Improficiency and the Professionalization of Undisciplined Practices

Abstract

This chapter’s author interrogates the spaces and knowledges of interdisciplinarity by exploring the relationship between alternative understandings of expertise (improficiency), academic career prospects (professionalization), inter-/disciplinary spaces (the undisciplined), and research practices. She considers the implications of interdisciplinarity for the spatialization of disciplines themselves, emergent knowledges, the academics generating them, and understandings of expertise. She argues that the prefix ‘inter-’ is most appropriate in individual (not team-based) contexts, as the co-location of different knowledges in the body of one researcher holds particular promise, despite this promise being underappreciated. In this chapter, she offers a variegated conceptualization of inter-/extra-disciplinary spaces; a refined understanding of expertise across interdisciplinary practices; and suggestions as to how academic institutions can better support interdisciplinary careers. Rather than progressively dismantling interdisciplinary spaces, knowledges, and practitioners, proponents of different disciplines can validate and help to realize the potential for interdisciplinary work to ricochet productively among the disciplines, rather than continually policing the borders between them.

I have drawn my inspiration for this chapter from previously published work, in which I proposed the idea of proto-practices (practices informed by influences from outside the accepted norms of the field of practice) as a potentially enduring influence in the development of artistic expertise (Banfield, 2017a). As such influences come from beyond the field of practice, they are the result of neither training nor disciplining in the ways of the field and would thus not be considered to constitute proficient practice within the field. I found such external, unsanctioned, and thereby improficient influences on practice to function in an experimental fashion, whether by accident (e.g., dipping a paintbrush into a cup of coffee by mistake) or design (e.g., seeking out unconventional materials to use). Those experiments the artists concerned deemed successful they then incorporated into their evolving practice. Thus, the development of expertise could be characterized by the varying purpose of experimentation (e.g., to see what happens or to push one’s limits) rather than by the proficiency of practice or quality of outcome. Potentially resulting in proto-elite practices in which a proto-element constitutes the novelty at the heart of attributions of style, conventional psychological accounts of expertise are unsettled as the development of expertise sustains rather than eradicates unsanctioned or undisciplined elements of practice. Extending that analysis from artistic practice to academic practice, I also suggested that different disciplines can serve as a source of proto-practices for each other in interdisciplinary entanglements (Banfield, 2017a), thereby contributing to the development of academic expertise. However, such interdisciplinary activity is evaluated in the context of disciplinary norms and expectations, generating contestation as to what constitutes expertise. It is this potential within and the implications of such interdisciplinary entanglements that I develop further here.

In this chapter, I draw auto-ethnographically on my own research activities and career experiences to date to interrogate the potential of interdisciplinary spaces as a source of academic novelty given ongoing pressures to conform with singular disciplines despite contemporary drives to increase interdisciplinary work. I bring together the four elements in the title to explore the relationship between understandings of expertise (improficiency), academic career prospects (professionalization), inter/disciplinary spaces (undisciplined), and research activities (practices). I consider the implications of contributions arising from such work for the spaces of disciplines themselves, for the interdisciplinary spatialization of emergent knowledges and the academics generating them, and for researchers’ understandings of expertise in these myriad and muddled spaces. I conclude by calling for a reconfiguration of how we conceptualize interdisciplinarity to acknowledge the potential for individual academics—as much as teams—to be interdisciplinary and to parse an individual’s academic output from the individual academic, by proposing a new conceptualization of quasi-disciplinary spaces to accommodate diverse spatialities of emergent knowledges and practices, and by proposing a refined understanding of expertise to create a more generous and generative validation of interdisciplinary practice to support interdisciplinary careers.

Positionality and Interdisciplinarity

At the time of writing, it is five years since I gained my doctorate. Although my doctorate is officially in geography, I also drew strongly on psychology, which I studied to postgraduate level, and although only a hobbyist in art, I used artistic practice as a research method. I teach only in geography but publish in both geography and psychology and draw on my former career in local government in my academic work, thoroughly confusing my disciplinary identity.

Specifically, the intersection of psychology and geography within my work relates to non-representational thinking, especially its concerns as to whether, how, and to what extent we might be able to access, apprehend, and work intentionally with our pre-reflective experience. Proponents of conventional non-representational geography consider that cognition (reflective, representational thinking) and affect (pre-reflective, embodied sensations, and dispositions) do not translate and that any attempt to speak from our pre-reflective understanding is thus futile (Gibbs, 2010; Pile, 2010). By contrast, the strand of non-representational thinking upon which I draw (the philosophical and psychotherapeutic work of Eugene Gendlin) allows for some—albeit limited—capacity to draw upon and think explicitly from our pre-reflective understanding, which Gendlin calls implicit (Gendlin, 1993, 1995). Consequently, and as illustrated in Figure 3.1, non-representational thinking in psychology differs from that in geography by allowing for a bidirectional relationship between reflective and pre-reflective registers of experience and greater interaction between individualized embodied and transpersonal environmental aspects of pre-reflective experience. The transpersonal aspect is conceptualised differently in each discipline, being termed atmosphere in geography but felt sense in psychology.

Fig. 3.1

Affect versus the implicit. Source: Design by author

I view the benefits of working with Gendlin’s ideas in the methodological possibilities that arise. Gendlin argues that one can (and does) think with the implicit (e.g., intuition or emotion), and that one can think into the implicit, intentionally mining it to refine our understanding of a situation from an implicit basis. Although formal thoughts and concepts are logically connected, they are also connected implicitly, enabling one to understand how things make more-than-logical sense even when they make no logical sense (e.g., comprehending metaphors), and one can use these connections creatively to generate new conceptual understanding from implicit understanding (Gendlin, 1993, 1995, 1997, 2009a, 2009b).

Gendlin oriented his psychotherapeutic work towards helping clients to engage intentionally with their pre-reflective experience to extract—or, in Gendlin’s terms, explicate—that pre-reflective or implicit understanding and shape it into something that can be worked with linguistically for therapeutic purposes. In adapting these ideas and techniques for use in geographical research, I sought to develop non-clinical means of facilitating the deliberate working with and explicating from pre-reflective experience. To that end, I both deprofessionalized Gendlin’s work by removing it from a clinical context and undisciplined his work by removing it from psychology and reframing it for geography.

Gendlin argues that it is often easier to develop (explicate) conceptual or linguistic understanding from implicit understanding if images are formed first, whether through mental visualization or actual image-making (Gendlin, 1980). Whereas for Gendlin such image-making might be scaffolded by a range of linguistic therapeutic techniques, I explored image-making (artistic practice) as its own way into implicit understanding, so that it could be used independently of formal therapeutic techniques, thereby bringing together geography, psychology, and art (Banfield, 2016a, 2016b).

