The modern university can trace its roots to Kant's call for enlightened self-determination, with education aiming to produce an informed and responsible body of citizens. As the university evolved, specialized areas of investigation emerged, enabling ever more precise research and increasingly nuanced arguments. In recent decades, however, challenges to the hegemony of disciplines have arisen, partly in response to a perceived need for the university to focus greater energy on its public vocation—teaching and the dissemination of knowledge.

Valences of Interdisciplinarity presents essays by an international array of scholars committed to enhancing our understanding of the theoretical underpinnings and the practical realities of interdisciplinary teaching and research. What is, and what should be, motivating our reflections on (and practice of) approaches that transcend the conventional boundaries of discipline? And in adopting such transdisciplinary approaches, how do we safeguard critical methods and academic rigour? Reflecting on the obstacles they have encountered both as thinkers and as educators, the authors map out innovative new directions for the interdisciplinary project. Together, the essays promise to set the standards of the debate about interdisciplinarity for years to come.

Raphael Foshay has been teaching in Athabasca University’s MA Program in Integrated Studies, since 2008. His interests lie principally in literary, cultural, and interdisciplinary theory. He has written on Derrida, Hegel, Heidegger, and Levinas, as well as such literary figures as Joyce, Yeats, Kafka, and Wyndham Lewis and is the editor of Valences of Interdisciplinarity: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy.

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“This volume of essays could be of interest to faculty and administrators of graduate interdisciplinary programs or those contemplating developing such programs, because it shows the complexity of clarifying what such a program would be, the value of such programs and the challenges in gaining acceptance for them.”

“What all the essays here seem to be wrestling with—at their core—is the creation of an engaged self, both for the practitioner of interdisciplinary studies and for students.... In wrestling with the shifting valences of interdisciplinarity, the authors reveal their own quests for integration, to find a stable nucleus within the cloud of shifting electrons.”

Keith E. Welsh