These boundaries that we establish between little pockets of knowledge in the academy are a fiction. Transdisciplinarity, to my mind, is about challenging the fiction of disciplines, about recognizing that knowledge isn’t something that can be carved up into neatly bounded parcels that we then work either in (to produce disciplinary knowledge); at the intersection of (to produce interdisciplinary knowledge); or with (to produce multi- or cross-disciplinary knowledge). Transdisciplinary work subverts the very foundations of the concept of ‘the discipline’, resisting and transcending the always arbitrary and fictive boundaries between; borrowing from Foucault, I suggest that talk of disciplines and disciplinary boundaries bring into being the categories themselves and such categories are always normative.
Transdisciplinarity: The Politics and Practices of Knowledge Production | The Disorder Of Things.