© 2010 State University of New York Press, Albany Chapter One Interdisciplinarity and Social Justice An Introduction Joe Parker and Ranu Samantrai Introduction Many interdisciplinary felds exemplify the political ambivalence that characterizes the U.S. academy: ostensibly a critique of that institution’s role in reinforcing inequalities, their very existence indicates a belief that the academy may also be an equalizing force in society. Supporters of the ethnic studies, cultural studies, and women’s studies programs founded in the late 1960s, for instance, carried their battles from political movements into universities in the faith that changing the production of knowledge would transform social relations, broaden access for the disenfranchised, and thereby change the agents and the consequences of knowledge production. The pattern of scholars and activists joining forces to open felds of research and teaching continued in subsequent decades with the emergence of envi- ronmental studies, flm and media studies, and gay and lesbian or queer studies. Recent additions—including critical race studies, disability studies, transgender studies, critical legal studies and justice studies, diaspora stud- ies, border studies, and postcolonial studies—take as their epistemological foundation the inherently political nature of all knowledge production, a principle shared by the essays of the present volume. Through trenchant critiques of disciplinary predecessors, interdisci- plinary felds often have defned themselves in contrast with established disciplines. Their attempts to query the conditions and consequences of knowledge production have prompted changes that reach into traditional 1