Abstract

This essay uses the example of a non-discipline specific doctoral program as a way to think about interdisciplinary practice. Alongside the need for academic specialization there is also a need for integration and boundary crossing. Balancing analytical focus with interconnectivity is an important feature of the relationships defining the individual scholar in a discipline, the disciplines as part of a larger academic community, and the university in a societal and global context. In each example core communities of understanding and specific scholarly identities are valuable. But there is also a value in acknowledging the increasingly common experience of hybrid or multiple identities and the specific conditions and circumstances where the disciplines can productively overlap and combine. Students in the Salve Regina University interdisciplinary Doctoral program confront the challenge of constructing individual scholarly identity as part of their own unique integration of the disciplines.