ABSTRACT
Contemporary globalization debates, however, have raised a plethora of empirical, normative, and epistemic concerns that cannot be sorted out by specialists operating within the narrow and often rather arbitrary confines of single disciplines and their associated idioms. Critical of this tendency to
compartmentalize the complexity of social existence into discreet spheres of activity, global studies has evolved as a self-consciously transdisciplinary field committed to the engagement and integration of multiple knowledge systems and research methodologies. In the United States, global studies is part of a small but growing interdisciplinary trend in the academy that started in the 1970s as a response to the methodological rigidity of dominant behavioral approaches. At the time, some scholars championed interdisciplinarity to address ‘real-world’ issues and develop broader and problem-centered perspectives. In the 1980s and 1990s, these academics turned to interdisciplinary modes of teaching and research primarily for intellectual and political reasons. They soon discovered that the increasingly neoliberal environment of higher education began to favor interdisciplinarity for financial, rather than intellectual, reasons. Budget-conscious administrators often saw interdisciplinary programs as a way of circumventing self-governance at the department level and reduce labor costs. Public and private funding agencies external to the university appreciated its enhanced focus on policy-relevant issues. As Isaac Kamola has noted, interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century constitutes a mixed blessing. While it challenges epistemologically conservative regimes of disciplinary knowledge production, it also complements the defunding of established departments and programs.2
