Nineteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

This paper compares the inter/transdisciplinary process to migration. Ideas, concepts and language from one discipline can move to another. Migration is therefore more than a metaphor in understanding interdisciplinary social science, but also the process through which we can move ideas from one discipline into another. However, migration also entails hybridity, thus we can develop ideas that are neither fully in one discipline or another, this destabilises the frameworks we used to understand the social sciences- with migratory thinking one does not easily fall into a single category or discipline. Taking an interdisciplinary approach and drawing on the history of Late Antiquity/ the ’Barbarian’ Migrations, Critical Muslim Studies and also Tourism Studies, this paper shows how ideas can move contexts and hopes to show how we can use the study of migration to inform interdisciplinary social science. Migration of people and ideas are not dissimilar from the movement of ideas across the disciplines themselves and this comparison can help us escape the confines of mono-disciplinary thinking.