Discourses of interdisciplinarity and the shifting topography of academic work: generational perspectives on facilitating and resisting neoliberalism

Generational differences in the way knowledge-makers negotiate shifts in relation to interdisciplinary knowledge-making at one Canadian university are studied. Semi-structured interviews with 20 participants in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines were conducted. Using a Foucauldian approach, transcripts were read to determine how academic identities and subject positions are formed and reformed through time as different discursive spaces are experienced. The historical perspective of older participants revealed the complex interplay between private and public ‘scripts’. Participants demonstrated agency on behalf of themselves and their institution by engaging in practices they thought would provide space for research that ‘really mattered’. Older participants who were administrators promoted instrumental forms of interdisciplinarity that did not challenge the central role of disciplines in the construction of expertise. Younger participants were more likely to resist being ‘disciplined’; they identified strongly with conceptual forms of interdisciplinarity and derived both satisfaction and creativity from working in the margins of knowledge spaces.

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