Exploring Interdisciplinarity
The Life History Of Dr. Linda Garcia’s Blog
Dell White Paper
By: Tyler Sax
“Genius is a group product”
-Dr. Linda Garcia
-9-
Introduction
The world of education is changing all around us, and Dr. Linda Garcia seems to have a pretty good idea about where it should be going. Her blog on interdisciplinarity is not only the chronicle of her developing thoughts on the subject, but also a conversation about the way that we educate people. Through her posts and through conversation she has displayed a developed interest in two main themes: applying theory to the world around us and incorporating this practice into a university system that is not bogged down by having separated itself into disciplines. These are the two major ideas that that Garcia develops in her work, and which we will be exploring. She titled the blog Exploring Interdisciplinarity because of her fervent belief that the university tendency to divide itself into highly separatized disciplines of practice is counterproductive. Also, the idea of taking theory and being able to use it to view the real world was the foundation for her blog and is an integral part of the way she teaches.
This scholarly work, however, bears little resemblance in format to the type of work one often sees produced by a professor at a prestigious university. No, it is not the typical article published in a research magazine, nor speech given at an academic conference, nor influential book written on a controversial topic. Rather, it is a blog. It is a journal of her thoughts published for the masses. It is not a snapshot-like glimpse into her mind, but a living, ever-developing story that gives a rich sense of depth and context to her ideas.
The medium of her work is almost as fascinating as the content itself. Since it is a means of communication that is relatively new to the world, blogging is still trying to find its place in the academic community. However, the progress is promising. “Blogging lets me fill in the dots in my life,” said Garcia about the role it plays for her. In fact, Garcia agrees that she is writing for herself as much as she is writing for her audience. Having originated in the summer of 2008, the blog has now taken on a life of its own. With each new post comes another idea, another theory, or another view of the world. This constantly morphing conversation is not only a comprehensive register of Dr. Garcia’s work, but also a blank slate whose future is uncertain.
Narrative
This blog was born under circumstances that Dr. Garcia described in her very first post as “somewhat unusual.” She was on vacation, to be precise, when she finally wrote her first entry.
Without skipping a beat, she refers to Garrison LeMasters as her primary inspiration for starting the blog. An adjunct professor at Georgetown and former assistant to Dr. Garcia, LeMasters teaches game theory. Once she reached the position as head of CCT, LeMasters urged her to begin blogging and helped her get her start. This inspiration was critical in getting the project started because at the time, blogging “wasn’t natural” for Dr. Garcia.
The second inspiration came from her husband, environmentalist and historian Brock Evans. One relaxing day at the couple’s favorite vacation spot in rural New Jersey, Evans noticed his wife’s sizeable stack of books and laughingly challenged her to be able to relate any of the theory she learned in those books to their surroundings. Thus, Garcia had the content for her first set of posts. She was able to take the theories that she teaches every semester and relate them to “the lake.” The question she asked herself was “What do I see that would have been invisible to me if I had not used theory to focus my attention?” In her second post, she takes one of Brian Skyrms’ theories, which she frequently teaches in class, and applies it to Lake Hawthorne. Skyrms’ book The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure, which focuses on the evolution of cooperation and incentives, motivated her to realize that the community at Lake Hawthorne was very much a “commons” (a shared resource which individuals cooperate to maintain). Just like in an example in Skyrms’ book, the history of Lake Hawthorne entails a group of individuals who had to cooperate in order to keep big developers out of the community in order to protect the sanctity of the lake – their resource. But this is just the first example of the lake being mentioned in the blog. In fact, it would become over time what she described as a “frame of reference” for the blog as a whole.
As an advocate of the benefits of interdisciplinary studies, Garcia has a bit of disdain for the university structure to which we adhere. She claims to have a “real critique of the university setting,” and goes on to note that the present problems are “self-reinforcing in the extreme.” That is, department heads tend to hire like-minded faculty members, and this process tends to limit the diversity of ideas and viewpoints within a department. Furthermore, Garcia has found that the way you “legitimate yourself to get ahead in your department is to use the jargon of your department and to speak in those terms.” So, it is due to the way that universities structure departments and disciplines that we find this stagnation of ideas and use of “jargon” just for the sake of getting ahead.
So, how does this belief relate to her blog? Well, it gives us a look at her motive, perspective, and intellectual agenda. It helps us put it in context, and make it part of a greater conversation. Her basis message is that the artificial lines we draw between academic disciplines only serve to limit us in our ability to educate people by exploring things from different angles. This message fits right into the greater conversation that the academic world is having today regarding education. Are most universities designed to promote the best type of learning and research? Are classrooms and teachers today equipped to teach in a way that coincides with new modes of learning? These are questions that scholars like Michael Wesch, John Seely Brown, and Paul Dugid, among others, are tying to start the conversation about in order to find answers. Dr. Linda Garcia is very much a part of this conversation.
Discourse
Analysis
In reviewing academic work, there is great value to be found in analyzing the strategy used by the creator. That is, when creating something of such intellectual complexity, it is often the case that the author will use a number of convincing intellectual moves in order to create persuasive, substantial work. By making an analysis of these strategies, we can often discover more about the author’s agenda, intended audience, and a deeper sense of context. In particular, Dr. Garcia uses three identifiable intellectual moves that augment her work. First, she utilizes blogging as a form of writing to create shifts in tone and subject. This variation serves mainly to make the work more readable, but also allows her to interject with more personal posts at times. Second, she formulates a series of metaphors that all share a common foundation: Lake Hawthorne. The metaphors are fundamental to many of her arguments, and the continual use of the lake as their basis yields a strong cohesiveness throughout the blog. Finally, Dr. Garcia references a number of fellow experts throughout her blog and uses their works to contextualize her own.