I supplemented this approach with three mechanisms designed to direct attention to aspects of artistic practice that would normally be overlooked precisely because they function implicitly. Actively engaging in artistic practice alongside participants provided a comparative basis whereby in becoming aware of how other people do the same task differently, one is also made more aware of how one does that task oneself. In addition, in some research sessions, we would work with art materials with which we were unfamiliar, unsettling our practice conventions and effectively deprofessionalizing our respective practices (from whatever standard we previously exhibited) (Banfield, 2016a, 2016b). This not only established another comparative basis (between familiar and unfamiliar materials) but also generated moments in which by doing things differently participants also think differently (Thrift, Harrison, & Anderson, 2010). Finally, working with improficient as well as expert practice allowed the exploration of differences in the sensibilities and capacities exhibited at different stages of practice development (Banfield, 2017a, 2016b).

This work is starting to generate contributions as it reaches publication, not only in terms of its methodological innovations but also in relation to conceptual and theoretical developments. Beyond introducing Gendlin’s work to geographers, contributions include: considering practices as much as people in synaesthetic terms to facilitate further geographical engagement with the implicit (Banfield, 2016c); injecting geographical ideas of experimentation into psychological understandings of descriptive phenomenological analysis (Banfield, 2016d); the conceptualization of proto- practices, as outlined earlier (Banfield, 2017a); the spatialization of the psychological concept of flow (Banfield, 2018); and conceptualizing powerful experiences of erraticism in novice practices (Banfield, 2017b).

Bringing these works to publication, however, has not been straightforward, for a host of reasons that support observations in the existing literature. These have included challenges concerning legitimacy, communication difficulties when working with different disciplinary languages, and resistance to alternative perspectives on established theoretical and methodological emphases (Bracken & Oughten, 2006; Darbellay, 2015; Moody & Darbellay, 2019; Moore, Martinson, Nurius, & Kemp, 2018). I also struggled to identify an appropriate conduit for the publication of these works, whereas editors had difficulty finding appropriate reviewers to establish and evaluate research quality (Bracken & Oughten, 2009; Felt, Igelsböck, Schikowitz, & Völker, 2013; Leahey, Beckman, & Stanko, 2017; Lyall, Bruce, Tait, & Meagher, 2011).

These are not, however, the only difficulties faced in interdisciplinary work. As disciplines are set within a broader academic and societal context, as outlined in Figure 3.2, their implications stretch down to the level of the individual. Societal issues include neoliberalization, the Research Excellence Framework, and the Impact Agenda, which together compel more quantifiable and fungible research activities and outcomes that do not fit easily with my own research. Disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and institutional contexts compel issues of definition or identity (e.g., whether a discipline is an art or a science), of status (e.g., whether established or early career), and of dominant concerns (e.g., whether teaching or research, legitimacy or career prospects). Within my own context, disciplinary issues include (for geography) definitional questions concerning the discipline’s identity, coherence, and role in society, and (for psychology) questions of emphasis between experimental and qualitative work, and of flexibility in established theoretical and methodological approaches. Together, these establish a complex context for my own activities. I have also attained a different professional standard in each discipline, and take on a different role in each: Whereas I am focused on research in psychology, I actively both teach and research in geography. Interdisciplinary issues include diverse definitions, questions of status relative to disciplinary work, and challenges in establishing the legitimacy and proficiency of such work. Besides these aspects, institutional factors include: the definitional difference between departmentally based and college-based academics, with implications for the funding and other forms of support available to each; the status or prestige of the university that potentially reduces the need for the university to grow its own internal talent; and concerns over the insecure nature of early-career and college-based employment, all of which constrain development opportunities. Finally, there are personal factors to consider, as there is a certain degree of choice in terms of how I work and what I work on. These include a determination to define my research by that which most interests me (rather than chasing funding), the benefits that I gain from working as I do that partially offset the frustrations and limitations, and concern over my future career prospects.

Fig. 3.2

Societal, inter/disciplinary, and institutional context. Source: Design by author

It is the specific configuration of these issues as they relate to my work that fuels much of the commentary in this chapter. In the next section, I focus on the implications of my way of working for how we think about interdisciplinarity as a mode of academic practice and how we can refine our conceptualization of the spatialities of emergent knowledges and practices, before progressing in the subsequent section to consider similarly vexed issues concerning legitimacy and proficiency in interdisciplinary work.

Inter/Disciplinary Spaces

With contributions starting to show through in publications, questions arise concerning what possible impacts such contributions can have on the disciplines to which they speak, given their roots in interdisciplinary work strongly influenced by another discipline, as explored in Figure 3.3. It is possible that the receiving discipline may simply absorb any contribution without so much as a rippled surface, leaving no impact on disciplinary emphases, interests, or configuration. Equally, a contribution might help to extend a discipline in some way, potentially expanding it towards the other in a shrinking of the interdisciplinary space between them. However, a contribution may fail to speak successfully to any discipline, effectively ending up in a disciplinary no-man’s land. There is even a possibility that a contribution might carve for itself an a-disciplinary micro-enclave (of psychogeography in my case), recognizable to no one but its originator.

Fig. 3.3

Disciplinary spaces. Source: Design by author

Of course, evolution in disciplinary identities and boundaries is nothing new, as discoveries are either rejected or adopted and disciplines expand, merge, or proliferate to accommodate them. Geography exemplifies this disciplinary flexibility well, as its emphasis has shifted over time: It has progressed from gazetteer geography in the era of exploration through differing prioritization of regionalism and universalism, the adoption of emphases on visual representation and environmentalism, varying degrees of engagement with social theory, and shifting characterization, from a spatial science to critical, activist, and more-than-human formulations (Bonnett, 2008; Martin & James, 1981; Livingstone, 1992; Smith, 2005). Indeed, geography is often described as an inherently interdisciplinary discipline, clearly manifesting tensions between desires to integrate different knowledges and desires to create and defend a distinctive identity: Despite its practitioners’ longstanding aim to unify its human and physical aspects, researchers of each struggle to communicate with each other and debate continues about the discipline’s coherence, canonicity, and social role (Baerwald, 2010; Bracken & Oughten, 2006, 2009; Castree, Demeritt, & Liverman, 2009; Keighren, Abahamsson, & della Dora, 2012; Lyall et al., 2011; Whatmore, 2013). What emerges through this initial discussion is a concern for how the disciplinary and the interdisciplinary relate, a question I examine in this section under two subheadings: Disciplinarity and Interdisciplinarity, and Beyond Interdisciplinarity.

