Disciplinarities: intra, cross, multi, inter, trans

For some papers I am currently working on, I have taken up my interest in definitions of different types of disciplinarities (see blog post from a couple of years ago). Since that time, I think talking about the need for working interdisciplinary has only increased, but still there seem to be no real incentives for actually making it possible to work genuinely interdisciplinary. This holds when working within an academic setting, and it is even more complicated when trying to bridge academic and artistic disciplines.

In the middle of all of this, I hear the word transdisciplinarity more and more frequently. Trying to find a proper definition of what this means, I came across Marilyn Stember’s 1990 paper Advancing the social sciences through the interdisciplinary enterprise. There she offers the following overview of different levels of disciplinarity (my summary of her points):

  • Intradisciplinary: working within a single discipline.
  • Crossdisciplinary: viewing one discipline from the perspective of another.

Based on this, I have added two elements (inter and trans) to my former sketch of the different disciplinarities (based initially on Zeigler (1990)):


In her paper, Stember argues that many people believe they work interdisciplinary, while in fact, it is more common to work multidisciplinary.
