Transcript Document 7363113

Crossing the Interdisciplinary
Divide
Dr Justin Greaves
University of Warwick
• ‘We are not students of some subject
matter, but students of problems. And
problems may cut right across the
borders of any subject matter or
discipline’ (Popper, 1963)
The RELU programme
• The Rural Economy and Land Use
(RELU) is a £25 million research
programme, funded by the ESEC,
BBSRC and NERC
• Committed to pursue interdisciplinary
working across the social and natural
sciences in every research project it
funds
RELU 1 at Warwick
• Project on the regulatory and environmental
sustainability of biopesticides
• Essentially a collaboration between political
scientists and plant scientists
• The University of Warwick sought to bring
together natural scientists from Warwick HRI
with social scientists from the main campus to
explore possible common research projects
• The creation of the RELU programme created a
relevant funding opportunity
RELU 3 at Warwick
• Project on the Governance of Livestock
Diseases (GoLD)
• One challenge here has been the large and
diverse mix of disciplines involved. There are
four team members from Biological Sciences
(including a veterinary epidemiologist, an
infectious disease epidemiologist, an
ecologist and a mathematical modeller), two
from Political Science, two from Economics
and one from Law
Politics: a junction subject?
• In many ways politics is the junction
subject of the social sciences, born out of
history and philosophy, but drawing of the
insights of economics and sociology and,
to a lesser extent, the study of law,
psychology and geography
• This openness (‘eclecticism’) can be seen
as a strength allowing interdisciplinary
work to flourish
However.....
• A recent ESRC benchmarking review of
political science notes that
‘interdisciplinary networks’ are patchy
• Relatively little co-operation between
natural scientists and political scientists
• Writers such as Moran (2006) and
McKenzie (2007) take a rather pessimistic
view of interdisciplinary collaboration
• Recent symposium issue of European
Political Science on interdisciplinarity
What is a discipline?
• ‘Discrete sets of knowledge that share
understandings about the most salient
questions to ask, variables to explore and the
most appropriate methods to employ (WarleighLack and Cini, 2009)
• ‘A “discipline” is distinguishable by features
such as a defined area of study, a unique
approach to its field, and specific theories,
concepts and methodologies being employed
to describe, understand and explain
phenomena’ (Kelly, 2009)
Another approach
• ‘We take a discipline to be a branch of
learning or scholarly instruction ... which
is defined by institutional boundaries
constructed by the needs of teaching,
funding, administration and professional
development’ (Bracken and Oughton,
2006)
Five questions to ask?
• A distinctive subject matter?
• A distinctive methodology?
• An area of expertise that needs
specialised training in order to become a
practitioner?
• A professional association which manages
the profession and to which most
practitioners belong?
• A mission?
Is Politics a discipline?
• ‘We cannot talk about political science as
a discipline if those who call themselves
political scientists and pretend to teach it
are unable to agree on its basic substance
and methodology’ (EPSNet, 2003)
• ‘It is questionable whether politics is a
discipline in the strictest sense at all’ (Kelly
2009)
• A field of enquiry rather than a discipline?
What is interdisciplinarity?
