What does it mean to be interdisciplinary? Though I do have a home discipline (Rhetoric and Composition), food is one scholarly interest which has forced me to leave my disciplinary bubble. To truly understand food in my research I draw from many disciplines and here, I reflect on how those disciplines intersect to make space for new understanding.
As part of my Cultural Rhetorics seminar, I wanted to practice constellating as one method of mapping a research topic. This map is an exercise that I used to consider how I piece together my understanding of food. I used circles to represent disciplines, with smaller circles representing subdisciplines. I used embroidery to connect all of these subdisciplines and ideas, and color to trace ideas back to their disciplinary "homes."
This exercise not only represents a form of multimodal composing, but also made me reflect on the value of interdisciplinary work. As I performed needlepoint on some sections of my map, my view of other parts of the maps were blocked. Imagine me, sitting holding a large (this piece of fabric is the size of a small area rug) piece of fabric, trying to literally thread together these disciplines. Near impossible at some points! When I'm all the way over in the English side, I literally could not see agriculture and the hard sciences. What a metaphor. Academia is vast.
Having the visual of the disciplines serves as a reminder that I must make effort sometimes to draw connections. I also must stop and recognize if I'm hanging out on one side of the map too much. Constellating is one method of Cultural Rhetorics which has helped me to map out where I draw my knowledge was, and I was fortunate to be able to practice this activity at The Conference on Community Writing in 2017. My session titled, "Food Constellations: A Collective Tapestry of Community and Connection," modeled constellating as one method of situating our scholarly identities.