Like Mushrooms: Interdisciplinary Graduate Students Are the Fungi of Higher Education Ecosystems
Plain Language Summary
Graduate students whose work sits between fields — here, engineering education, science and technology studies, and computer science — are often told they are valuable, and just as often find that no department, committee, or peer group has a ready category for what they do. This essay draws on my own path from an undergraduate electrical engineering program through two years at General Motors and into a doctorate pursued alongside a computer science master's degree to describe what that in-between position actually demands: a constant, mostly invisible effort to explain one's work in whichever vocabulary the room recognizes. I then propose a metaphor for it. Like fungi, which break down what other organisms discard and connect them through underground networks, interdisciplinary graduate students metabolize what separate fields offer and carry it between them; the question for universities is whether they will provide the conditions under which that can happen.
Contribution
I contribute an autoethnographic account of "interpretive labor" as the defining and threatening condition of interdisciplinary graduate study — illustrated through the recursive case of a student whose object of study, expertise, is precisely what committee members, peers, and publication venues recognize differently — and extend it into a fungal metaphor that, read through complex adaptive systems theory, yields concrete recommendations for how institutions might curate "adaptive space" for interdisciplinary scholars.
Research Questions
- What does interdisciplinary graduate study demand of a student whose object of study, expertise, is precisely what each home discipline recognizes differently?
- How do interdisciplinary graduate students perform, and simultaneously learn, the "interpretive labor" required to be legible across engineering education research, science and technology studies, and computer science?
- How might institutions, understood as complex adaptive systems, provide the substrate through which interdisciplinary graduate students catalyze institutional change?
Methods
This is a scholarly essay rather than an empirical study, and it proceeds autoethnographically: I chart a "personal geography," in Downey and Beddoes' sense, from an undergraduate STS course that first unsettled a conventional picture of engineering design, through software work in General Motors' software-defined vehicle group, to a doctorate in engineering education pursued concurrently with a computer science master's degree. That narrative is read against the interdisciplinary graduate education literature on advising, peer networks, and identity, and through Goffman-derived accounts of interpretive labor, with a comparative table setting engineering education research, computer science, and STS side by side on origins, core concerns, paradigms, methods, units of analysis, and orientation to technology. The closing section turns to mycology and to Uhl-Bien and Arena's complex adaptive systems framework to build the metaphor and derive its institutional consequences.