Zones, Exchanges, Boundaries, Communities
Zones, Exchanges, Boundaries, Communities
Thin and Thick Interdisciplinarity
This chapter spells out the implications of prevailing metaphors for interdisciplinary process: the trading zone or contact zone, which generates pidgin languages; the gift exchange; the encounter of different communities of practice around a boundary object (the research topic), mediated by brokers. Inflected by academic hierarchies of prestige, each metaphor plays out differently in practice, offering a continuum of interactional intensity. The choice of a thinner or thicker mode of interdisciplinary encounter has implications for knowledge production, entailing tradeoffs between predictability and discovery, accountability and democratic participation.
Keywords: interdisciplinarity, contact zone, trading zone, communities of practice, boundary objects, brokers, exchange, democratic participation, accountability, interaction
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