Urban studies’ interdisciplinarity is both its strength and weakness.

Evidence

It is possible to argue that the strength of urban studies is the logical corollary of its weakness. A predilection for interdisciplinarity both transgresses disciplinary boundaries but also potentially neglects the logics on which conventional academic divisions of labor are based. To suggest that architecture, cultural studies, sociology, politics, history, and geography might all be talking about a different city when they invoke notions of the urban is perhaps unsurprising. More significantly in the contemporary academy, as disciplinary boundaries collapse it becomes more important to examine the sorts of leakage that occur across previously sealed silos of knowledge production. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2288

Categorization

• SEED: A possible essay angle: what ‘leakage’ across collapsing academic silos reveals about knowledge production itself.