Disciplinarity and Interdisciplinarity

Characteristic of any discipline and reflecting the formalization of professions more generally, disciplines determine standards for legitimacy and proficiency through the creation of competency demands, performance evaluation, and qualification conferment, and newcomers are trained (disciplined) in the discipline’s pre-established ways to reinforce its identity and sustain its distinctiveness (Dahle, 2003; Evetts, 2013; MacDonald, 1995). This establishes what Fleck would understand as a thought mood among a thought collective as a way to resist external manipulation (Fleck, 1979; Ginev, 2015; Solska, 2015). However, academics are simultaneously expected to generate original contributions if they are to gain recognition as a legitimate contributor, prompting ongoing and highly political boundary work to manage who and what counts as legitimate, a process that is amplified by intercollective communication—interdisciplinarity—as this communication can generate the confrontation of novelty (Dahle, 2003; Evetts, 2013; Peine, 2011; Whatmore, 2013). It is hardly surprising that such disciplining forces persist so strongly, given increasing competition for resources and status and the diversely and politically populated nature of disciplines. These give rise to disciplinary identity politics enacted through exclusionary and demarcatory closure, whereby gatekeepers filter who is accepted as an initiate, and turf protectors erect barricades against potential threats from possible interlopers (Andrews & Wærness, 2011). Ultimately, then, disciplinarization—the active making and remaking of disciplines—has led to increasing specialization, which in turn has stimulated greater need for interdisciplinarity. Yet the more intense specialization becomes, the more challenging it is to engage in such interdisciplinarity—continually raising the stakes for those seeking to work in an interdisciplinary fashion.

Compounding these dynamics are two contemporary trends identified in social science literatures that can be discerned in relation to disciplinarity: post-politics and post-democracy (Doucette & Kang, 2018; Kenis, 2018; Banfield, 2020). As indicated in the previous section, geography is affected by the neoliberalism and impact agendas as much as any other discipline, but each of these works in a post-political fashion to conscript the discipline and its practitioners into a proceduralized focus on technicalities of specifying, measuring, valuing, and auditing their activities, thereby constraining debate as to the appropriateness of these agendas and limiting consideration of their deleterious effects on research that is no longer deemed worthy. In this context, then, post-politics reduces political debate within a discipline and externalizes and delegitimizes certain unfavored modes of academic practice. At the same time, although academics are encouraged to work in more interdisciplinary ways, the literature on interdisciplinarity exhibits strong post-democratic tendencies: Although its authors encourage disciplinary exchange, they seem to be legitimizing only certain forms of interdisciplinarity. Specifically, they are validating team-based or collaborative approaches but not interdisciplinarity on the part of an individual academic. In this context, then, post-democracy not only invalidates certain forms of interdisciplinarity, but in so doing also constrains political debate between and among disciplines because these conversations can only legitimately involve academics speaking from the perspective of a single discipline. Consequently, these post-political and post-democratic tendencies exacerbate the disciplinary identity politics inherent to disciplinarity, with deleterious implications for interdisciplinarity.

Researchers have attributed the drive towards greater interdisciplinary working to growing awareness of the complexity of social and environmental issues, the limitations of working in strongly disciplinary ways, and changes to the broader societal context that directs shifts in the practice of academia, such as neoliberalism and the Impact Agenda (Darbellay, 2015; Felt et al., 2013; Lyall et al., 2011; Moody & Darbellay, 2019; Moore et al., 2018). Since coming to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, a degree of consensus has emerged concerning core definitions for different ways in which cross-disciplinary work can be conducted, depending upon the degree of integration between the disciplines involved (Barry & Born, 2013; Darbellay, 2015; Kemp & Nurius, 2015; Lyall et al., 2011; Moody & Darbellay, 2019). Work whose practitioners involve different disciplines but hold these disciplinary understandings apart is generally described as multidisciplinary. Beyond this, work that involves some limited interaction between disciplines is termed interdisciplinary, whereas work that entails integration and adaptation of disciplinary understandings and practices is considered to constitute transdisciplinarity. In addition, some authors require transdisciplinary work to be targeted towards specified extra-academic goals and to involve non-academic stakeholders (Darbellay, 2015; Kemp & Nurius, 2015; Lyall et al., 2011). However, there is an overwhelming skew towards collaborative or team-based understandings of cross-disciplinary work, with many authors explicitly confining their discussion to collaborative work practices: Even where they acknowledge the possibility of an individual working in an interdisciplinary fashion, they give this opportunity scant attention rather than sustained interest (Darbellay, 2015; Huutoniemi, Klein, Bruun, & Hukkinen, 2010; Kemp & Nurius, 2015; Lyall et al., 2011). Furthermore, some authors emphasize the internal variation within any discipline and the porosity of disciplinary borders, which they argue establish interdisciplinarity as simply a different way of doing disciplinarity (Osborne, 2013; Szostak, 2012). Within this context, Osborne highlighted the limitations of superficial interdisciplinarity, and lent especially scathing characterization to individual modes of interdisciplinarity as usually involving a lot of trespassing, imposing the researcher’s own view on another disciplinary area (Osborne, 2013).

This is especially concerning given my activity as a solo researcher, drawing directly on my own knowledge and experience of two disciplines. The disparaging view above (Osborne, 2013) rather presupposes the imposition of extradisciplinary perspectives on a receiving discipline rather than the productive integration or juxtaposition of such perspectives, but my personal approach to interdisciplinarity is more akin to alternative views in the literature. One such view is that optimal interdisciplinary collaboration requires the involvement of two or more researchers on a sustained basis and that such collaborations are more effective if each researcher has a bedrock of knowledge and skills in more than one discipline (Rowe, 2008). My approach to interdisciplinarity fits neatly with this more affirmative view: My integration and juxtaposition of disciplinary perspectives is not a contingent amalgamation for a one-off project, but rather a sustained method. This is not just a different form of interdisciplinarity, then, but a different approach: an underlying attitude towards and interest in working conjointly across disciplines in a manner that is concerned less with whether an interdisciplinary approach is needed (Lyall et al., 2011) than with whether it will generate interesting conclusions. However, this mode of interdisciplinary practice is seemingly barely tolerated even where it is minimally acknowledged.

