Interdisciplinarity Beyond the Buzzword:A Guide to Academic Work Across Disciplines

Interdisciplinarity has recently been lavished with considerable hype in academia. A large proportion of calls for funding, new shiny projects and educational endeavours mention the concept. In Amsterdam, many research and education initiatives – academic and non-academic alike – seem to incorporate interdisciplinarity in some way. But what is interdisciplinarity? What is it good for? And how can a researcher best conduct interdisciplinary research? Very little hands-on guidance is currently available, particularly for those who are just starting out with interdisciplinary research or teaching. The Amsterdam Young Academy (AYA), founded by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the University of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam University Medical Centers, is an independent platform where talented researchers from different disciplines meet to develop views on research and science policy. Within AYA’s Interdisciplinarity Working Group, we aim to advance interdisciplinary research and teaching in Amsterdam, to provide a community particularly for early career interdisciplinary research and to learn from one another. In many of our discussions we noted the lack of guidance and of the sharing of best practices within the different interdisciplinary communities across Amsterdam’s academic institutions. Through our interdisciplinary lunch events, we learned that many researchers want to team up with colleagues working in other fields but often do not know where to start. Obviously, discipline-specific information is widely available for each institute and department. But cross-domain and cross-institute initiatives and opportunities are difficult to discover via Google without knowing what exactly to enter in the search box. Moreover, every interdisciplinary collaboration is different, so it is impossible to create a canonical guide to interdisciplinarity. However, academics working interdisciplinarily can share similar attitudes and interests, and they do stumble upon similar organizational and infrastructural hiccups. That is why we interviewed 20 people with various backgrounds, roles and experiences on the topic of interdisciplinarity. You will find the biographies of these players in the interdisciplinary field listed in the concluding section of this guide. Discussing our various insights, we discovered common threads in our interviewees’ interdisciplinary practices. We grouped these threads into our five main themes here: goal, person, community, education, and system. By sharing the diverse insights of these interviewees as well as our own, we hope to inspire those interested in (beginning) interdisciplinary research and teaching

Ironic imperialism:how Russian patriots are reclaiming postmodernism

This essay analyzes the recent appearance in Russian letters of ultra-nationalist fantasies about the restoration of Russia's imperial or totalitarian status. This new trend has its roots not only in the increasingly patriotic tone of Russian society and politics, but also in the dynamics of the literary field itself. 'Imperialist writers' such as Aleksandr Prokhanov and Pavel Krusanov have both revived and reacted against postmodern themes and motifs from earlier decades. Relying on the legacy of sots-art and stiob, the 'imperialists' advance a new model in Russia's postmodern tradition, one that is balanced on the very borderline between irony and ideological militancy. In playing the game of ambiguous fanaticism, these writers have been able to attract the attention of a broad and diverse public, and have moved from an intellectual periphery into the cultural mainstream

Messages from the Black Hole:post-Soviet literature in search of a Russian identity

Dit proefschrift onderzoekt in een aantal case studies hoe Russische literatuur uit de periode 1990-2010 zich verhoudt tot het debat over een “Russische identiteit”. Het analyseert hoe speelse en ironische benaderingen van dit klemmende vraagstuk in de literatuur rond de eeuwwisseling langzaam plaatsmaken voor meer zelfverzekerde visies op Ruslands unieke “karakter”, “idee” of “missie”. Ik laat zien hoe terugkerende verwijzingen in de literatuur naar “het imperium” als Ruslands natuurlijke bestaansvorm hierbij verbonden zijn met een nieuwe culturele zelfverzekerdheid. In recente literatuur staat “het imperium” telkens voor een verlangde sociale en geografische eenheid en voor een veronderstelde historische continuïteit van de Russische cultuur. Mijn analyses suggereren dat de verschuivingen in de literaire representatie van identiteit deels voortvloeien uit een breed gevoelde vermoeidheid met de toon van populair postmodern proza uit de jaren ’90, waarin “het Russische vraagstuk” vaak op een ironische of relativerende manier werd benaderd. Deze observatie bepaalt de structuur van de dissertatie: in Deel I van deze studie onderzoek ik de preoccupatie van postmoderne schrijvers als Viktor Pelevin en Vladimir Sorokin met een Russische identiteitscrisis; in Deel II analyseer ik werken van Pavel Krusanov, Dmitrij Bykov, Eduard Limonov en Aleksandr Prochanov waarin de benadering van een “Russische identiteit” zich voorbij post-sovjet en postmoderne twijfels beweegt.

Copy-writing Post-Soviet Russia. Viktor Pelevin's work in Postcolonial Terms

The copywriters and creatives in Viktor Pelevin's novel Generation "II" (1999) both 'copy' and 'write' Russian identity. Through advertising texts, video scripts, and written scenario's for Russia's stage-set democracy, the commercial elite makes Russia into a superficial and virtual copy of 'the West'. Some members of the Nouveaux Russes in fact protest against the meek imitation of western cultural forms, and propose a uniquely Russian path of development. However, to Pelevin, repeating nineteenth-century arguments about Russia's non-Western particularity is also a form of imitation and cannot produce authentic and stable identities either. The novel's ambivalent orientation on 'western universality' and 'Russian authenticity', together with the constant doubts about the reality of identity and the centrality of meaning, displays striking similarities with the ongoing debates and concerns of post-colonial literature and theory. This article proposes a post-colonial reading of Pelevin's text. It uses elements from the work of the prominent post-colonial critic Homi Bhabha for an analysis of the re-imagination of Russian identity in Generation "II".