Why Transdisciplinarity?
“Amalgam” by artist Nick Cave on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Photo by Kata Beilin.
LACIS Review was conceived by a group of graduate students who took a LACIS seminar focused on Inter and Trans-disciplinary Latin American Studies between 2019 and 2021. It has not been easy to bring a new publication to life and we have done it slowly, but here it is. Welcome to the first issue!
This introductory issue contains 26 short essays, including two video talk presentations, in semi-formal style and presenting research projects that reach beyond the fields of their authors towards frameworks of other disciplines. These essays are authored by faculty and graduate students whose work focuses on Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. The authors come from UW-Madison and from other campuses in the US. LACIS Review has invited publications in English, Spanish and Portuguese. In this first issue we read about various projects where science, technology, social studies, and humanities talk to each other to better understand “the big picture” of the multidimensional and un-disciplined reality of Latin America.
While in the common understanding, interdisciplinarity is defined broadly as research undertook in collaboration with more than one academic field, transdisciplinary research distinguishes itself by engagement with real, lived problems where multi-angled understanding is needed for strategic thinking. Transdisciplinary projects focus on how to better design and conserve multispecies systems of thought, life, matter, and technologies on our planet. It often involves collaborative work, including also non-academic actors and knowledges such as those of Indigenous people. As transdisciplinary research transcends the boundaries of disciplines, new transdisciplinary platforms emerge. Projects discussed in this issue can be placed, among others, in Environmental Humanities, Science and Technology Studies, Agroecology, Transdisciplinary Psychedelic Studies and New Materialities.
Latin American Studies have been interdisciplinary from the inception as they relied on dialogues between various fields of study to understand the complexity of ways of life and social structures in a historical and geographical context of the Luso-Hispanic World. At the beginning of the twentieth century, most research approaches were anthropological, archeological, and linguistic (Pakkasvirta, 2011). In the 1950s, under the influence of British cultural studies, Latin American Studies emerged as what today is called a transdiscipline; research focused on social, political, economic, and cultural problems lived by Latin American communities with an outlook for solutions. In the 1960s and 1970s, Latin American Studies focused on understandings of poverty. Dependency theory traced flows of resources from the periphery to the centers of consumption and analyzed extractivism as a function of colonization. Around the same time, Liberation Theology surfaced to condemn this dynamic as unethical. It produced rebellious political pedagogy and consciousness that became an important part of Latin American culture (Stenberg, 2006). This rebellious thought was reflected in Eduardo Galeano’s Las venas abiertas de América Latina (1970), the most widely read book of economic history in the Americas. Galeano transformed the concept of poverty into “impoverishment,” and questioned development promoted by European and North American institutions as imported and foreign to Latin American realities (Norget, 2007). These thoughts inspire today’s Latin American Studies to react to the intensification of extractivism in times of globalization and socio-environmental crisis (Escobar, 2011; Quijano, 2000; De Sousa Santos, 2015; Acosta, 2013, Otero, 2022; as well as Goldstein in this issue).
The current socio-environmental crisis requires transdisciplinary research because the excessive disciplinary divisions may have contributed to it. A science and technology scholar, Bruno Latour (2012), explains that while modern knowledge became disciplined, the universe has remained hybrid and undisciplined. The sculpture titled “Amalgam” by Nick Cave that accompany this introduction, where humans, birds, trees, and objects are all entangled in multiplicity of complex and disorderly relations, visualizes this undisciplined character of reality. The divisions between fields of knowledge, -- sciences focused on the natural realm, and humanities focused on politics and culture -- prompted scientific progress, followed by economic expansion. But these divisions also led to a loss of wholistic ways of thinking able to respond to the complexity of real issues.
In modern times, materiality and nature became an object of research of sciences. Natural objects made their way to the laboratory where they were dissected and analyzed. The imagination of nature as “out there,” separate from the cultured city, allowed the collapsing of life into sets of discrete, exploitable resources that enriched society through market exchanges. The compartmentalization of knowledge, and the emergence of disciplines allowed deep specialization essential for the technological and economic expansion. But specialists were often unaware of wide context of their narrow knowledges and could not address the complex side effects of application of these knowledges in technologies.
On the other hand, humanities detached from material reality and scientific knowledge, and western philosophers glorified the human mind’s capacity to transcend material limitations through imagination and beauty. The illusory character of this transcendence was revealed by the climate change. The Indian historian, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009), of the University of Chicago, claims that climate change forces us to view this philosophy as a mistake because planetary collapse will mean an end to human freedom. Chakrabarty summons Humanities to return to Earth and deal with its problems. That means becoming truly interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary.
In the article that I wrote for the Forum of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) this past summer 2022, I suggest that climate change and environmental destruction is not only the result of economic expansion, extraction, and destruction, but it can also be viewed as a result of the concepts and discourses that were used to justify extractivist economies and to turn blind eye to their effects. Narratives about progress, expansion, human exceptionalism, and work as struggle against nature were foundational for shaping the modern economy.