Despite these literary limitations, I engage in detail here with one specific epistemological framework of interdisciplinarity. Drawing on analysis of research proposals as an indication of researcher intentions, the creators of this framework identify three dimensions of interdisciplinary research: scope, type, and goal (Huutoniemi et al., 2010). Scope denotes the cultural and conceptual distance between the disciplines involved, such that closely related disciplines would have narrow scope. Type refers to the degree to which and ways in which the disciplines relate to each other and is subdivided into multi- and interdisciplinarity. Multidisciplinarity can take encyclopaedic (loosely related by topic), contextualizing (related for problem-framing only), or composite (coordination of complementary skills) forms, whereas interdisciplinarity can take empirical (analytically diverse), methodological (diverse approaches integrated), or theoretical (developments from contrast or synthesis) forms. Finally, the framework’s authors define goals as either epistemological (aimed at growing knowledge), instrumental (addressing an extra-academic objective), or mixed (Huutoniemi et al., 2010). Although they lay their emphasis on collaborative forms of cross-disciplinary practice, the authors do acknowledge that interdisciplinary synthesis can be done individually, making this framework informative with respect to my own work as an individual interdisciplinarian.

The scope of my own work is narrow, for although geography and psychology conventionally sit within the social and life/medical sciences respectively, the aspects of psychology upon which I draw lie at the social end of the psychological spectrum, requiring the use of qualitative methods and the prioritization of positive psychology over psychopathology. Even were I to bring art back into the discussion, describing geography as a visual discipline and image-making as consistent with my Gendlinian perspective, the disciplines across which I work would remain closely aligned. In terms of type, my work would be interdisciplinary (either methodological or theoretical) as I modify the knowledge or practice that I extract from one discipline in order to shape it to the needs of the receiving discipline, which is in turn modified by the incoming material. Such knowledge, then, is not imposed upon but tailored to the receiving discipline, which in turn can modify the knowledge that it receives in a more reciprocal relationship than acknowledged in some quarters (Osborne, 2013). However, although epistemological goals of expanding knowledge of a subject are relevant, I have no specific extra-academic objectives, and I would suggest other goals not acknowledged in the framework, such as methodological development and opening new avenues for research as well as personal interest and development.

Consequently, the framework (Huutoniemi et al., 2010) functions well in capturing my individual interdisciplinarity, although further refinement of categories of goal might be fruitful. However, a further consideration that arises is the distinction between contributions targeted towards social objectives and those targeted towards disciplines. Unlike collaborative approaches in which any interdisciplinary modification of a discipline is secondary to the delivery of the extra-academic objective, I draw inspiration for my work from one discipline in order to intervene in the other: I direct a contribution towards the discipline from which it did not spring. As a practitioner, then, I work between two disciplines, but direct the knowledge- and practice-based contributions arising from that work towards a single discipline. This, in turn, has implications for how one might spatialize emergent knowledges and practices in relation to their target discipline, as although bidirectional contributory traffic exists, these emergent knowledges and practices are uniquely configured waround each discipline. In contrast to conventional understandings of team-based interdisciplinarity, in which those collaborating speak from a single discipline and assume mutually interdisciplinary adaptations—even though they are both secondary to social objectives and no doubt configured differently in each discipline due precisely to the differences between them—in my own work it is the individual that is interdisciplinary and the contributions are acknowledged as uniquely disciplinary. This, then, provides my starting point for a foray beyond interdisciplinarity as a singular if contested concept to construct a more nuanced spatial understanding of the interdisciplinary.

Beyond Interdisciplinarity

Arguably, then, interdisciplinarity is entirely the wrong term for any situation in which researchers work only from their own home discipline. Equally, interdisciplinarity does not reflect very well either the ways in which my own contributions relate to the disciplines to which they speak or how the outcomes of collaborative interdisciplinary work are taken up by and thereby reconfigure the participating disciplines. On this basis, it seems sensible to distinguish between the academic practitioner/s and the emergent knowledges and practices that they generate. Accordingly, the practitioner/s might or might not be interdisciplinary depending upon whether they work from one discipline or more, but still be producing knowledges and practices that are best considered disciplinary due to their disciplinary specificity. Indeed, stemming from other disciplines, any contribution made to a discipline through interdisciplinary work is perhaps best conceived as fundamentally external to the target discipline.

Applying this perspective to my own work, I found no single way of describing or conceptualizing how an emergent contribution relates to its target discipline. Rather, one must think in more nuanced terms about graduated or variegated spaces of disciplinarity, reflecting different relations between emergent knowledges and target disciplines. In Table 3.1, I develop these ideas into an embryonic conceptual framework for these variegated disciplinary spaces in relation to different aspects of my emergent contributions from psychology to geography.

Table 3.1 Variegated disciplinary spaces

In this understanding, one may consider potential contributions as para-, epi-, or peridisciplinary. One may class them as paradisciplinary if fellow academics treat them as external to or somehow abnormal for the target discipline, perhaps perceiving them as a threat to disciplinary coherence and, given the power to do so, therefore excluding them. The philosophical side of Gendlin’s work might fit this description, for although researchers have taken forward some of his methodological inspirations, his philosophical material has not (yet) received the same response. One may consider epidisciplinary work to add to or come after a discipline, acknowledged as a source of potential upon which to build, as seems to be the case with the methodological aspects of my work. One may describe work as peridisciplinary if it is perceived in terms of proximity to the discipline, being close to or having alignment with pre-existing interests. Such work might be invited further into the fold of the discipline, and the contributions to proficiency debates in the geographies of artistic practice might fit this description. Lastly, disciplinary work is fully internalized such that the discipline self-identifies with it, although none of my work currently fulfils this brief. Seemingly, then, one can use more differentiated terminology to describe more meaningfully the diverse spatial relations between emergent knowledges/practices and their target discipline, with a pair of quasi-disciplinary spaces identified between extra- or paradisciplinary space and intra- or disciplinary space.

Such reconceptualizations, however, raise further questions, three of which I attend to briefly here. Firstly, is this a patchwork or a process? With Table 3.1, I suggest a patchwork of discrete knowledges and practices that relate in distinctive ways to the same discipline, but there is also a sense in which these quasi-disciplinary spaces could be considered as stages in a transformational process of progressive incorporation into the discipline. Whereas in Table 3.1 I refer only to psychology’s contributions to geography, I could use a similar table for contributions in the other direction to illustrate how one contribution was initially excluded as a potentially threatening paradisciplinary knowledge but was subsequently reconfigured as epidisciplinary upon resubmission to a different publishing outlet. There would be no such table for contributions to art and no progression into art, as I am not seeking to publish in that field. In turn, the possibility arises that the progression an academic achieves by one contribution might benefit the reception of their other work, thus advancing their interests and career and highlighting the diverse and dynamic relationship between the practitioner behind the work, the work they produce, and the discipline concerned. It also brings together the patchwork and process perspectives both within single disciplines and across multiple disciplines, as suggested in Figure 3.4. In Figure 3.4b, I have more thoroughly incorporated my conceptual and methodological contributions than my theoretical contributions into geography, whereas with Figure 3.4c I evidence the dominance of geography over psychology in my academic practice and acknowledge my lack of progression in relation to art.

