Assumptions Meet Reality: Canadian Social Scientists and Humanities Scholars in the Interdisciplinary Health Research Field

• In Event: 431 - Regular Session. Sociology of Knowledge: Organizing Scholarly Knowledge

Abstract

While science policymakers and university administrators in Canada have been pushing interdisciplinary research and greater collaboration between the social sciences, humanities and traditional health research disciplines, social scientists and humanists face several cultural and material hurdles. In this chapter, we use neo-institutionalist theory and Pierre Bourdieu's social theory to shed light on these challenges. We argue, based on qualitative interviews with social scientists and humanists in medicine-related programs, that merely wishing for successful interdisciplinarity does not erase the tensions between different doxa (i.e. field logics) and leads to decoupling.
Our research suggests that for social scientists and humanists to succeed in the health research fields, they often have to adapt to their new field and align their work with the dominant doxa of biomedical research. This necessary adaptation clashes with their epistemic habitus, leading to perceived changes in the quality of their research and to professional dissatisfaction. Conversely, the health research field has not changed its rules of the game to adapt to its new occupants, thus reproducing previous hierarchies that give social scientists and humanists low legitimacy and undermines their academic success in the broader field. Previous research has looked at the everyday practice of interdisciplinarity without considering the power relationships between disciplines in depth. Our approach is novel in that it takes into account the power relationships that shape interdisciplinarity at the institutional level.

Authors

• Mathieu Albert, University of Toronto

• Ayelet Kuper, University of Toronto

• Elise Paradis, University of Toronto