Feminist Studies and Gender Studies

interdisciplinarity and recognition

Abstract

In recent years, with the awareness of the incompleteness of the knowledge limited to a single discipline, interdisciplinarity has become almost mandatory in academic research. Paradoxically, interdisciplinary work is often confronted with the difficulty of scientific validation, due to a possible lack of definition of analytical categories, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks. Women's, Feminist and Gender Studies (WFGS), being intrinsically interdisciplinary, and aiming to assert itself as an autonomous research area, often encounters this difficulty. Based on the pedagogical and scientific research practice in this field of knowledge, this essay outlines some of the problems, solutions and paradoxes posed by interdisciplinarity, seeking to contribute to the debate on the concept and to the scientific recognition of interdisciplinary work.