Knowledge, Culture and Interdisciplinary Dialogue
Ravi de Costa
Summary

This paper sets out the views and experiences of interdisciplinary research held by an “early-career-stage” social scientist whose work has predominantly been in the areas of colonialism and culture. The author emphasizes a dimension probably not central to most understandings of interdisciplinarity, the ethical and political. In particular, he draws on his research on indigenous peoples to suggest that narrow or segmented traditions of knowledge production have marginalized peoples deemed as “primitive” and have imposed upon them the norms and policies of dominant European societies. Using this approach, the paper goes on to offer three categories for thinking about the motivations that underlie dialogues between disciplines and traditions of knowledge production: an ethical approach, a limits-of-method approach, and a problem-based approach. The paper concludes with an argument that a comprehensive dialogue – whether in the context of a research project or in the design of research institutions themselves – will be one that makes space for a variety of approaches