Bricolage: Excursions Into Transdisciplinary Territory

David Starr-Glass
Source Title: Handbook of Research on Transdisciplinary Knowledge Generation
Copyright: © 2019 |Pages: 15
ISBN13: 9781522595311|ISBN10: 1522595317|EISBN13: 9781522595328
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-9531-1.ch016
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Abstract
Disciplinary work is conducted within a socially constructed framework of assumptions,
processes, methodologies, and discovery that are particular to, and embedded in, a specific
discipline. Disciplinary paradigms define the discipline and provide it with a cohesive
integrity, but they also operate as barriers for those outside the disciplinary community. For
collaborative explorations and research—whether in the form of interdisciplinary,
multidisciplinary, or transdisciplinary work—it is necessary for those involved to first
recognize and appreciate these paradigmatic boundaries before negotiating them. The
approach of the bricoleur is different. Bricoleurs make do with fragments of previous
knowledge, analogous encounters, and different disciplinary experience and use them to
gain new insights into the problem at hand—insights that may be partial but which are also
both pragmatic and functional. This chapter considers the nature of bricolage and the
approach of bricoleurs in conducting explorations of transdisciplinary territory.
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Introduction
At first glance, knowledge production might seem relatively straightforward; however, the
notions that knowledge is approached in a neutral fashion or that knowledge is produced
simply for its own sake are challenged by a number of realities. First, existing knowledge and
the advancing frontiers of knowledge production are selectively defined and recognized
according to existing disciplinary assumptions that highlight and privilege the discipline’s
current understanding of usefulness, validity, and generalizability. Second, knowledge is
produced, recognized, and conserved—or ultimately rejected and superseded—within
distinctive paradigms and ideological frameworks (Kuhn, 2012) that serve to define the
discipline and shape its ongoing research efforts. Third, those who produce new
knowledge—and those who will eventually consume or utilize that knowledge—do so within
overarching political, social, and economic frameworks that inevitably set agendas and
establish preferences regarding the nature and the utility of what is deemed to be knowledge
(Olssen & Peters, 2005; Ozaga, 2007).

Knowledge production is heavily—but not exclusively—centered in the research function of

the academy, where individual disciplines are self-defining and where each has established
a characteristic methodology and developed a “specialized terminology, a community of
practitioners, a canon of authorities, an agenda of problems to be addressed, and perhaps
more formal signs of a professional condition, such as journals, textbooks, courses of study,
libraries, rituals, and social gatherings” (Kelley, 1997, p. 1). Academic disciplines are socially
constructed, culturally conserved, and increasingly driven by ideological assumptions and
preferences. As Shulman (1993) observed, the very term disciple is significant because “it
not only denotes a domain but also suggest a process: a community that disciplines is one
that exercise quality, control, judgment, evaluation, and paradigmatic definition” (p. 6). The
power and authority of the disciplinary community regulate the ways in it defines itself
and—often obliquely and sometimes unintentionally—these same forces define what the
discipline is not and with what it should, or should not, be involved.

Disciplinary identity and identification create disciplinary boundaries that may not be implicit
stated, but which are nevertheless recognizable to community members. Boundaries delimit
the territorial range of the discipline and function as barriers that prevent members from
venturing beyond their familiar and established territory (White & Hanson, 2002; Quattrone,
2000). Academic disciplines and communities of professionals perpetuate the accepted
boundaries of their disciplines through the education and socialization of their novices; that
is, through what Lee Schulman (2005) has called signature pedagogies—“the types of
teaching that organize the fundamental ways in which future practitioners are educated for
their new professions” (p. 52). The signature pedagogies that are associated with individual
disciplines are pervasive, reinforcing, and “implicitly define what counts as knowledge in the
field and how things become known” (p. 54). Commenting on the purposeful distinctiveness
of disciplinary education, some have asked rhetorically: “What does our pedagogy reveal,
intentionally or otherwise, about the habits of head, hand, and heart as we purport to foster
through our disciplines?” (Gurung, Chick, & Haynie, 2009, p. xii). Those educated, trained,
and living within the confines of the disciplinary community may be wary about approaching
the knowledge margins of their disciplines—let alone actually crossing them. Accordingly,
many members of the disciplinary community may require considerable encouragement,
support, and training in order to engage in ventures that are characterized as either
interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity (Owen, Johns, & Etkin, 2011; Snow, Salmon, & Young,
2010; Su, 2016).

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