Interdisciplinary Afterlives: Trajectories of Scholarship and Practice After Participating in a Global Urban Studies Graduate Certificate Program

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Unpacking paradigmatic contours of international service learning: equity and marginalization

Proposal

Introduction
This paper explores the intellectual and social 'afterlives' of six graduate students who have participated in an Urban Studies, interdisciplinary graduate certificate program focusing on comparative urban studies around global cities at a major West Coast University. It is based on qualitative research undertaken as part of a larger dissertation project examining the pedagogy of the program and specifically looks ways that these students—both research-based PhDs and professional master’s—have found meaning in the experience and integrated it into their current work, two to three years after participation. It is based on fieldwork completed during the program year and a student alumni group that was used to maintain connections across program cohort years and to develop new work in the intellectual spirit of the program.

Context
Urban Studies Interdisciplinary Program* [USI, a pseudonym] is a year-long graduate certificate program that draws graduate students from their home departments—professional master’s from architecture, urban planning, and PhD’s from the humanities and social sciences—to study a major West Coast global city that is site of the home academic institution, in relation to other global cities in the Asia Pacific region. The six-year-old program has provided its now 150 participants a toolbox of practices, methods, and experiences (in classroom and with global travel) to develop their collaborative intellectual work, through the creation of scholarly products that combine traditional scholarship with material design thinking (building, making), spatial (cartographic) and artistic practice (film, digital media). The program is framed around issues of urban spatial justice and social-scholarly engagement that ask what can be learned from the contemporary city. Classroom pedagogy is a combination of seminar coursework, drawn from the humanities, and studio design practice, drawn from architecture and planning. Site-specific fieldwork is undertaken in both the home city and the international city of each year’s theme.

It is an example of what Cathy Davidson (2017) calls “new models of higher education” that “foster deep, integrated learning, synthesis, and analysis across borders of discipline,” while also cultivating “the difficult and increasingly necessary skill of collaborating with those whose expertise and cultural background may be radically different from one’s own” (p. 232). Students gain skills that influence the rest of their academic careers and their lives beyond, becoming creative urban and global scholars who can communicate across a variety of disciplines and knowledge environments. The program represents a new form of interdisciplinary practice that draws together a diverse set of students and engages them together on collective projects that are both local and global over the course of an academic year, fostering a sense of meaningful togetherness that is rare among an increasingly instrumental and individualistic higher education environments.

Theoretical Framework
Pedagogy at the graduate student level has been under theorized. Graduate pedagogy with interdisciplinary components has been theorized even less. Lee and Danby (2012) argue that graduate education needs to be reshaped in a way that puts added emphasis on pedagogy to better understand how graduate education is both a process of “coming to know” and “coming to be,” providing an “eco-social” model for understanding environments where knowledge and identity is co-produced (pg. 4-5). The concept of educational identity trajectory “recognizes that learning and identity are intimately linked [where] learning is embodied in the whole person and incorporates the past in the present (and thus the academic with the personal)” (McAlpine & Amundsen, 2011, p. 173). Within the USI program, qualitative fieldwork with student graduates has found such a shift in graduate identity, where students have taken on a hybrid identity between their home discipline and an interdiscipline, which in turn has shaped their ensuing work. In other parts of the larger (dissertation) study, I argue that this shift is produced, in part, by the (inter)disciplinary pedagogical structure that coordinates learning between disciplinary ideas, people, and places to create communities of practice.

An experience of '(inter)disciplinary togetherness' developed through experiences of the program, which creates meaning through collective engagement. What results is a 'hybrid-identity trajectory,' where multiple intellectual identities and experiences coalesce to create a new type of scholar, who is able to use hybrid knowledge from engagement with multiple disciplines and have a hybrid skill-set of media methods, practices, design skills, etc., which can be applied to more traditional research projects (an example of this would be a humanist literary scholar who creates a series of site-specific conceptual maps as part of her dissertation project that work in tandem with the writing). The concept of 'interdisciplinary afterlives' more fully theorizes this process.

RQ
The key research questions are as follows:

• How have students found meaning in their experience with USI and integrated it into their identity trajectory as an academic or practitioner?
• In what ways have they maintained social and intellectual community with USI in the time since participation?
• How have students utilized or applied the intellectual (concepts, topics, and focus about the city) and methodological (different forms of media) knowledge of the program within their own research and practice?

Methods
This particular study follows six student participants, drawn from different disciplines and different years of the program, who embody key continuities with the program in their work. Empirical data comes from long-form (2-3 hour) interviews about their experience, current work, and application of USI ideas. They are chosen from a larger research sample of qualitative interviews (N-20) and quantitative survey (N-100) data of student graduates completed over 2018-2019. Participant observation was also completed during individual USI program years (2015-2017) and of the alumni group meetings (first half of 2018) that occurred monthly before culminating in a student symposium. Student subjects are identified by a generalized disciplinary identifier, e.g. the historian, the activist-scholar, the architect, the educator, where their individual narrative is presented before analysis.

Conclusion
This paper, through engaging with the specific experience of students who have participated in this type of program, hopes to contribute a better understanding of interdisciplinary graduate education and where it might lead.

Author

• Jonathan Banfill, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)