Fig. 3.4

Patchwork or process? Source: Design by author

The possibility of one contribution aiding the incorporation of subsequent contributions prompts a second question concerning the universality or otherwise of such conceptualizations. For example, would early contributions in a sub-discipline always be described as paradisciplinary? Surely this would depend upon the status and reputation of the practitioner concerned. As an early career researcher, I have no guarantees that any of my work will be taken up, but had the same work been done by a leader in another area of the discipline it would be a very different story, full of expectation that the work would be received swiftly and with little resistance due to the disciplinary rootedness and reputation of the individual concerned. Here, the term antedisciplinary might be more appropriate to reflect this work coming before more-or-less guaranteed disciplinary acceptance, as indicated in Figure 3.5. This, then, would form a sub-set of intradisciplinary space, further complicating the relationship between the academic, their work, and their discipline/s. This, of course, reinserts the political, and does so in a manner that reverses the post-political tendency identified earlier: By focusing on the technicalities of emergent knowledges, attention is refocused towards rather than away from the politics of disciplinarity.

Fig. 3.5

Graduated disciplinary spaces. Source: Design by author

Thirdly, how might this framework be of benefit in an applied capacity? Here, I feel it fit to draw attention to early-career academics working in an interdisciplinary fashion. It might help to identify multiple ways in which such academics are disadvantaged in contemporary academia even compared to the disadvantages identified in conventional interdisciplinary contexts (Darbellay, 2015; Felt et al., 2013; Kemp & Nurius, 2015; Leahey et al., 2017; Lyall et al., 2011; Moore et al., 2018), and to signpost developmental support and/or disciplinary shifts in practice with which one could help alleviate this within specific institutional contexts. For example, such academics might be disadvantaged not simply due to their junior status, but also because they do interdisciplinary work (which sits uneasily with the drive to maintain coherent disciplinary identities) and because (like me) they do the wrong type of interdisciplinary work (individual), which is currently not legitimized.

Seemingly, then, there is both scope for and need for a reconceptualization of both interdisciplinarity as a mode of academic practice and the variegated spatialities of emergent knowledges and practices in terms of its potential as both an analytical and pedagogical tool. However, this explicit concern for early-career researchers and their developmental needs brings me to the last major area for discussion: the potential for interdisciplinary proficiency and associated implications for academics’ understanding of expertise.

Inter/Disciplinary Knowledges

Similar difficulties arise in relation to interdisciplinary knowledges, as I demonstrated in relation to interdisciplinary spaces, meaning that despite drives to increase interdisciplinary working and despite identified needs—especially on the part of early-career academics—for enhanced support for interdisciplinary work (Darbellay, 2015; Felt et al., 2013; Kemp & Nurius, 2015; Leahey et al., 2017; Lyall et al., 2011; Moore et al., 2018), any such support is unlikely to be delivered in anything other than a discipline-specific fashion. This situation seemingly arises not only because of the disciplinary identity politics and the protectionist professionalization of disciplines, but also because of the long-standing prioritization of single-discipline working practices, as those currently in positions of disciplinary authority would have limited knowledge and experience of working in a properly (individual) interdisciplinary fashion, making them ill-equipped to formulate proficiency standards for such work. Prospects for establishing standards for interdisciplinary proficiency, then, seem remote, especially given the vast number and diverse nature of alternative disciplines that such standards would need to accommodate. This leaves two other possibilities to consider. One is undisciplined improficiency: the continuance of proto- or illegitimate activities beyond the bounds of any discipline. The other is professionalized indiscipline: reprofessionalizing for the receiving discipline the proto-activities that arose from a different discipline. However, neither of these resolves the problem of establishing legitimacy and proficiency for interdisciplinary work. The former results in such activities being permanently excluded and delegitimized, stuck in an academic no-man’s land, whereas the latter reinforces disciplinarity rather than validating interdisciplinarity. Ultimately, then, both interdisciplinary work and its associated knowledges seem destined to be externalized and delegitimized by the prevailing power of the disciplines, irrespective of any societal drives to promote interdisciplinary academic work.

This, though, prompts me to question what this might mean for academic expertise generally. Academics contest what expertise itself is, how one should conceptualize it, and how one can nurture it. Perspectives vary from the psychologically informed view of a staged process of individual development from rule-based learning to more fluent and intuitive performance (Dreyfus, 2006; Ericsson & Charness, 1994), through relational and social understandings that recognize the role of communities of practice in supporting the development of expertise and accrediting its attainment (Barbour, Sommer, & Gill, 2016; Collins & Evans, 2007; Evans & Collins, 2008; Fuller, 2006; Lamb, 2020), to performative notions of expertise as a communicative claim to knowledge, emphasizing the power dynamics of expertise (Kuhn & Rennstam, 2016; Treem & Leonardi, 2016). These, of course, need not be mutually exclusive, which brings me to the relationship between expertise as a signal of ability and professionalism as a marker of status. Situated within a broad community of practice that includes the most generic lay knowledges and practices, one can conceive an ever-steeper pyramid of progression as fewer people exhibit higher attainment, culminating in the leaders of a field at its pinnacle being both expert and professional. In Figure 3.6, I illustrate these parallels between the psychological staged perspective of expertise and the typology of lay through specialist expertise in a disciplinary context that combines the exclusiveness of expertise with the managerialist control of academic institutions (Collins & Evans, 2007; Correia, 2017; Dreyfus, 2006; Ericsson & Charness, 1994; Evans & Collins, 2008; Evetts, 2013).

Fig. 3.6

Expertise and professionalism. Source: Design by author

Personally, I might self-identify as proficient in geography but as a novice-going-on-proficient in psychology, lacking doctoral certification in psychology yet still drawing on it for professional purposes—and in art, meanwhile, I possess little more than ubiquitous expertise as a hobbyist. However, my early-career status prompts me to conceptualize these expertises in combination rather than in isolation: I remain an early-career academic despite these differences in proficiency between disciplines. Again, one faces the challenge of accommodating interconnections evident in lived academic praxis within conceptualizations that are driven by disciplinary specificity. It is equally important to consider the differential scope between my three disciplinary fields, whereby psychology and geography overlap to a greater degree than either does with art: I am educated to university level and publish in both geography and psychology, but not in art. Bringing this differentiated relationality between disciplines into conversation with the expertise/professionalism binary discussed above, different visual landscapes of my interdisciplinary expertise emerge, as illustrated in Figure 3.7.

