For Transdisciplinarity

Abstract

This response situates Stephen Amico’s provocation within the context of an intimate connection between postcolonial thought and the drive towards interdisciplinarity. It examines via three critical moments the deeply intertwined desires to destroy the colony on the one hand and disciplinarity on the other. To this end it analyses the debates around interdisciplinarity between Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Laurent Dubreuil, before turning to the explicit thematization of transdisciplinarity as part of the neoliberalization of the university. Finally, the essay turns to Hélène Cixous’s reflections in “Mon Algériance” to develop another way of thinking about the irreducible dispersal and dissemination of disciplinarity and its imbrication in the (post)colonial.

Music in the Middle: A Culture-Cognition-Mediator Model of Musical Functionality

“…Research under the culture-cognition-mediator model must be strongly transdisciplinary. Such a transdisciplinary scope has been central to music scholarship for well over a decade (Born, 2010; Parncutt, 2006; Waltham-Smith, 2020), so this particular implication is far from novel. However, it puts the culture-cognition-mediator model in line with current trends in musicology more broadly, verifying a necessary but not sufficient condition of its relevance in contemporary scholarship.…”