Vipin Kumar Chirakkara
Pages 175-188
ABSTRACT
Interdisciplinarity is a concept that has obtained considerable acceptance in the present academic contexts. It is however not free of ambiguous meanings and ways of usage: there is a significant lack of consensus apropos how to be interdisciplinary. Since the traditional disciplinary demarcations are adequately historicised as ideological and have reached points of insurmountable crises, in the manners much critical scholarship informs us today, the term does not denote certain renewed forms of academic enquiries that have survived ideologies. Instead, interdisciplinarity may be understood as contradictory responses to the crises of disciplines, and represents ideological appropriations and contestations at once, not as subjects of study but as formative principles of contemporary research. This paper broadly conceptualises the practices of interdisciplinarity by classifying them into two types: one that extends the prevailing epistemology and one that transcends it. It claims further that one of the essential modes of apprehending ideology shall be to trace the paradigmatic divergences between the two types of knowledge production. Download PDF