Fig. 3.7

Interdisciplinary expertise and professionalism. Source: Design by author

Clearly, expertise is not a singular phenomenon but multiple and variegated, with different researchers emphasizing this characteristic in different ways. Some focus on the context within which expertise comes to light, such as the interaction between objects and the different ways in which their manipulation gains value, thereby attributing value to the ability to manipulate (Kuhn & Rennstam, 2016). Others adopt a taxonomic approach, such as those mentioned above, classifying the diversity and hierarchy of expertises (Barbour et al., 2016; Collins & Evans, 2007; Ericsson & Charness, 1994; Evans & Collins, 2008), and yet others combine the two, taking into account occupational setting, associated norms of practice, and the individual’s intentions (Winch, 2010). It is this last example, the conceptualization of dimensions of expertise, that forms the focus of my attention here.

With this framework of expertise, one can highlight both the distinction and close interaction between knowing that (systematic propositional knowledge of, e.g., facts) and knowing how (practical knowledge of, e.g., processual activities), which—despite being conceived as different forms of knowing—are deeply interwoven (Winch, 2010). For any one discipline, a combination of knowing that and knowing how would constitute proficiency or expertise, some of which might be unique to that discipline, but some of which might not. Within my own work, the different ways of knowing do not feature equally between the disciplines, as shown in Figure 3.8. The strand coming from art is more knowing how than knowing that, as I value untutored and uninformed practice as much as formally accredited practice, whereas the strand from psychology is more knowing that than knowing how, as I draw on psychological concepts and theory rather than practical or methodological issues. Although one could argue that my untutored artistic endeavors do not constitute knowing how precisely because they are untutored, and that in drawing on Gendlin’s techniques I am employing psychological know-how, to do so would re-discipline these aspects of my work. In order to integrate them with geography, each has been deprofessionalized, yet they also do not meet geography’s conception of proficiency because they have come from beyond its borders: They are proto-practices.

Fig. 3.8

Knowing how versus knowing that. Source: Design by author

In my own work, then, the constellation of knowing how and knowing that is interdisciplinary, as with it I integrate influences from multiple fields of practice. Yet it is also extradisciplinary, as none of the disciplines would recognize it individually, complicating evaluation of originality as a marker of academic expertise. In this context, closeness of fit between the intervention and the receiving discipline becomes critical. To count as legitimately belonging to a discipline in the first instance and as constituting an original contribution in the second instance, the intervention must be acknowledgeable within the prevailing normative structure of the receiving discipline (Winch, 2010). Integrating the issues of spatializing emergent knowledges and evaluating expertise, I have the impression that only contributions located within at least a quasi-disciplinary space are candidates for consideration as legitimate and original contributions.

Proponents of the Dimensions of Expertise framework also identify a tripartite distinction between ways in which expertise can be understood and developed: a vertical dimension functions hierarchically through formal accreditation; a horizontal dimension functions socially through scaffolded immersion in a community of practice without formal accreditation; and a scope dimension functions by forging increasingly complex and lengthy links between task-types (Winch, 2010). This distinction is then employed to illustrate how different occupational modes—such as professions versus crafts—are characterized by different configurations of these dimensions, with professions being more vertical and crafts more horizontal, which in turn are characterized more by knowing that and knowing how respectively (Winch, 2010). Having already considered how knowing that and knowing how feature between my disciplinary interests in broad terms, it is informative to do likewise in relation to vertical, horizontal, and scoping dimensions.

As evidenced in Table 3.2, my disciplinary engagements are characterized by different constellations of the dimensions of expertise, with geography strong in all three dimensions by virtue of being the discipline in which I teach, and especially strong in both vertical and scoping dimensions. By contrast, psychology is characterized by vertical and horizontal dimensions of expertise to a lesser degree, as I am not as embedded within the psychology community as within the geography community, with the vertical dimension proving stronger than the horizontal. In relation to art, I would not claim any substantive knowing that. Yet although I am outside the professional art community, my research methods have afforded some degree of both horizontal and scoping dimensions, although less so than in geography, and with a stronger emphasis on the scoping than the horizontal dimension.

Table 3.2 Dimensions of expertise

In conceptualizing expertise not in terms of its specificity with respect to each discipline but in terms of how it is bound into each discipline, one can move towards a more combinatorial appreciation of interdisciplinary expertise, as in Figure 3.9, with which I present a visualization of the dimensions of expertise for each discipline as evaluated in Table 3.2, both separately and in combination. By integrating the dimensions of expertise across disciplines in this way, I draw attention to the fact that although the horizontal dimension is the only dimension characterizing all three disciplines, it is the vertical and scoping dimensions that feature most strongly when they feature at all.

Fig. 3.9

Interdisciplinary dimensions of expertise. Source: Design by author

This makes clear that the authority of a field’s hierarchy is more powerful in establishing my pattern of expertise than the scaffolded support of a field’s community. Given that any individual is acknowledged as belonging to multiple communities but far fewer hierarchies—exoteric versus esoteric circles (Fleck, 1979) or ubiquitous versus specialist domains (Collins & Evans, 2007; Evans & Collins, 2008)—this might suggest that interdisciplinary expertise would be more appropriately rooted in the scaffolded support of broad communities than the authoritarian accreditation of a hierarchy. Perhaps researchers would find it easier to identify productive connections between different disciplines if they paid more attention to looser connections within lay expertises, which might be expected to overlap to a greater degree than specialist expertises, drawing on academics’ ability to see informal connections between their varied communities of practice—connections that are potentially broken during the process of formalization, specialization, and professionalization of knowledge. Shifting the emphasis from the hierarchical to the social determination of expertise need not remove disciplinary hierarchies from the process but could enable broader communities of practice to play a stronger role in evaluating potential contributions of cross-disciplinary linkages and interventions by setting these evaluations in the context of broader and more (albeit loosely) interconnected lay expertises.

With Table 3.2, I also acknowledge that for psychology and art, I direct my scoping activities towards forging links between the disciplines rather than within them, whereas for geography, I form links both within and beyond the discipline. I thus raise the possibility of the scoping dimension (Winch, 2010) to facilitate the formulation of standards of legitimacy and proficiency for explicitly interdisciplinary work, as academics could redirect the emphasis away from questions of what is being linked towards questions of how these things are being linked. Rather than a receiving discipline excluding an intervention because it rubs against a pre-existing emphasis, researchers might be more concerned with valuing the contribution made in the rubbing against: What is it that makes this intervention uncomfortable, how can one interrogate that further and to what ends for which disciplines? Significantly, this would direct academics’ attention towards working with the ricochets among disciplines instead of policing the borders between them. In this context, the more uncomfortable an intervention, the more valuable its contribution—and thus the expertise of the individual behind it—may be. Perhaps, then, it is possible to move towards greater validation of genuinely interdisciplinary academic practice without having to dismantle the disciplinary architecture of the Academy.

