Research Gaps
Fields of Becoming: The Collaboration That Never Came
Back in the early 2010s, every university brochure, every grant announcement, every graduate seminar was saying the same thing:
The future of science is interdisciplinary.
And they didn’t just mean it.
They demanded it.
Graduate students were required to assemble committees that crossed departmental boundaries.
They had to justify their work across multiple fields to get IRB approval.
They had to demonstrate cross‑disciplinary relevance to secure funding.
They had to take upper‑division science courses far outside their home discipline—sometimes in subjects that seemed unrelated on the surface.
Many remember sitting in 4000‑level plant science courses, geology labs, or advanced biology seminars because their programs insisted that real scholarship required fluency beyond a single silo. Even if they struggled in those classes, the concepts seeped in. Systems thinking. Ecological reasoning. Pattern recognition. The sense that everything connects to everything else.
Students were trained to think like integrators.
They were trained to see architecture, not fragments.
They were trained to build bridges between fields that had never spoken to each other.
And they believed the world they were being prepared for actually existed.
But here is the part no one warned them about:
The vision was real. The rhetoric was real. The requirements were real. But the infrastructure was not.
The disciplines never merged.
They never even touched.
Trauma science remained in psychology.
Memory research remained in cognitive science.
Neurodegeneration remained in neurology.
Development remained in pediatrics.
Anthropology remained in anthropology.
Systems theory remained in theory.
Everyone talked about collaboration, but what they meant was:
“We will cite each other once in a while.”
The people capable of true integration—the ones who could see patterns across fields—were systematically filtered out. Not because their ideas were wrong, but because they didn’t fit inside a single disciplinary box. They didn’t stay in their lane. They didn’t collapse complexity into something tidy and fundable.
Meanwhile, outside the academy, the rest of the world continued living in relational reality.
Across much of the globe, infants are not treated as separate individuals.
Breastfeeding continues for years.
Co‑sleeping is the norm.
Caregivers carry infants constantly.
Regulation is shared, not solitary.
In several South American communities, a child is not considered a separate person until age two or three. Not metaphorically—functionally. The caregiver–infant dyad is treated as a single organism. Their bodies are not separate. Their regulation is not separate. Their health is not separate.
This is the global human norm.
Western science is the outlier.
And the people who understand relational regulation—midwives, Indigenous communities, caregivers, mothers—are the people academia ignores.
So the knowledge that could have bridged the disciplines never entered the disciplines.
The training of the early 2010s wasn’t misguided.
It was simply ahead of its time.
Students were prepared for a world academia claimed it was building—a world where trauma, development, memory, regulation, and neurodegeneration would finally be understood as parts of the same architecture.
But academia never built that world.
The integrative work that was promised is emerging elsewhere—outside the silos, outside the institutions, in the hands of people who were trained to see the connections even when the system around them refused to.
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