Borrowed ecological concepts illuminate the contested boundaries between disciplines

Evidence

Field biologists have devised the term “ecotone” to characterize the border zones between adjacent communities of vegetation where (as between, say, grasslands and wetlands) life forms that ordinarily require discrete conditions meet and interact. Ecotones may thereby open up new configurations of possibility (and for some species, introduce new threats) as the transitional areas create so-called edge effects. In university life, we are witnessing an upsurge in these edge effects as interpenetrating fields proliferate at the borders between once separate disciplines, at times creating new dynamic combinations while also, depending on one’s perspective, inflicting casualties through habitat fragmentation. In the scholarly ecotone, as in the biological, one may detect an elevated concentration in the sheer variety of life-forms, but at the expense of less-adaptable, specialist species. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 84

Categorization

• QUESTION: Does the ecotone analogy carry normative weight or describe only? Worth chasing how far Nixon intends the habitat-fragmentation cost for humanities’ less-adaptable specialist species.
• XREF: Useful vocabulary for the reader’s own cross-course polyad framing — scholarly edge effects as a description of the four connected courses. — connects to: Disciplinary boundaries reflect reification, not the nature of their objects — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 11; Interdisciplinarity’s subversive force becomes slack pluralism once institutionalized

Broader Connections

• Disciplinary boundaries reflect reification, not the nature of their objects #expands (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 11
• Interdisciplinarity’s subversive force becomes slack pluralism once institutionalized #exemplifies (0.75)