than something that only makes sense to me.
That’s the thing about interdisciplinarity—it relies on disciplinarity (I’m pretty sure I’m not making up words). You can’t just “be interdisciplinary” and consider approaches that don’t belong to any one discipline without first knowing something about the disciplines you are working with. In fact, the more I delve into individual disciplines (such as Economics, my second major), the more I realize their flaws, and their need for the balance of other perspectives to find their intersections and generate useful approaches. Interdisciplinarity isn’t just about transcending disciplines, it’s about empowering them. By taking the structures of established disciplines and finding their intersections with external perspectives, we make them more applicable to the real world.
This is why I find my (interdisciplinary) studies popping up so regularly in my day-to-day life. Maybe it’s that intersections beget more intersections, but the more perspectives I incorporate into my disciplinary thinkings, the more I find ways to incorporate them into almost everything I do or think about. This, in my mind, is one of the major strengths of the living-learning community. Interdisciplinarity doesn’t exist in a closed off thought bubble, as many people (us included!) tend to criticize some areas of academia. Through finding intersections, I find that I’m able to engage my studies throughout my life as an individual. By creating a community based around that, we are able to do things (like this blog!) that encourage and support each other to do just that—really delve into our day-to-day livelihoods and find all the myriad intersections with what we’re passionate about. It sheds new light on the phrase “work-life separation”—a difficult concept for me, as much of my life is engaging and applying my work.