tic accounts [I was studying] than anybody else did, and that
meant that nobody really ever could say that I was wrong, and
that made me worried...Theywould inevitably be impressed by
the fancy footwork that I performed with these sources, but it
would be difficult for someone to say that I had read them wrong.As this quote suggests, the lack of canonized agreement about how
to evaluate interdisciplinarity gives researchers more leeway con-
cerning how to go about their work, but it also creates greater un-
certainty about how to establish the resulting project’s quality. A his-
torian emphasizes the importance of using “other fields’ toolkits” in
a disciplined way. This approach he contrasts with “the kind of
interdisciplinarity that Stanley Fish once complained about, which is
basically the person who makes up his own standards and therefore
is bound by no one. I am interested in consciously trying to sort of
broker useful relations between disciplinary toolkits.”
Combining traditional standards of disciplinary excellence with
interdisciplinarity presents a potential for double jeopardy. This is
because expert and generalist criteria (what one respondent defines
as “virtuosity and significance”) have to be met at the same time. Be-
cause interdisciplinary research is a hybrid form, the usual criteria of
evaluation—originality and significance, for instance—may end up
being weighted differently. A historian of China says it is important
to have
the endorsement of specialists who feel that...this [is] going to
satisfy needs in your particular discipline. I mean only after we
got a “yes” to that would I want to go on. Now we apply the sec-
ond tier of criteria, which is, “Is it going to do anything for any-
body else?” The first thing in the sequence...certifies people as
competent in their, as it were, local expertises. But to me, that’s
not the ultimate criteria. The ultimate criterion is, is it going to do
anything for the rest of us.210 / Considering Interdisciplinarity and Diversity