• ‘I think what we mean .. is people from different
disciplines coming together with the various
research methods, tools, techniques and
processes that they know about. . . and doing two
things: sharing that knowledge between the
disciplines, so there’s a kind of import and export of
knowledge between them, but actually bringing
those things together to create new tools, research
methods, which can be applied to problems that
genuinely sit between or problems that disciplines
have in common or problems where you need a
multi-disciplinary approach to solve them’ (Tom
Innes, Director of Designing for the 21st Century)
Biology and Political Science
• Aristotle first asserted the biological uniqueness
of human political behaviour with his famous
observation: ‘Man is, by nature, a political
animal’
• The first chapter of Mackenzie’s survey of
political science is ‘The Biological Context’
• Punctuated equilibrium models have their
origins in evolutionary biology
• The interaction between entity and setting is
one that is amenable to political scientists
Biology and Political Science (2)
• The link between politics and biology is
reflected in such terms as ‘biopolitics’ or
‘political biology’
• A recent paper by Boari (2005) gives
solidity to the foundation of political theory
and political economy by anchoring them
in biology and opening the path towards a
unification between the two social
sciences and their immediate juxtaposed
science, biology
Biology and political science (3)
• Fowler and Schreiber (2008) describe
recent advances and argue that biologists
and political scientists must work together
to advance a new science of human
nature
• From an interdisciplinary perspective it is
interesting that Fowler and Schreiber are
two political scientists writing in Science,
one of the top rated scientific journals
Our projects in practice
• Benefit of close geographical proximity
• Importance of email correspondence
(‘electronic brainstorming’)
• Steep learning curve for the political
scientists
• Biologists thought that political scientist
might be identified with a particular political
position, or at least researching the
legitimacy of different political positions
Creating understanding
• In both projects a procedure followed of
each discipline reading literature selected
from the other disciplines and presenting
their understanding of the article to team
meetings
• This allowed misunderstandings to be
resolved and helped create an
understanding of how the other disciplines
worked in terms of methodology and
vocabulary
The importance of interaction
• On the GoLD project we have regular
research team meetings (organised and
run by the post-doctoral researchers)
• Importance of informal interaction
‘It would be ironic, although historically
rather symmetrical, if the genesis of future
great ideas owed more to the
consequences of lunch than to metrics’
Language and terminology
• Often talk of the need for a common language
in interdisciplinary research
• The phrase ‘trading zone’ is often used to
denote an interdisciplinary partnership in which
two or more perspectives are combined and a
new, shared language develops (Collins, Evans
and Gorman, 2007)
• Perhaps the key is a ‘shared understanding’
(Bracken & Oughton, 2006). We aspire to a
GoLD terminology
Co-authorship
• Another challenge has been writing together for
joint publications
• Biological scientists are used to tersely argued
research papers that present key findings in a
few printed pages, perhaps as few as one
• Political science articles more discursive
• It can be a challenge, therefore, to carve out a
coherent and readable paper
• How do you standardise the jargon of different
disciplines without losing thread of the content?
‘Change consultant’
• We are working with a change consultant and
business coach, specialising in ‘practical,
measurable methods of improving individual,
team and business performance’
• Given the challenges of an interdisciplinary
project this should promote effective team
working. We hope it will allow team meetings
to be even more productive and improve and
focus our interdisciplinary writing
Some broader philosophical issues
• To the positivist natural science and
social science are broadly analogous
• Interpretivists believe that the natural
and social world are different and
require different methods of enquiry
• Interdisciplinary working provides new
insights into the ‘philosophy of science’
and ‘philosophy of social science’
Scientific Realism
• Scientific realism accepts that there is a
reality independent of our existence, but also
that our access to that world is complicated
and our understanding of it is influenced by
the webs of meaning that we construct
• Such an approach ‘can straddle the natural
and social sciences’ and is compatible with
the interdisciplinary ‘turn’ opening up
collaboration between natural and social
scientists
Structure and agency
• Social science deals with conscious and
reflective objects which may act differently
under the same stimuli, whilst units making
up physical science are assumed
inanimate, unreflexive and predictable in
response to external stimuli
• Animal biology, however, involves animate
and, arguably, reflexive objects. Overlaps
with social and political science?
Hard and soft science
• The distinction between hard and soft science
does not stand up to scrutiny
• Often more overlap than assumed. EG:
growing use of experimental methods in
political science; social and natural science
makes use of sampling and surveys
• Debates in both social and natural science
concerning research being speculative and
unverifiable (eg: string theory, the Trouble With
Physics)
Please visit our websites
• http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/
biopesticides
• http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fa
c/gld
• Thanks to all members of the RELU 1
and RELU 3 project teams (principal
investigators Wyn Grant and Graham
Medley)