Interdisciplinarity involves bringing together distinctive components of two or more disciplines. In academic discourse, interdisciplinarity typically applies to four realms: knowledge, research, education, and theory. Interdisciplinary knowledge involves familiarity with distinctive components of two or more disciplines. Interdisciplinary research combines distinctive components of two or more disciplines in the search or creation of new knowledge, operational procedures, or artistic expressions. Interdisciplinary education merges distinctive components of two or more disciplines in a single program of instruction. Interdisciplinary theory takes interdisciplinary knowledge, (...) research, or education as its main objects of study. At any given historical period, the interdisciplinary richness of any two exemplars of knowledge, research, and education can be compared by weighing four variables: number of disciplines, the "distance" between them, novelty, and integration. (shrink)

This article situates current debates about transdisciplinarity within the deeper history of academic disciplinarity, in its difference from the notions of inter- and multi-disciplinarity. It offers a brief typology and history of established conceptions of transdisciplinarity within science and technology studies. It then goes on to raise the question of the conceptual structure of transdisciplinary generality in the humanities, with respect to the incorporation of the 19th- and 20th-century German and French philosophical traditions into the anglophone humanities, under the name (...) of ‘theory’. It identifies two distinct – dialectical and anti-dialectical, or dialectical and transversal – transdisciplinary trajectories. It locates the various contributions to the special issue of which it is the introduction within this conceptual field, drawing attention to the distinct contribution of the French debates about structuralism and its aftermath – those by Serres, Foucault, Derrida, Guattari and Latour, in particular. It concludes with an appendix on Foucault’s place within current debates about disciplinarity and academic disciplines. (shrink)