Traversing, turning, and mobilizing as operators for a radical interdisciplinarity: modeling local and complementary integration

Abstract

This article examines how interdisciplinarity is operationalized today, a question explored in our graduate seminar Radical Interdisciplinarity, which was offered four times between 2019–2020 and 2022–2023 by the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA). Together with students, we investigated the state of the art of interdisciplinary research. Building on analyses of enactive cognition, turns to practice, and mobilizations of quantum physics, we argue that interdisciplinarity is not set in motion by the circulation of concepts, ideas, or theories across fields. Rather, such circulation is the effect of interferences and resonances between modes of thinking and understanding that develop locally and simultaneously in different sites, generating ripples across fields. Our approach to interdisciplinary practices of knowing allows us to specify who or what does the traveling, when and where flows of ideas and insights generate knowledge, and how that happens both locally and in complementary ways. We conclude by distinguishing traversing, turning, and mobilizing as related yet distinct operators of a radical interdisciplinarity, thereby lending specificity to Boyer's “scholarship of integration.”