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Aloha, On 4/24/2012 9:18 AM, Dr Dave Evans wrote: > Interdisciplinary study as a methodology is not entirely a comfortable > fit with the nuts and bolts ways that university departmental > structure is put together and managed. When I was there, my alma mater emphasized and promoted the notion of "interdisciplinary studies" in a variety of ways, including having formally acknowledged interdisciplinary programs of study and administrative centers. My own grant affiliation was with the interdisciplinary Center for South Asian Studies, although my academic affiliation was with the Anthropology Department. Practically speaking, this entailed my office space being in the building hosting the Center not in the one hosting the Department. Which, I discovered, did influence my overall relationship with the Department in a slightly negative manner. Interdisciplinary = shadow person. Taking the notion of interdisciplinary studies more or less seriously, I also discovered that many academics are neither willing nor prepared to understand and support research that crosscuts disciplines and/or received departmental turf. What actually brought about some lasting re-alignments toward some sorts of interdisciplinary studies in my university's social science college turned out to be the simultaneous establishment of two colleges of human medicine, thanks to a generous state legislature. Interdisciplinary medicine X social science became quite do-able, and many revealed that they had been doing such interdisciplinary studies all along, even when nobody noticed before. Even me. Musing I Found Bioscientists Fascinating, Even Ethnographically Fascinating, But I Also Found It Chancy To Reveal Their Secrets! Rose, Pitch Michigan State University alum