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Professor David Ferris (University of Colorado) | |
| The
research project I will pursue under the auspices of a CRASSH visiting
fellowship is first examined in an essay I contributed to a volume on
the state of the discipline for American Comparative Literature
Association. This essay, entitled “Indisipline,” examines Comparative
Literature as a field of study whose history is already defined by the
challenges facing the traditional disciplines of the humanities as they
absorb the methods of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study.
Building on the analysis undertaken in this essay, my project focuses
on the task and nature of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary
methods of inquiry. This project’s central question is whether such
methods can constitute fields of study or whether their significance is
restricted to producing transformations within already existing
disciplines for the future university. My project will research why each of the major divisions of knowledge in the modern university (the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities) differ with respect to how disciplines are formed within each division and to how inter- and transdisciplinary research functions across the disciplines that make up each division. I will undertake this comparison in order to account for why current science-oriented and some social science disciplines (for instance, biology, physics, psychology, and anthropology) tend towards self-division then separation while the humanities tend increasingly towards aggregations with fewer distinct disciplines. The place and need for the human subject as the organising principle of the humanities will be examined as a determining factor for these different tendencies. Following from this, I ask whether the notion of a subject is still a valid category around which to organise knowledge or whether the presence of inter- and transdisciplinary methods of study in each of the divisions have rendered such a notion irrelevant to the point of forcing us to ask whether the historical critical vocation of the university is still possible if these modes of organising knowledge no longer require a human subject? Here, the role of centres, progammes, institutes, etc., to house and foster this kind of inter- and transdisciplinary study will pose the question of whether the university is entering a new era of discipline formation or does the proliferation of inter- and transdisciplinary methods signal the university’s hesitation about its own future as it simultaneously preserves its historical disciplines and creates transitional models alongside them? If such models remain transitional, then this comparison of the major divisions of knowledge leads to the question of how contemporary methods of study can embody the sense of a university yet to come. If not, what needs to be asked is whether the future university is destined to remain the effect of a history that already contains a tendency to proliferate its disciplines without fulfilling the promise of the self-transformation of disciplinary thinking that gives a university its future. This project will finally consider whether the future university can preserve a critical vocation by placing at its centre inter-and transdisciplinary interventions that constantly reconfigure its past into new relations that derive their significance from the experience of the present, or whether such an experience must always reside alongside that past—a future disciplined or a past transformed. | |
