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This year I am a TA for Urban Culture and Society, a course in the Growth and Structure of Cities Program. This program seems like a valuable model of what you are talking about in terms of interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary work.

I think you (Anne and Liz) were suggesting there might be an important distinction between interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work. You have me wondering, does transdisciplinary work eventually become interdisciplinary discipline after a while? In what ways do the professors in a multidisciplinary disciplines find themselves transformed (or not) by their contact with colleagues and students who hold such varied interests? The gap that interdisciplinary work bridges may not be as great as the gulf between Physics and English Literature or feminist critical thought, but it could be as different as architecture and art history, planning, GIS applications, or environmental studies (itself another interdisciplinary area of study).

Do you suspect that there are risks of just creating new monolithic disciplines out of formalized interdisciplinary activity (e.g., Cities, Environmental Studies)?

I like the question you raised about formalizing a requirement of participation in transdisciplinary activity. One potential advantage might be that students' perspectives would be expanded by the requirement without actually losing focus on their central interest. Would you anticipate problems in terms of limits on resources? Does it matter if professors or departments prefer to focus their relatively limited resources upon students who are likely to pursue their multidisciplinary programs?

Then again, depending on how we define what counts towards this requirement, it may turn out that enough programs already exist, and even that many students already participate in some aspect of this during the course of their student careers; still, that might be quite different from requiring seniors to participate in a transdisciplinary capstone colloquium.

Finally, Sky Stegall articulated a "path to feminizing physics. "Given our conversation today, I wonder if we might think of this as transgendering physics, in the broad sense of crossing back and forth across the constructs of gender and physics, disrupting and redistricting the boundaries as we go.