LLC Students at GRC

Widely known for offering different approaches to traditional research, interdisciplinarity draws knowledge from several other fields. Though seemingly an educated notion, consequently, interdisciplinary fields have encountered much resistance from practitioners of traditional disciplines. Aside from their difference in practices, resistance is also rooted in failure to admit their monopolizations of knowledge and omission of non-white objects. lnterdisciplinarity counters inequality by rejecting neutrality and suggesting that modern academy has failed to involve personal experiences into traditional discourses. As the personal largely became political, academia commissioned social justice issues. Parker and Samantrai (201) discuss the 1960s and early 1970s as a time where interest in social justice was taken within education. While Black studies, Chicano studies and Asian American studies rejected disciplines dominated by white faculty, women's studies served as a corrective to address women's erasure from humanities and to the sexism of the academy and society (pg. 7). Birthed at the brink of liberatory demonstration during anti-war protests, civil rights movement, women’s liberation movement etc., ethnic studies, cultural studies and women's studies emerged because of political movements accompanied by movements on college campuses. These fields became known as knowledge producers. Social justice is linked to interdisciplinarity, but are interdisciplinary scholars committed to social justice? How much of interdisciplinary work is rooted in social justice, and how much is simply application of varying methodologies? This microtalk will deliver a look at Parker and Samantrai's critical analysis of interdisciplinarity and its relationship with social justice, in addition to UMBC's possibilities.