However, this notion of scope as forging connections does not resolve the issues faced by individual interdisciplinarians. To elaborate on the significance of this, it is helpful to revisit Fleck’s work on thought styles, collectives, and solidarity. If a thought style is a common way of thinking within a field of practice, thought collectives are groups of people who commit to the relevant thought style, and thought solidarity among the collective reinforces its prevailing thought style, thereby leading to rejection of others (Fleck, 1979; Punstein & Glückler, 2020), then this discussion has implications for how one understands each term. An individual who works in two disciplines simultaneously embodies two thought styles, thereby forging a bridge between separate thought collectives, but also constitutes an alternative form of thought collective: A collective of diverse thought styles in one individual rather than a collective of diverse individuals sharing a singular thought style. In the case of an individual interdisciplinarian, however, it is not the “other” that is rejected but one of the collective “us” who—despite committing to the thought style of the collective doing the rejecting—is rejected anyway precisely because of the connections that they forge.

Although one must acknowledge that such rejection is not inevitable, by drawing on research conducted with professionals (engineers and designers) engaged in different ways with product development (Punstein & Glückler, 2020), it becomes clear that any rejection of individual interdisciplinarians is fundamentally oppositional to both the interdisciplinary emphasis on the benefits of knowledge co-creation and the academic emphasis on originality within framings of proficiency. Punstein & Glückler found that such work was characterized by diverse relations between the two sets of professionals, ranging from mutual exclusion to genuinely engaged co-creation (Punstein & Glückler, 2020). Within the discussion of mutual exclusion, they noted that engineers sometimes accomplish the task of industrial design, thereby excluding the designers, but this might equally be considered a proto-practice: Engineering influenced from beyond its own field. Moreover, a later example of an engineer interested in design changing the thought style of their own collective (Punstein & Glückler, 2020)—if informed by any degree of formal engagement with the field of design—could constitute individual interdisciplinarity. With this example of an “exoteric push within a local professional collective” (Punstein & Glückler, 2020, p. 563), the design-interested engineer introduced design to their own thought collective and made it commensurable with its thought style: Hence, this is not an imposition of individual views (Osborne, 2013) but the crafting of a conduit between otherwise disparate bodies of knowledge and practice, which was possible precisely because this individual had some level of engagement with and commitment to the exoteric “other.”

This conduit is forged at the level of the body: the body of the design-interested engineer that holds within it at least a proportion of know that and know how (Winch, 2010) belonging to each field or discipline, and that possesses the capability to render them commensurable. Given the infrequency with which researchers have found such co-creation to occur, this rendering commensurable is presumably a significant achievement, which brings into sharp relief the significance of social practice in establishing (in)commensurability (Punstein & Glückler, 2020) through the politics of disciplinary boundary marking. However, the invalidation of individual interdisciplinarity is starkly problematized if one considers the value deemed inherent in the permanent encounter of two collectives in a place, which can produce particular moods more conducive to this rendering commensurable (Punstein & Glückler, 2020). Although this might conventionally apply to team-based contexts, there is an enduring encounter of two collectives in one place evident in the exoteric push articulated: In the body of the design-interested engineer, or indeed, any individual interdisciplinarian. An individual interdisciplinarian has already taken on these divergent terminologies and understandings as their own: They have either already reconciled them or can see the potential to do so. In this instance, the individual human body forms a common crucible of understanding for divergent bodies of knowledge, whereas in team-based scenarios, the combined collective must construct its own social body as that common crucible.

Bringing this chapter back to my non-representational emphasis, the body of the individual interdisciplinarian could be considered a mood vessel, a capability of commensurability and a conductor of co-creation between different bodies of knowledge through the forging of connections between those knowledges. Arguably, then, individuals can be quintessentially interdisciplinary in a way that teams cannot: They might be able to perceive potential connections on an implicit level that would be harder to explicate in the discourse-dependent construction of a team-based social body. From a Gendlinian perspective, it should be easier for an individual to render commensurable different thought styles than for a collective to do so. The individual interdisciplinarian might be able to explicate into a conceptual formulation connections between thought styles that they sense within their implicit understanding at the level of the body, whereas in the collective context those connections can only be articulated rather than explicated, because there are no connections at the implicit level (as each individual has committed to only one thought style) and the articulation between different thought collectives is already anchored in the formal conceptual level and is thereby detached from the implicit within both thought collectives. If interdisciplinarity is about knowledge co-creation across disciplinary boundaries, then the individual interdisciplinarian is the archetypal embodiment of interdisciplinarity, yet such interdisciplinary formulations continue to be frowned upon despite their generativity as wellsprings of originality, which is meant to be the pinnacle of academic capability. The rejection of individual interdisciplinarians, then, is contrary to both the aspirations of interdisciplinarity (knowledge co-creation) and one of the defining characteristics of academia (originality).

Using this as a springboard towards a conclusion, I have used Figure 3.10 to highlight my argument that despite conventional understandings of interdisciplinarity as team-based, it is a term more appropriately applied to individual academics, and underlines the unipolar relationality between emergent knowledges/practices and their target discipline. With the figures, I have also specified the extra-, quasi-, and intradisciplinary spatialities of emergent knowledges proposed earlier as they relate to my own work, and teased apart different ways in which an individual might conduct their interdisciplinary work. The top figure would be multidisciplinary, as although its research draws on each discipline and speaks to each discipline, there is no interdisciplinary connection or contribution. The middle figure would be the quintessential interdisciplinarian, contributing equally to each discipline from the other’s perspective. The bottom figure is me, contributing to each discipline from the perspective of the other but in a skewed fashion, contributing more to geography from psychology than vice versa due to my greater embeddedness within geography.