Blogging As a Form of Writing
One incredible feature of Dr. Garcia’s work being in the form of a blog is that we get some amazing insight into the tactics that she uses and, even better, we get to see them develop over time. The time-element that comes with a blog provides an amazing sense of depth to the reader. One notices, for instance, simple things like the tone of one post versus the tone of the next, or the difference in subject between posts written during school and posts written during the summer. Take, for example, the post entitled “Once More To the Lake,” a light-hearted account which is delicately placed between “Blogging in the Interstices” and “Games People Play,” both of which are decidedly more academic in subject and tone.
Posted on July 10th 2009, the cleverly named “Once More To the Lake” alludes to a 1929 essay written by E.B. White, but is really about what the title suggests: her final trip to Lake Hawthorn for the summer. In it, she poetically describes the long drive to their home-away-from-home and a ritualistic mock wedding held by her grand children. Although the post makes no direct mention of academic disciplines or any of her theories, Garcia, likely unintentionally, paints a portrait of her day at the lake, but in doing so makes a perfect example of how game theory can relate to everyday situations (she often uses the games that her grandchildren play as examples).
In “Blogging In the Interstices,” the post that immediately precedes “Once More To the Lake,” Garcia is prompted to make a link between two of her classes by a comment made by a student. “One of the Chinese students in my Networks and International Development Class protested that, given institutional lock-in, reforms could never come about in China. I gently begged to disagree.” After thoroughly explaining her rebuttal to her student’s claim, she declares that she sees “a new link between some of the ideas [discussed] in [her] Networks and International Development class and those [focused on] in [her] class on The Networked Economy.” Taking an idea and being able to link it between classes or disciplines is fundamental to Garcia’s work as an interdisciplinarian.
Garcia furthermore takes advantage of this form of media by being able to comment on current events as they occur. In “Playing Around,” she jests that the title of her post refers to “the recent tales of our politicians’ sexual machinations.” Then, in “BloggingIn the Interstices,” she writes about the turmoil and protest surrounding the Iranian elections that took place during the summer of 2009. After describing the history of “interstices of a social order” and their importance in circumventing ill-intentioned authority, she is able to ask, “where are the critical interstices in our global society today?” She then goes on to explain how “Iranian hackers have managed to develop the kinds of net-savvy skills required to create a protest movement in an interstitial, virtual space, making it possible for them to outwit a very powerful and seemingly entrenched regime.” The Iranian protest of their corrupt government was, to Garcia, a perfect example of a political movement originating in the interstices and it was in a modern context. So, Garcia is able to make use of the ageless nature of blogs by bringing in current events that relate to her discussion.
The Lake Hawthorne Metaphors
Another prominent intellectual move that you will notice is the metaphors she uses, many of which involve Lake Hawthorne, in order to relate her theories to the practical world. In her very first post, “Blogging Lake Hawthorne,” she asks herself “What do I see that would have been invisible to me if I had not used theory to focus my attention?” After laying this groundwork, she moves on to her next post where she begins to form the metaphor. She first references two texts which are frequently mentioned throughout the blog: Brian Skyrms’s The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure and James Rosenau’s book Thinking Theory Thoroughly. The stag hunt is an example that Skyrms uses to explain game theory and the evolution of cooperation. In his book he asks how cooperation could have evolved given the strong disincentives not to cooperate. Garcia then takes this example and relates it to her experience at the lake: the lake was, to her, a commons (a shared limited resource), just as Skyrms described. So, when the community of people who benefitted from the commons decided to make sacrifices in order to preserve the lake and prevent big investors from making developments there, they were acting cooperatively.
“Of course Elinor Ostrom has made a convincing case for how certain kinds of institutions and ‘rules of the game’ can alter the incentive structure so that individuals cooperate to sustain a ‘commons.’ ButSkyrms goes further, exploring the question of how do these incentives/norms, themselves, come about. What accounts for the evolution of the social contract? How can it overtake the strong incentive to defect? His tentative answers are very CCT-like: They all have to do with spatial structure, location, and locational interaction. Greatly simplifying, the key to cooperation is to assure that stag hunters (cooperators) are positioned so that they come into contact with one another before they meet hare hunters (defectors) who together constitute a a basin of attraction large enough to take over the stag hunters. With signaling–the subject of a future blog entry–the size of the cooperative community can be quite extensive and unstructured to a greater extent.The history of Lake Hawthorne’s evolution is fully consistent with Skyrms’ characterization with respect to both how the social contract was established, and how it evolved and was maintained over time.”
This is a perfect example of Garcia taking the lake and using it to display how she can apply theory to a real world situation. Although significant, the Lake Hawthorne metaphors are not the only ones used throughout the blog. Rather, Garcia uses them frequently in relating theory to practice; a fundamental exercise in her blog and her teachings.
Contextualization Through Reference
The previous case, when she mentions Rosenau and Skyrms, also exemplifies another one of the strategies Garcia uses in her blog: relying consistently on a number of outside sources that she references. In her second post, “Commons are Common Enough,” she references James Rosenau for the first time. However, this is a name with which one becomes very familiar over the course of the blog.