My Role as an Interdisciplinary "Expert": A Reflexive Critique

• In Event: Is STS an Innovation Discipline? Bridging Critique and Practice

Abstract

Interdisciplinary project approaches are often seen as necessary routes to ‘innovative’ solutions to complex problems. Like innovation, interdisciplinarity, which reflects the attributes of Mode 2 research (Gibbons et al., 1994), is associated with modern research approaches.

STS scholars investigating knowledge-making as researchers in natural science projects document the challenges of communicating their perceived role to the natural scientists they engage with (Calvert, 2013) and the resistance required to prevent the ELSIfication of their job description (Viseu, 2015). In my own research – I was recruited as an ethnographer of ‘interdisciplinarity’ on an urban sustainability project that aimed to bring together modeling approaches, policy insights and economic and social contexts to understand what makes a sustainable urban environment. Therefore my research extended the study of natural scientists to a variety of ‘interdisciplinary’ researchers.

This paper is a reflection of the complexities involved between others’ expectations and my own vision of my role in the project. As I was recruited for this project, some researchers anticipated my research to be very ‘active’ – for example I was seen by others as the ‘all-knowing’ interdisciplinary facilitator, who would piece together unnoticed connections in the project. Underlying this perception is the assumption of ‘good’ interdisciplinarity and that others would be willing to undertake the commitment to engage with it. However as my research progressed, tensions arose when I decided to undertake the research task to understand the researchers’ very definition of interdisciplinarity, and investigate the inherent aspirational assumptions that seemed to go hand in hand with their definitions.

Author

• Ashley Lewis, University of Nottingham