Fig. 3.10

Interdisciplinary spaces and subjects. Source: Design by author

The challenge, though, is to deal with the dashed line down the middle of Figure 3.10, so that interdisciplinary work can become genuinely interdisciplinary rather than being progressively straightjacketed into prescriptive disciplines, and so that researchers can focus their efforts on optimizing the generativity of uncomfortable interventions and their ricocheting effects around the disciplinary architecture rather than excluding these interdisciplinary innovations, destroying interdisciplinary spaces, denying interdisciplinary knowledges, and quashing interdisciplinary career prospects in the process. As to how this might be achieved, I have suggested in this chapter that integrating dimensions of expertise (Winch, 2010) among the disciplines involved in interdisciplinary work, shifting the balance of power more towards the scaffolded development of expertise through broader communities of practice than the current reliance on vertical accreditations, and focusing on the scoping dimension in forging links instead of reinforcing divisions between disciplines might be productive avenues to explore.

More specific suggestions as to how interdisciplinarity—especially at the level of the individual academic—might be both recognized and nurtured are focused on publication opportunities, and staff appraisals and support. It would be valuable to establish publication outlets for works that run up against journal editorial decisions about disciplinary boundaries precisely because they are seeking to question or unsettle the borders of a discipline, and this change would be enhanced if departments adopted an affirmative approach to challenging encounters in the publication process. The pressure to publish or perish encourages the production of “safe” works, but the greater potential contribution might come from works considered to be “dangerous” from a disciplinary perspective. Perhaps work that is initially rejected for transgressing disciplinary emphases should be reviewed by colleagues or institutions to consider this alternative contribution and how it might best be facilitated, which could be done at the level of an individual work, an individual academic, or a collective. In this way, certain aggravating publication encounters could become indicators of potential contribution rather than of deficient disciplinary work; individual interdisciplinarity would be validated; and its potential contribution might find new life, thereby facilitating the acceptance of such an academic’s contributions and accelerating the progression of their incorporation into a discipline without confining them to that discipline. Academics could further enhance this by actively emphasizing the value of working on an individual interdisciplinary basis in staff development or appraisal processes—in other words, if those conducting such processes could seek out and nurture those with the capability of commensurability, the attitude of interdisciplinarity. Not only would such shifts present disciplines as outward-looking and receptive rather than inward-looking and protectionist and provide a more welcoming and supportive environment for (especially early career) individual interdisciplinarians, but could also prompt curriculum diversification, which in time, would further embed this new brighter dawn of interdisciplinarity within the academy more broadly. This, then, is not so much about bringing together two disciplinary collectives—whether temporarily or permanently—to produce a mood conducive to co-creation of knowledge, but is much more about validating and supporting those academics who already embody—in their own enduring attitude and practice as an individual interdisciplinarian—two (or more) collectives to facilitate that co-creation of knowledge.

Conclusion

I drew my inspiration for this chapter from the suggestion that disciplines can serve as mutual sources of proto-practices in interdisciplinary entanglements and explored the implications of this through an auto-ethnographic interrogation of my own academic interdisciplinarity, attending respectively to interdisciplinary spaces and interdisciplinary knowledges.

In relation to space, I unsettled conventional conceptualizations of interdisciplinarity by exposing the post-democratic function of such views in delegitimizing interdisciplinary practices undertaken by individual academics, reinforcing the disciplinary identity politics at play in maintaining disciplinary distinctiveness and autonomy. I suggested that “inter” is only an appropriate prefix in the context of individual interdisciplinarians, as in other contexts “inter” is never properly inter and cannot be sustained due to the power of disciplinary forces. I also recommended that a more variegated conceptualization of disciplinary spaces is needed to accommodate the diverse spatialities of emergent knowledges and practices, and proposed a classification for this purpose distinguishing between extra- or paradisciplinary, quasi-disciplinary (peri- and epi-), and intradisciplinary (or disciplinary) spaces.

In relation to knowledge, a similar picture emerged in that supposedly interdisciplinary knowledges and practices are acutely vulnerable to the conforming forces of disciplinarity by virtue of the disciplines’ power to establish introspective standards of legitimacy and proficiency. This, I proposed, fractures the connections being forged between disciplines in interdisciplinary work, as that work is only ever evaluated against the benchmark of an individual discipline; moreover, the longstanding dominance of unidisciplinary academic practice makes it difficult for disciplinary leaders to formulate meaningful standards for legitimacy and proficiency that could be applied to individual interdisciplinarians.

Seemingly, then, disciplinary spaces construct disciplinary knowledges but interdisciplinary spaces do not and, I suggest, cannot construct interdisciplinary knowledges: Disciplinary spaces first deny and then destroy interdisciplinary spaces, and subsequently either exclude or incorporate the interdisciplinary knowledges with which they would otherwise be associated. Such a process pulls the interdisciplinary rug from under the feet of interdisciplinarians and brings very sobering career prospects for academics seeking to work in this way, as they are perpetually denied both legitimacy and proficiency on anything other than a unidisciplinary basis. This denies and unravels the very quality of their work that they value and that generates academic contributions, even though they embody the permanent co-location of two collectives deemed valuable for the co-creation of knowledge that holds potential for the sustained generation of originality so central to academia.

However, interrogating the intersections between interdisciplinarity and understandings of proficiency through the lens of dimensions of expertise, it became apparent that there are ways in which more integrative understandings of expertise might be developed to accommodate interdisciplinary knowledges, practices, and expertises without having to dismantle the disciplinary architecture. By shifting the balance between dimensions of expertise to grant a stronger role to the horizontal scaffolding of communities of practice and refocusing notions of legitimacy and proficiency in interdisciplinary work on scoping activities through staff-development processes and provision of support, researchers might be able to validate the ways in which interdisciplinarity has the potential to ricochet among the disciplines, rather than prioritizing the policing of borders between them, without having to jettison disciplinary distinctiveness.

Ultimately, then, my conclusion is cautiously optimistic, and I propose four productive opportunities. Firstly, researchers have the means to reconceptualise interdisciplinarity in a more democratic fashion that accommodates individual interdisciplinarians. Second, the fields are now in a position to develop and refine their understanding of disciplinary spaces to accommodate the diverse, intersecting, and shifting spatialities of emergent knowledges and practices encountered in the lived praxis of academia. Third, researchers have the conceptual tools necessary to reconfigure their understandings of expertise in the context of interdisciplinary working so that they attend less to the specifics of individual disciplines and more to how such working is bound into those disciplines, enabling them to validate interdisciplinary linkages, ricocheting, and uncomfortable encounters. Fourth, and finally, not only would this pave the way for brighter career prospects for individual interdisciplinarians by establishing their legitimacy and proficiency, but it would also more appropriately reflect and deliver contemporary trends towards greater interdisciplinary working, which could be supported by greater engagement with Gendlin’s body of work. Perhaps there is a way, after all, to professionalize undisciplined practices and validate improficiency—or rather, to render interdisciplinarity proficient on its own terms even within the existing disciplinary architecture.