Volume 20, Number 2, May, 1998

Social Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change, edited by Rolland G. Paulston (Garland, 1996). Review by Julie Thompson Klein, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan. Anyone engaged in interdisciplinary work, and anyone who thinks in terms of spatial metaphors will find Social Cartography to be of interest. We are, editor Rolland Paulston declares, in a time of "cartographic transformation." The ground of our era is akin to "a space of shifting sites and boundaries." ... Social cartography, Paulston explains is "the art and science of mapping ways of seeing." Poststructuralist and postmodern approaches have opened the way to widespread exercises of social mapping that build on, while extending, prior postmodern notions of "place," "space," and "location" in geography and in feminist, literary, and postcolonialist studies.

Four-Legged Sermon on Sustainable Development. Achieving Broad-Based Sustainable Development, by James Weaver, Michael Rock, and Kenneth Kusterer, West Hartford, Connecticut: Kumarian Press, 1997. Review by Raymond C. Miller, Professor of International Relations and Social Science, San Francisco State University. The authors have set out to write a textbook on development which makes a moral argument for an interdisciplinary, people-centered approach. They contend that development strategies that focus exclusively on economic growth while overlooking human rights and ecological limits are "morally repugnant." ... The authors take a firm unambiguous position; they develop their argument in a clear, systematic fashion; they include non-economic elements on an equal basis; and they are explicitly "interdisciplinary" in their approach. The four legs in the review title refer primarily to their four components of broad-based sustainable development: healthy, growing economies; fair distribution; free and democratic societies; and ecological sustainability.

Workshop

• Partnerships: An Interdisciplinary Workshop for Faculty in the Arts, Humanities, and Mathematics, Dartmouth College, July 25-August 1, 1998. Sponsored by Mathematics Association of America.

New Journal

• Consumption, Markets & Culture. Editor: A Fuat Firat, Business Programs/Marketing, School of Management, Arizona State University West, Phoenix, Arizona. Gordona and Breach Publishers.

• Thomas H. Murray, internationally renowned ethicist and past president of AIS, will present the keynote address for the 1998 AIS Conference, October 8-11, in Detroit, Michigan. The conference theme is "Building Bridges Across Disciplines and Cultures.
• "The Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena," January 7-14, 1999, on the Mediterranean island of Malta, Sponsored by the OTS Foundation and the Vatican Observatory.

Volume 20, Number 3, October, 1998

Understanding Organizations: The Limits of Focusing on Individual Rationality. Rational Choice Theory and Organizational Theory: A Critique, by Mary Zey. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 1998. Review by Jack Meek, University of La Verne, California. According to Mary Zey, the borrowing of rational choice theory from economics to examine organizations and organizational behavior, while popular and attractive, is fraught with many difficulties. Zey's work is a must read for all of us examining organizations, not solely for the critique of rational choice theory, but for the diligent elaboration of the theory and its fundamental elements. ... The powerful message of Zey's work goes beyone philosophy of science epistemology and issues of theory building; ... In her words, "we do our students a disservice by teaching them that the rational choice models of decision making are the only acceptable models ... studying the rational choice models exclusively may have a negative normative effect on our students." (112).

Transdisciplinaity: Bridge to the Future, by Luca Zarri, who was in charge of the International Colloquium on "Transdisciplinarity: Towards Integrative Process and Integrated Knowledge,"May 25-29, 1998, Royaumont Abbey, Val-d'Oise, France. This article is about the meanings to be attributed to the term "transdisciplinarity": its purpose is to provide such a notion with a first, conceptual framework, on the basis of the reflections developed by the participants in the recent international symposium on the theme.

Volume 20, Number 4, December, 1998

Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, by Martha Nussbaum. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Review by Beth A. Casey, Bowling Green State University. Martha Nussbaum's classical defense of recent reforms in liberal education seeks to respond to the critics of political correctness, such as Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and George Will - critics who feared a new relativism and sought to keep ethnic studies, women studies, gay and lesbian studies and, occasionally non-western studies from entering the mainstream of liberal education. Most frequently these critics offered arguments on the perils of weakening western traditons, the need to avoid debilitating cultural relativism, and the inherent conflicts of "identity politics." None was able to foresee the extent to which the new interdisciplinary areas of study would transform scholarship across the disciplnes of the humanities and social sciences and, ultimately, invite a new way of looking at the world. (Nussbaum) presents a valuable defense of the new curriculum as an attempt to "cultivate humanity" by that moral and critical inquiry that Seneca would have recognized as liberal education because of its power to produce free citizens, not just acquaint those born into freedom with their traditions.

Boyer Commission Urges IDS. By Bill Newell. In "Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities," the recently released report by the Boyer Commission on "Educating Undergraduates in the Research University" recognizes that one of the distinctive features of research universities is that they "offer an array of interdisciplinary programs"; but they must do more to overcome the fragmentation of intellectual pursuits that leaves students "ignorant of how diverse fields overlap and intermingle."

Faculty Positions.

• San Francisco State University, Assistant Professor, tenure-track, interdisciplinary artist/arts educator/scholar. Inter-Arts Center.
• Arizona State University, Lecturer (3 positions), Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies.
• North Carolina State University, Head, Division of Multidisciplinary Studies.

Conferences

• "Creating and Sustaining Learning Communities: Connections, Collaboration, and Crossing Borders," March 11-13, 1999, University of South Florida, Tampa.
• Tenth Anniversary Interdisciplinary Conference on Science and Culture, April 8-10, 1999, Kentucky State University Institute for Liberal Studies, Frankfort, Kentucky.
• Fifth International Interdisciplinary Conference on the Environment, June 23-26, 1999, Baltimore, Maryland.

Nominations for Boulding Award

The Kenneth E. Boulding Award for lifetime service to interdisciplinary studies was created by AIS in 1990. Boulding himself received the initial recipient of the award. AIS members are invited to submit nominations by contacting committee members, Steve Gottlieb, Nelson Bingham and Julie Thompson Klein.

Special Issue.

• NWSA ( National Women's Studies Association) Journal will publish a special issue, Appalachia and the South: Place, Gender and Pedagogy, in the Fall of 1999.

New Books/New Book Series

• Cultural Frames, Framing Cultures, a new book series in cultural studies, edited by Robert Newman, University of Virginia Press.
• The Innovative Campus: Nurturing the Distinctive Learning Environment, by Joy Rosenzweig Kliewer, Oryx Press, Phoenix, Arizona.
• Phenomenology and Education: Cosmology, Co-Being, and Core Curriculum. by Michael M. Kazanjian, Rodopi.