Beyond Interdisciplinary: Does Disciplinarity Create Exclusion?
This week, guest blogger Hannah Duffewoffers their take on interdisciplinary research through the lens of crip and disability studies. Is it time for academia to move beyond ‘discipline’?
Disciplines feel pretty integral to academic environments. Our ideas and frameworks appear very clearly aligned to a particular field, but, I have come to wonder where these distinctions come from, and what purpose they serve. Mhairi Ferrier’s post a couple of weeks ago touched on this, she talked about ‘muddled clarity’ and what this means when you work across disciplines. This is something I have been contemplating myself, particularly when my research crosses so many areas of thought including disability, design, and the environment. It is also becoming an increasingly relevant discussion as we encourage interdisciplinary research and how to navigate it. We have to question where exactly our work is situated, what the core focus is, and how we define it even when crossing disciplinary borders. I share Mhairi’s concern about having our work recognised when we aren’t using rigid methodologies prescribed by our fields. What does this mean for our academic futures? Does it mean our work won’t be recognised? What does pushing back against these ideals mean for our careers?
‘Crip’ as Method
Primarily, I have come to question the idea of discipline from a crip perspective. I’m a disabled researcher, and my work talks primarily about disability, as well as design and the environment. So when I’m using the word crip I am engaging it to describe both an identity that I hold and a methodology that I utilise. Crip is a reclaimed term that started being used by disabled people in the late 20th century to describe themselves. It has since evolved and become part of academic literature, often thought of as a process, discipline, or theory. Crip is a way of understanding bodies and minds beyond what we typically understand within the disabled and non disabled binary. Through it we see that, actually, these definitions are far more complex, and bordering them excludes certain people from important conversations about disability justice, wellbeing, and expertise. Crip’s evolution into a methodology, or a verb (i.e. to crip), follows similar pathways. If we are to crip something, we both reframe it into the disabled lens, while also disrupting dualistic ideas about the world and its definitions.
I have wondered how we can crip disciplinary boundaries for a long time now. For me, it came from an internal experience of not quite feeling like I fit anywhere in the academy, while also knowing I can’t really think differently given that much of the ways I contemplate the world come from my disabled experience. I have zipped around academic discipline, starting in art, moving into a masters of science focused on political ecology, ecological economics, and environmental humanities, amongst other things. Now I’m in design, but I feel as if I am only in halfway a lot of the time. My work is interested in the environmental futures that disabled people imagine, using crip design and technoscience as a method of uncovering them. There’s a lot of different theories and ideas blurring together there. It covers all sorts of spaces and methodologies, but nothing feels particularly fixed. Of course, no one piece of work can cover everything, so in many ways I have landed on “crip” as the central idea of the work. But, the problem is, that I don’t think crip really has a disciplinary home either. Even its definition and usage is a push back against defining binaries between what is and what is not. So in many ways, as a way of thinking, it resists disciplinary confinement all together.
The way that academia is structured has been built on nondisabled ways of being, including disciplinary borders, which reinforce ideals of hyper-productivity, individualism, meritocracy, and expertise…
Hannah Duffew, PhD Researcher
Cripping Discipline
Chen, Kafer, Kim and Minich (2023)1 critique disciplinary boundedness at length in their anthology Crip Genealogies. They show that the bounds placed between discipline originate in colonial ideas of categorising knowledge, and also prevent important coalitions and methods from emerging in the present. The authors follow Kandice Chuh’s (2014) essay ‘It’s not about anything’2, who pushes back against scholarly “aboutness”. Chuh is very forthright in her problematisation of disciplinarity, she shows how these ideas come from colonialism and bodyessentialism. The latter being a way of thinking that sees bodies as categorisable, i.e. woman or man, disabled or nondisabled, healthy or unhealthy, gay or straight, natural or unnatural. Her concern is how disciplines reinforce these ideas of what is or is not something, by separating them from one another. Simultaneously, how this stops important conversations about disability, race, gender, and queerness from entering other spaces. I am particularly fond of Sami Schalk’s (2022) description of her research as “undisciplined”.3 The work itself focuses on Black disabled liberation, so rather than turning to academia for answers about how something “should” be done, Schalk uses justice as a guide. Primarily because academia has for so long excluded Black disabled ways-of-knowing.
I have already talked about how “crip” rejects boundaries and how ideas of discipline comes from problematic origins, but what does this mean in relation to disability? Disabled people have fought for a long time to be in academic spaces, with over 16% of students now being disabled (though the number is probably way higher).4 While there are improvements in accessibility measures, the way that academia is structured has been built on nondisabled ways of being, including disciplinary borders, which reinforce ideals of hyper-productivity, individualism, meritocracy, and expertise– all of which actively harm disabled scholars who exist in different time scales and rhythms. If we continue to reinforce these divisions then whose voices will be left out from debates that have direct impacts upon their lives? What kind of knowledge do we miss out on if we exclude them? How do we allow for more cross contaminations across disciplinary borders?
This is, of course, not a push back against academic rigour, we still need peer review and frameworks to ensure that our research is accurate, well thought through, and ethical, but I’m still not sure whether that really means separating our methodologies and frameworks from one another. What could be learnt if we unravelled discipline instead?
Hannah Duffew (she/they) is a disabled, chronically ill, Crip, and Mad PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh. Her research navigates crip ecologies, design, and technoscience, to form a thesis unravelling the environmental futures imagined by disabled people, using design justice methodologies. Their creative background includes protest art, installation, and performance, curating exhibitions and working with organisations such as Shape Arts. Her research interests have focused on anarchism, the environmental humanities, and post-growth, presenting research at the Degrowth Conference, STS Conference, Leeds Disability Studies Conference, and co-chairing a panel at the 113th CAA conference in New York.
You can follow and find out more about Hannah’s research throughthe following channels:
SGSAH Blog 