Various multiple-disciplinary terms and concepts (although most commonly “interdisciplinarity,” which is used herein) are used to frame education, scholarship, research, and interactions within and outside academia. In principle, the premise of interdisciplinarity may appear to have many strengths; yet, the extent to which interdisciplinarity is embraced by the current generation of academics, the benefits and risks for doing so, and the barriers and facilitators to achieving interdisciplinarity, represent inherent challenges. Much has been written on the topic of interdisciplinarity, but to our knowledge there have been few attempts to consider and present diverse perspectives from scholars, artists, and scientists in a cohesive manner. As a team of 57 members from the Canadian College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada (the College) who self-identify as being engaged or interested in interdisciplinarity, we provide diverse intellectual, cultural, and social perspectives. The goal of this paper is to share our collective wisdom on this topic with the broader community and to stimulate discourse and debate on the merits and challenges associated with interdisciplinarity. Perhaps the clearest message emerging from this exercise is that working across established boundaries of scholarly communities is rewarding, necessary, and is more likely to result in impact. However, there are barriers that limit the ease with which this can occur (e.g., lack of institutional structures and funding to facilitate cross-disciplinary exploration). Occasionally, there can be significant risk associated with doing interdisciplinary work (e.g., lack of adequate measurement or recognition of work by disciplinary peers). Solving many of the world’s complex and pressing problems (e.g., climate change, sustainable agriculture, the burden of chronic disease, and aging populations) demands thinking and working across long-standing, but in some ways restrictive, academic boundaries. Academic institutions and key support structures, especially funding bodies, will play an important role in helping to realize what is readily apparent to all who contributed to this paper—that interdisciplinarity is essential for solving complex problems; it is the new norm. Failure to empower and encourage those doing this research will serve as a great impediment to training, knowledge, and addressing societal issues.

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This article parses opposing currents in Peru's collective memory of their bloody internal war through an analysis of acts of vandalism perpetrated against one of the country's few sites of memory, the Ojo que llora, in Lima. 'Vandalism' in this article is understood as a form of writing (though a violent one) of an alternative vision of the past. Originally intended as a space for remembering and paying homage to the victims of the armed conflict, the site has become a space for contesting disputed memories. As a site of performance of memory and human rights claims, and especially as the target of continued defacement, the Ojo que llora has become a stage on which the perduring presence of the past -in its still-conflictual strains -is made visible for national and international publics. It thus refuses the very closure that government narratives would impose, and thereby keeps open public engagement with the past. The ongoing conflicts over the past made visible at this site point to the struggles to define an over-arching memory, and in the process the very meaning of 'victim' is constrained.

This project started ten years ago, almost to the day, when I wandered through Ayacucho's central plaza on the late afternoon prior to the Peruvian Truth Commission's arrival the next day to submit their Final Report. Colorful carpets (alfombras) made by schoolchildren and local groups from flower petals, chalk, and other materials surrounded the plaza, posterboards displayed images of the conflict and visitors' comments about them, in the corner stood an enormous stage in a style of a wooden triptych retablo. Nearby, an exhibition displayed some of the entries for an art contest on memories of the internal conflict. On this day, and those that followed, I was struck by how visually rich the conflict was and its aftermath as Peruvians engaged with their recent fractured past. As an historian, I wondered what stories and memories emerged from these representations. A few of us were pondering similar questions at the time, Olga González, Jonathan Ritter, María Eugenia (Makena) Ulfe, and Víctor Vich, among others. Soon it became clear that the range and array needed a cooperative and collective approach to begin to understand the myriad of cultural responses to the conflict. This edited volume is the result. However, the work is far from complete. A whole new generation of Peruvians and Peruvianists are continuing to ask about the cultural impact and means of broaching Peru's conflict. The intellectual origins of this book also trace back to a workshop held on Robben Island, organized by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Legacies of Authoritarianism (loa) Research Circle. With its infamous history as a former leper colony, holding spot for immigrants, and later apartheid prison, the island has since transformed into a memory museum and education center. Here in June 2000, activists, artists, practitioners, former and future truth commissioners, academics, journalists, and students from around the world came together to reflect on the dark heritage of authoritarian rule. Over the course of those few x | acknowledgments days, both art as a medium for truth-telling and the creative practices necessary for transition away from authoritarian regimes came to the fore. One result of our conversations was a book that tried to visually lay out the possibilities of artistic engagement with difficult pasts, The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule. I thank Leigh A. Payne, Ksenija Bilbija, and Jo Ellen Fair for this experience, and Louis Bickford as well for bringing me into the larger project. Another root of this book lay deeply in the Social Sciences Research Council (ssrc) training and research project led by the faculty scholars Elizabeth Jelin, Carlos Iván Degregori, Eric Hershberg, Steve J. Stern, among others. While I was only indirectly involved in this ssrc project (via the loa Research Circle) and only one contributor to this book, Ponciano del Pino, had an official role in it, it created a whole generation of Latin and North American scholars dedicated to studying the aftermath of dictatorships in Peru ...

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