Cheshta Arora ; Tarunima Prabhakar - To think of interdisciplinarity as intercurrence

jimis:8915 - Journal of Interdisciplinary Methodologies and Issues in Sciences, September 20, 2023, Vol 11 - Thinking interdisciplinarity in practice - https://doi.org/10.46298/jimis.8915
To think of interdisciplinarity as intercurrenceArticle

Authors: Cheshta Arora 1; Tarunima Prabhakar 2

  • 1 The Centre for Internet and Society
  • 2 Tattle Civic Tech

The paper reflects on the working of an interdisciplinary team consisting of researchers and activists from the field of computer science and social sciences involved in developing a user-facing, browser plug-in to detect and moderate instances of online gender-based violence, hate speech and harassment in Hindi, Indian English, and Tamil. There have been multiple calls within the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to include qualitative methods in one’s research design. These calls, while attuned to the importance of qualitative methods for HCI, ignore the intercurrent nature of different research methods, disciplines and practices. The paper borrows the concept of intercurrence from Orren & Skowronek (1996) and reorients it to explicate the practice of interdisciplinary research. It argues that intercurrence i.e. (in between, an occurrence within an occurrence) is a useful image to perceive interdisciplinarity wherein we argue that at any given point, an interdisciplinary team navigates multiple, yet simultaneously occurring temporal dimensions of differently disciplined bodies. An awareness of these multiple temporalities adds another dimension to thinking about conflicts and possibilities emerging from interdisciplinary practices and reorients interdisciplinary research towards unexpected outcomes.


Volume: Vol 11 - Thinking interdisciplinarity in practice
Section: Subject Area 1: Interdisciplinarity as a field of research
Published on: September 20, 2023
Accepted on: September 20, 2023
Submitted on: January 6, 2022
Keywords: interdisciplinarity,intercurrence,machine learning,gender-based violence,temporalities,[INFO.INFO-HC]Computer Science [cs]/Human-Computer Interaction [cs.HC],[SHS]Humanities and Social Sciences

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