Ideational border crossings: rethinking the politics of knowledge within and across disciplines

This article explores the merits, possibilities and difficulties of making intra and trans-disciplinary ‘border crossings’ essentially of an ideational kind. Drawing ideas from complexity literature, the article lauds the potential of ‘concept studies’ as means of making such crossings and addressing enduring issues (e.g., of equity and health) within education, Physical Education (PE) and Health. The article suggests, however, that the culture of neoliberalism and extant power relations may prohibit rather than nurture and encourage any willing exchange of ideas or sharing of resource, presaging border closure rather than ‘border crossing’. Talk of the latter in periods of austerity may become shorthand for ‘rationalisation’, offering new language for a newly invigorated politics of erasure, rather than announcing desire to nurture and actualise new voices and new ways of sharing ideas towards investigating and dismantling enduring social hierarchies and trends.