Skip to main content

Essential: Cross-Disciplinary Expertise

This week’s reading was, again, a clear reminder of what it takes to be an expert in the field… As a communication scholar, the desire to walk the walk and talk the talk entails SO MUCH more than grabbing hold of a fist full of theories, staking a claim with positivists or post-positivists, and rolling out relevant research questions that easily identify with current social issues. Early on in my graduate work, this is how I interpreted the field of research, and I would venture to guess that many other young scholars have done so, too. While I am, by no means, proficient and well versed in my selected academic arena, this last year and a half has begun to reveal to me how credible (and beneficial) research needs to be so much more than just a theoretical framework and an appropriately paired methodology. In fact, I begin to feel a wee bit of excitement when I recognize the relevant areas in which I do not know. Of course, while the landscape of the unknown becomes wider and greater, I’m thankful that I’m beginning to see the expanding boundaries and how they have an essential place within and among my own research interests. It is only at this point that I’m can see where truly grounded research questions can begin to unfold.

Of course, the culture-centered approach has definitely broadened my own boundaries. But, for me, it also filled in some gaping holes to questions that I’ve continually held near and dear to me as they relate to culture, underserved audiences, and a desire to make a difference… not for myself, or my area of research, but rather for the people who have entrusted (and will entrust) me with their wellbeing.

So, this long, drawn out personal diatribe leads into my notion of cross-disciplinary expertise being essential. Taking the chapters for this week’s reading as a case in point, the discussion revolves around culture, globalization, economics, health, communication, politics, public policy… and, of course, marginalized audiences. It is reasonable to say that such discussions put us at that often debated intersection of sociology, anthropology, philosophy, economics, political science, etc.

While this might seem like such a simple and naïve statement, it seems necessary (at least for me) as a stark reminder to lay out on the table that if, as researchers, we desire to enter into the public discourse on access to health care by marginalized populations, we better darn well be confident in our working knowledge of globalization trends, current policies, issues in healthcare, and, perhaps most importantly, a willingness to hypothesize and prove why certain public service movements may primarily be economically driven at the macro level. If we can do this, then we are closer to being positioned as effective liaisons between two vastly different worldviews. If we cannot do this, then the desire we may have to serve these underserved populations will fall right back into the hands of the dominant powers that be… and, perhaps, without us even fully recognizing the ramifications.

As I continue to read through the literature, I’m beginning to question more if a greater number of researchers in our field are not as capable in the manner I just described than we’d like to admit (or can even recognize). While this may sound like I’m gloating that I’m well on my way to being a well-rounded researcher, and others are wading around in their very compact research paradigms, I assure you I am not. Perhaps, more importantly, I sit here asking if young social science scholars are being mentored and challenged to look beyond the confines of their immediate discipline to find, not only the answers, but even the questions.

Popular posts from this blog

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

  The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...
Read more

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

  The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist  at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...
Read more