Interdisciplinarity is everywhere seen as normative, necessary, and part of what we do, and need to do, as academics.It’s good, isn’t it, to bring in documentaries when we teach history? It makes our courses more alive, surely, if we bring in paintings when we teach Renaissance literature? One can argue too that literature and film, the mainstays of our Italian Studies programmes, are also per se interdisciplinary – containing within them economics, psychology, philosophy, cultural studies and so on. However, despite the omnipresence of interdisciplinarity, as Alan Liu puts it (1989), interdisciplinary study is the most seriously underthought critical, pedagogical and institutional concept in the modern academy.
In the paper, the first question posed by Dr Brook was whether interdisciplinary practice could strengthen the position of the discipline. She discussed what happens when Italian Studies lecturers work across campus to create networks (for a formalisation of this process, see Columbia University’s The Italian Academy founded 1991), or how working with those in other fields outside of academia facilitates impact cases and helps the discipline grow its public engagement profile, thus strengthening its position nationally.
However, she also addressed the threat of disaggregation. In his book, The University in Ruins, Bill Readings challenges some of the ambitious claims made for interdisciplinarity, suggesting that the term is malleable, and can be easily appropriated in pursuit of the market-orientated university’s aims. In other words, interdisciplinarity has as much to do with Universities managing budgets and being flexible to the demands of the marketplace as it does with the admirable aims of intellectual dialogue and co-operation, since merging departments into interdisciplinary programmes can be a form of downsizing and cost-cutting (Readings, 191). This is not to say that interdisciplinarity is bad, per se, but that we need to be careful of how it is used. The second danger that needs to be faced is that of losing a sense of an overarching shape or sense to the disciplines. It is by means of disciplines that thinking traditions take shape and they have contributed immensely to the production of knowledge (Mills in the HEA’s Interdisciplinarity: A Literature Review, 2007), and to its curation and defence. They promote rigour and depth, which provides a good foil to the breadth of interdisciplinarity. If the discipline changes rapidly and in different ways from University to University it is hard to defend the need to have anything specific at all within its borders. While interdisciplinary brings benefits, these potential threats need to be taken on board.
In the paper, Dr Brook also explored a second question: how can we use interdisciplinarity (and pluridisciplinarity) to make teaching more interesting and worthwhile for students. She explored various possibilities, including clarifying student pathways with students, rethinking our introductory courses so that they also pose questions about the discipline and what questions get asked within it and who its players are (and are not), asking students to co-write essays with fellow students from other Departments, like History of Art or Architecture, inviting guest lecturers from other Departments to give classes on our courses, and using the Year Abroad better as a living laboratory for art, architecture, cinema, music. Here too, there are, of course, potential obstacles, such as the time-consuming organisation of team teaching and pedagogical issues around replacing depth of understanding with breadth.
Italian Studies is already an interdisciplinary, or probably more exactly, a pluridisciplinary discipline. We have film and literature in our Departments in a pluridisciplinary way, but how often do we bring them together and ask, for example, how has cinema affected writing in Italy? Dr Brook ended the presentation by suggesting that we think more about where the gaps in our interdisciplinary/pluridisciplinary practice lie. Who are we not working with and why? Why are we working so little with Education, with Psychology, with Music, even English and IT, and into the hard sciences? Our discipline, if not looked at with due reflexivity, loses sight of the amount of knowledge not accessible to it by the limits of its boundaries. We need too to be more aware of our interdisciplinary practice and to communicate this to students and to find the right balance in our courses between breadth and depth in our courses.
This is a time of change and challenge for Italian Studies. The relation of this discipline to others is crucial to navigating the threats of disaggregation and strengthening our hand.
