Exemplary introductions to interdisciplinary work

Written By Ayomide Yomi-Odedeyi

My dissertation project, and research more broadly, is highly interdisciplinary. For me, the most difficult thing about interdisciplinary work so far has been figuring out where to start, where to end, and how to delineate my scope.

So imagine my joy yesterday when ole miss Al Gore Rhythm over at the Twitter pushed a very helpful thread started by Dr. Travis Chi Wing Lau to my timeline.

Dr. Lau asked:

"Academic hivemind: what are your favorite introductions in an interdisciplinary monograph that really models how the author is not only putting into conversation these different fields but also intervening in them?"

Link to the original tweet

And thank goodness for the generosity of his followers, because they came with an abundance of examples! Some of these were already on my bookshelf here at home, or on my to-read list, while others were completely new to me. Luckily, many of them have introduction chapters that can be read for free online.

This thread also opened up space for the tagged authors mentioned in the thread to reflect on what it was like to write the work being lauded publicly.

Dr. La Marr Jurelle Bruce, author of How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind (on this list) shared that he agonized over his introduction. I am currently agonizing over my own work, let me tell you! I am at a stage in my process where I feel a complicated mix of resentment and determination every time I click on my word processor. So Dr. Bruce’s tweet was a nice reminder that I’m in this for the long haul and I have to think about the challenges of writing like someone who will be doing this for a long time, and not someone stuck in a single project that will never end and also kill me, but not before turning me into a shell of my former self and making me cry all the time. (Haha just kidding…or am I?!).

It’s uncommon for successful academics to talk about the actual process of writing, so I am always grateful for the vulnerability of my more senior colleagues in academia who are willing to share honestly about the lived experience of producing valuable work.

I’ve gathered all the books people named in the thread into a Zotero collection, as well as listed it out below in plain text. If I missed any, let me know in the comments. I’ll go back and add them, as well as update the link to the RDF.

Here is the interdisciplinary intros RDF.

Also, let me know if you’d like a reading buddy or book club for one or more of these. I plan to spend some time over the next several months sitting down and studying these intro chapters strategically to map out how these authors enter into their debates, and position themselves within the discourses. Maybe we could read an introduction and meet to talk about it on zoom or via email, or something of the sort? I have no idea if it’s even wise to make such an offer to internet strangers. I figure, if it goes terribly I’ll have learned a valuable lesson and never do such a thing again. Maybe I’ll just put up a follow up blog post where I present a content analysis and framework of what I find. I’ll probably just go with whatever of these two options gets the most traction.

The Full List of Books Recommended in Response to Dr. Lau’s Tweet.

Where available, I have linked directly to the introduction chapters on the publisher websites. Otherwise, I have linked to the publisher’s page of the book.

Ayomide Yomi-Odedeyi
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