Interdisciplinary Research Manual - Units.muohio.edu

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United States, but the plain fact of the matter may be that the country you are studying
and the other countries in the region are all doing a terrible job of dealing with this issue.
The public institutions of the region are underdeveloped, in part because of the policies of
the former power, in part because the indigenous culture is not state-based, and in part
because of a host of problems such as disease, drought, corruption, war, and even
genocide. So ethically, how should you proceed and how should you conceive of your
activity? It helps to find a viable, functioning organization that is at least partly grounded
in the local culture, an NGO perhaps, or an international agency with significant
indigenous leadership. A post-modern approach that involves full disclosure and a
personal disclaimer also helps. Most important is to state explicitly at the outset that you
are trying to figure out the implications for this third world setting of a theory developed
in a first world context, that you are aware of the danger of a resident of a first-world
country trying to do this, and that your focus is on how to adapt the theory to fit the
different cultural context.
Structuring Your Project
In an interdisciplinary project, you cannot start from a single, coherent, agreedupon
set of assumptions and proceed in a logical, linear fashion from premises to
conclusion as you would in most disciplinary projects, because the starting points are
themselves contested. There are different sets of assumptions and values held by each of
the disciplines on which you draw. You bootleg in evaluative judgments (via primacy
effect and recency effect) about the relative importance of the disciplines through the
order in which you present them. If you are (as you should be) trying to make genuine
use of the valid insights of each of the disciplines, not rejecting any of them, but trying to
see what’s of value in each and then pulling those insights together to create some sort of
larger understanding that’s responsive to each of them, then you do not want to be
playing favorites.
In a sense, you need to talk about each discipline’s contribution in the context of
all the others. Because interdisciplinary study is about the relationships between parts and
whole (text and context) as well as the interrelation of parts, readers aren’t ready to
appreciate the whole (or the context) until the parts (or the texts) are understood, but
neither are they ready to appreciate the parts apart from the whole. So how do you break
into the loop? You can’t present parts and whole (or texts and context) simultaneously, so
you’re forced out of the linear presentation format that works so well in a disciplinary (or
single-perspective) context. One starts to think instead about multiple passes through the
material at increasing levels of sophistication (starting with a very general,
impressionistic discussion of the contribution of each discipline, then in more depth each
time), spiraling in through the disciplines from the general towards the specific,
repeatedly bracketing the main line of argument to reach back for new parts or jump
ahead to an emerging understanding of the whole, or a dialectical process of oscillation
between different parts and the whole (as well as between one part and another part).
That way you increasingly understand what each discipline has to say in the context of
what the other disciplines have to say, gaining more depth or sophistication of
understanding with each pass. A more conventional solution is to give an overview in the
introduction and then compare the perspective in each disciplinary chapter to the
perspectives discussed in earlier chapters, and connect its insights to those identified in