MAIS601: Reflective Analysis

MAIS 601

Reflective Analysis: A Theory Runs Through It

Jeff McCarthy

05.23.2026

Broad Reflection

For the first time in my MAIS journey, I find myself resisting the work, reading and reflection. On a Saturday morning, I hesitated before even opening the readings and quickly conjured reasons not to get started.  The pressure I feel is difficult to explain because it doesn’t stem from a single article or a single difficult concept.  It feels cumulative or overarching.  It is present in everything we have explored so far, from hooks (1991) to Meek (2001) to Klein (1990) to Welch IV (2018) reflection on Newell.

In sitting with this resistance, I think part of it may stem from having taken MAIS602 (interdisciplinary research) before MAIS601 (theory).  MAIS602 pushed us toward narrowing our thinking into clearer research questions, methodologies, and frameworks.  By contrast, MAIS601 seems to be asking us to expand our thinking again and become more comfortable with uncertainty, complexity, contradiction, and multiple ways of going about eating the same elephant.  I realize I am probably oversimplifying interdisciplinarity at this early stage, but part of me also wonders whether I became too attached to my own research question and methodology after spending so much time and effort defining it.  I think I convinced myself that I had already figured out the path my research needed to take, including the methodology and epistemology required to arrive at the answers I already suspected I would find.  Perhaps doing more work doesn’t necessarily equate to more clarity.  There are additional steps, greater complexity, and more reflexivity and positionality to deal with first or perhaps continually.

Focused Reflection

What stood out most in Welch IV’s reflection on Newell was not simply the argument for interdisciplinarity, but the discomfort I felt while reading it.  Much of my professional experience has been shaped by emergency management systems built around command-and-control structures, crystal-clear authority, and deliberate decision-making.  In those environments, ambiguity and the “fog of war” are things you try to reduce as quickly as possible because operational clarity and battle rhythms solve problems and save lives.  Yet Newell’s discussion of interdisciplinarity seems to require almost the opposite, a willingness to remain open to uncertainty, competing perspectives, and the possibility that no single discipline fully understands a complex problem. 

What made this particularly unsettling for me was how strongly the reading pushed me to reflect on the actual COVID-19 pandemic response.  Looking back now, though perhaps still somewhat uninformed, I would describe the response as considerably interdisciplinary in practice.  Public health officials, emergency managers, political leaders, healthcare administrators, epidemiologists, communications teams, and hundreds of community organizations were constantly working together to reinterpret incomplete information in real time.  Adaptive leadership seemed so present during the crisis, even if we didn’t always use that language to describe it in real time.  We abandoned all-hazards response plans almost immediately because the situation's complexity and uncertainty demanded constant adaptation, and the power and authority shifted from the ‘plan’ to the political centre.

Through Welch and Newell, I’m wondering whether they could help me prove that institutions are actually uncomfortable documenting uncertainty, disagreement, improvisation, or collaborative sensemaking once a crisis has passed.  I also have a growing hunch that interdisciplinarity may offer important insights into how Emergency Operations Centres actually function during prolonged crises.  EOC’s are essentially collections of experts, mandates, pressures, personalities, and competing perspectives, all working together to make sense of rapidly changing situations.

What I am left wondering now is whether some of the most important aspects of crisis leadership are precisely the things our systems are least comfortable recording and learning from.  I find myself wondering whether interdisciplinarity may actually offer a better lens for understanding prolonged crises than adaptive leadership alone.  Are they mutually exclusive, or do they complement one another?  Am I derailing my research question and capstone project?  I also find myself questioning whether my own approach to research, positionality and bias may still be too anchored by the command-and-control environments I have spent most of my career working within.

In Norman MacLean’s (Robert Redford) voice from the end of A River Runs Through It, I hear in my mind, “I am haunted by theory”.

References:

hooks, b. (1991). Theory as liberatory practice. Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, 4(1), 1–12.

Klein, J. T. (1990). Interdisciplinarity: History, theory, and practice. Wayne State University Press.

Klein, J.T. (2001). Interdisciplinarity and the Prospect of Complexity: The Tests of Theory . Issues in Integrative Studies 19, 43–57.

Maclean, N. (1976). A river runs through it and other stories. University of Chicago Press.

Meek, M. A. (2001). The practice of interdisciplinarity. Issues in Integrative Studies, 19, 1–25.

Welch, J. IV. (2018). The impact of Newell’s “A theory of interdisciplinary studies”: Reflection and    

analysis. Issues in Integrative Studies, 36, 193–211.