Interdisciplinarity and Scholarship

Today, our group didn't get a lot of "research" done in terms of filling up our Diigo-repository. Instead, we engaged in a very productive conversation. Our group comes from a mixed background: myself, a second year planning to studying science and technology studies (STS) through an interdisciplinary major; Jessica, a fellow second year studying CS; Jane, a fourth year politics students; Sarah, and architecture student; Patrick, a first year planning to double major in CS and anthropology; and Alex, a fourth year CS student who is currently working on Bitcoin as his capstone/graduating thesis project. We all shared our interest and prior experiences with Bitcoin, and projected potential research topics. The conversation quickly turned into a long-winded (but much needed and much appreciated) run-down of Bitcoin, the blockchain, and mining--Alex, our resident 'Bitcoin guru,' provided our discussion with a solid technical foundation. He explained a lot of contradictory items, such as efforts to replace M-pesa (a mobile-phone based money transfer and microfinance service) with a Bitcoin layer being antithetical to the original design values of Bitcoin as a decentralized network. Alex helpfully pointed out a few more technicalities, such as the 1 megabyte limit on each block, the minimum amount of Bitcoin in a transfer (5,400 satoshi), and a watered-down version of hashing.

We have a variety of backgrounds and are already engaging in discussions that reach across disciplines. I suspect that the technical dimensions of our research and scholarship will be clarified and "debunked" by our CS-students, and the societal dimensions of Bitcoin further explored by our non-technical students. From an anthropological perspective, I am so excited to see a trans-diciplinary pidging (or creole/inter-language) already forming. This type of cross-disciplinary collaboration has been written about as a "trading zone," whereby participants "exchange ideas, learn from one another, and, having traded, return to their disciplines, richer for the experience and bearing tangible rewards in the form of improved research" (p. 3). I look forward to working in this group and seeing how our different academic backgrounds merge in our research.