Race and ethnicity research split across disciplines because their referents resist single-method capture

Evidence

Over the past two decades or so, the shifting boundaries of race and ethnicity as categories of social analysis have become increasingly evident. Despite a history that can be traced back to the 1920s and 1930s, explicit critical study of race and ethnicity remained a relatively small subfield in disciplines such as sociology and anthropology until late into the twentieth century. Yet there can be little doubt that in the past 20 years work on race and ethnicity has flourished, becoming one of the most intense areas of academic and political debate across a whole range of societies … Perhaps the most notable feature of this new work is that it can no longer be reducible to any single discipline in assumption or methodology, scope or content. The multidimensionalities of ethnoracial definition and experience as well as of racist expression have prompted the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of the analytic work necessary to understand them. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 100

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports vault claims that critical race studies need interdisciplinary method; links to how racial formation is defined as irreducible to one disciplinary lens.
• SEED: An essay could argue that the definitional instability of race/ethnicity is itself the reason no single discipline can own the concept.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 100