article: social epistemology of transdisciplinarity

Julie Thompson Klein’s Notes Toward a Social Epistemology of Transdisciplinarity has the potential to be really useful in a LIS context.  One of the knowledge/library issues I’ve been particularly interested in, is how the linear arrangement of information in a physical library can help or hinder a research question depending on the disciplinary context the researcher is coming from.

I really experienced this when working on my annotated bibliography for reference class.  Studying the feminist critique of science lead to a lot of resources in the social sciences.  Those, nearly, uniformly presented a similar accepted knowledge base.  There were a few texts in the sciences section, too, but those came at the subject from an entirely different perspective.  A feminist researcher approaching the questions would get a very different perspective on the issue depending on their academic area of interest.

Thompson Klein discusses how the world, in general, is more complex and interconnected than it once was, and we’re seeing that in academic subjects as well.  She cited women’s studies, systems thinking, peace studies, cognitive science, etc, as examples of new disciplines that are interdisciplinary.  Thompson Klein also pointed out that traditional areas of study sometimes borrow from other fields.  For example, an organisim can be considered in terms of culture, biology, and chemistry.  A political system can be considered in terms of political science, economics, or sociology.  In a sense, this project is borrowing from other disciplines to consider the more traditional aspects of LIS.

Also, Thompson Klein discusses “social epistemology of knowledge practices.”  This phrase might actually be a good phrase for what I’m investigating.  This could encompass the online social technologies that are interesting to me as well.  The blogging chapter hasn’t been published yet, by the way.  I’m looking into it.