Seasonal Study
Beyond Interdisciplinarity
Winter 2025
Julie Thompson Klein, Beyond Interdisciplinarity: Boundary Work, Communication, and Collaboration (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Klein's late work turns the question of interdisciplinarity away from definition and toward the boundaries themselves — asking not what ITD is but how boundary practices might reconfigure the conditions under which knowledge is produced. Two metaphors run beneath the text: boundaries as spatial, territorial, lines to be crossed; and boundaries as ecological, porous, conditions for exchange and emergence. The season's engagement turned on a further distinction, drawn from Kinchy and Kleinman — between strategic boundary work, which serves a single project, and routine boundary work, concerned with the slower reconstitution of institutional life. Sitting with this distinction opened onto a second text: a doctoral research proposal that grew directly out of it.
Outputs
- Beyond Interdisciplinarity: A Critical Reconstruction and Relevance Reflection ↗
A chapter-by-chapter reconstruction of Klein's argument, followed by a critical analysis distinguishing a "strategic" from a "routine" reading of her boundary heuristic, and a reflection on relevance and academic positioning.
- Reconfiguring Academic Space and Time ↗
A doctoral proposal, using the University of Vienna as a case study, extending Klein's boundary heuristic alongside Felt's chronopolitics and Sigl & Fochler's "hinterland for doing relevance" into an empirical study of spatial and temporal boundaries in institutional transformation.
Further Exploration
- Winter's ecological critique of library boundaries.
- Sigl & Fochler's hinterland for doing relevance.
- Felt's chronopolitics and academic timescapes.
- Assemblage-theory readings of transdisciplinary institutionalization (Tsao, 2025).
- An open question: what would "ecologies of spatializing practices" look like enacted, not just described?