TY - JOUR

T1 - Twisted into Form

T2 - Eclecticism and Epistemological Dissonance as a Framework for Interdisciplinarity

AU - Sørensen, Tim Flohr

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - With interdisciplinarity increasingly being emphasised as an unquestionable asset in archaeology, and prioritised amongst research funding institutions and university strategists, it may be worthwhile exploring the nature of collaborative research: What are the political mechanisms of interdisciplinary research and how does epistemic dissonance affect collaborative efforts? In this article, I contend truly interdisciplinary research should be capable of emphasising the sometimes radical differences between disciplinary research designs, ontologies, epistemologies and definitions of knowledge. To this end, I pursue atmosphere as an example of a phenomenon that can, or should, be studied in a way that attends to epistemic differences, since atmosphere has different implications in different disciplinary settings. I will favour postmodern eclecticism – however altmodisch and unoriginal it may seem in the 2020s – as my methodical approach to atmosphere, since it lends itself to a messy and noisy multiplicity of epistemologies and research designs doing justice to the cross-disciplinary concept of atmosphere. The strength of eclecticism is its lack of consistency and stringency, and its capacity for sustaining epistemic dissonance instead of concealing it.

AB - With interdisciplinarity increasingly being emphasised as an unquestionable asset in archaeology, and prioritised amongst research funding institutions and university strategists, it may be worthwhile exploring the nature of collaborative research: What are the political mechanisms of interdisciplinary research and how does epistemic dissonance affect collaborative efforts? In this article, I contend truly interdisciplinary research should be capable of emphasising the sometimes radical differences between disciplinary research designs, ontologies, epistemologies and definitions of knowledge. To this end, I pursue atmosphere as an example of a phenomenon that can, or should, be studied in a way that attends to epistemic differences, since atmosphere has different implications in different disciplinary settings. I will favour postmodern eclecticism – however altmodisch and unoriginal it may seem in the 2020s – as my methodical approach to atmosphere, since it lends itself to a messy and noisy multiplicity of epistemologies and research designs doing justice to the cross-disciplinary concept of atmosphere. The strength of eclecticism is its lack of consistency and stringency, and its capacity for sustaining epistemic dissonance instead of concealing it.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - Archaeology

KW - Concepts

KW - Interdisciplinarity

KW - Postmodernism

KW - Eclecticism

KW - Atmosphere

KW - Interdisciplinarity

KW - Discipline

KW - Conceptual dissonance

KW - Eclecticism

KW - Postmodernism

KW - Atmosphere

U2 - 10.17169/refubium-37028

DO - 10.17169/refubium-37028

M3 - Journal article

VL - 11

SP - 53

EP - 67

JO - Forum Kritische Archaeologie

JF - Forum Kritische Archaeologie

SN - 2194-346X

ER -