If the current socio-environmental crisis can be seen as a side effect of excessive divisions between disciplines and excessive specialization, transdisciplinarity deserves more attention in current academic education. Hispanic scholar and Associate Dean of Humanities at Rutgers, Jorge Marcone, shares the following reflection on the growing interest in transdisciplinarity on university campuses in the Americas:
I have been surprised by the enormous popularity and even a certain consensus, not only among researchers and students but also among authorities, of what has been known for a long time in studies of sustainability and social-ecological resilience by the name of transdisciplinarity. I understand that several definitions of this term circulate that, although they are not equivalent, intersect. On this occasion I am referring to a way of learning and solving problems, or of strengthening the capacity of agency to deal with them, which involves the cooperation of different sectors of society and university and research institutions to deal with complex challenges (Scholz 2020). The idea of the entrepreneurial University at the service of private industry, government agencies and even politicians in power is no longer the only current deciding university policies. In this conversation I have perceived a desire to promote and carry out research and teaching practices not only “for society” but “with society.” And this is pushing to transform the institution in different levels. (2022)
Marcone notes also that while all sciences recognize the need for greater cultural awareness, various humanities scholars doubt if they should be a part of projects focused on immediate benefits of nonacademic communities, and that there are institutional barriers for projects where distant disciplines, say microbiology and cultural studies, establish collaborations (yet, precisely at least one such project, “Microcosms” made it to LACIS Review!). Marcone notes that the emergence of environmental humanities prompts the awareness of the deep need for such projects.
In this LACIS Review, various essays exemplify transdisciplinary initiatives by connecting sciences and humanities and by recognizing that human minds and cultures are mediated by and entangled with plants, animals, and bacteria which are in turn carried by water and soil. Consequently, transdisciplinary understanding of human life, and economy leads us to questioning of separations between city and country, nature and culture established by modernity in contrast with indigenous and pre-modern conceptualizations. These alternative epistemologies are revisited today as we attempt to repair severed connections between us and the natural world. In this process important questions are asked: Is agency a uniquely human attribute? What is the role of materiality and of sciences in humanities’ education and research? How do humanities and social sciences contribute towards scientific work? Transdisciplinary thinking in this volume provides also a distanced meta-reflection about the planetary conditions of work itself, including academic work of those of us who research, write, and teach in the Academia, connecting and crossing borders between North and South. Finally, in various cases, research presented in this issue is centered on problems in ways that facilitate thinking about solutions of most pressing current problems such as poverty, climate change, perils of migration, racism, machismo, anthropocentrism, other forms of exclusion and injustice, and (mental) health. We hope you will enjoy learning about the exciting ideas of these essays that have been born at the border zones of different fields.
About the Guest Editor
Kata Beilin is a Professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and the past Faculty Director of LACIS, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Kata specializes in Environmental Cultural Studies and promotes transdisciplinary and collaborative research across different fields, including non-academic partners. She is currently writing a book on Yucatec Mayas’ relationships with plants, forests, and bees as an important part of cultural revival and of the defense of Mayan land.
Works Cited
Acosta, Alberto. “Extractivism and Neoextractivism: Two Sides of the Same Curse.” In Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America, edited by Miriam Lang and Dunia Mokrani, Transnational Institute, 2013, pp. 61–86.
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana University Press, 2010.
Beilin, Kata. “Climate Change as a Cultural Problem: Transdisciplinary Environmental Humanities and Latin American Studies” LASA Forum, Spring 2022. https://forum.lasaweb.org/past-issues/vol53-issue2.php
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 197–222. https://doi.org/10.1086/596640.
Escobar, Arturo. Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third World. Vol. 1. Princeton University Press, 2011.
Galeano, Eduardo. Las venas abiertas de América Latina (1970). Siglo XXI, 2004.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, 2012.
Marcone, Jorge. “Las humanidades ambientales y la transdisciplinaridad en la universidad.” LASA Forum, Spring 2022. https://forum.lasaweb.org/past-issues/vol53-issue2.php
Otero, Gerando. “Dependent development and Beyond; Can Latin America Transcend Extractivism?” LASA Forum, Fall 2021. https://forum.lasaweb.org/past-issues/vol52-issue4.php
Pakkasvirta, Jussi. “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Latin American Studies.” Iberoamericana: Nordic Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 40, no. 1–2, 2011, pp. 161–84.
Quijano, Anibal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South, vol. 1, no. 3, 2000, pp. 533–80.
Sousa Santos, Boaventura, de. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Routledge, 2015.
Stenberg, Shari J. “Liberation Theology and Liberatory Pedagogies: Renewing the Dialogue.” College English, vol. 68, no. 3, pp. 271–90, 2006. https://doi.org/25472152.
