As ALISE recognizes in this year’s theme, the positioning of LIS as an increasingly
interdisciplinary field represents both a challenge and an opportunity. This is true in my own
research. The questions I ask are only apparent by stepping outside of the confines of LIS’s usual
concerns and yet those same questions can only be answered through the insights developed in
LIS. This is the strength of interdisciplinary research.
In my poster, even as I acknowledge this opportunity, I also focus on two challenges I
face. Sometimes, as with a discipline like genocide studies, perspectives from outside the field
seem jarring and evoke negative reactions. This is true with my research. The second challenge
is a chicken-and-egg problem: my work raises questions within genocide studies that few others
have addressed. Even as the answers to these questions impact my study, they are outside the
scope of my research.
To explore these opportunities and challenges as I have experienced them, I provide
background on the key concepts I bring from each field, how they relate to one another, and the
questions to which this convergence of concepts has given rise. I concentrate on the critiques of
my research from within LIS, the problem of questions that need to be left unanswered, and how
I have used each challenge to further my research. Finally, I use this poster to reflect on how
interdisciplinarity affects LIS approaches to research and pedagogy
