Publishing Interdisciplinarity: Emergent Questions from a Collaborative Experiment

Abstract

In 2020, the panelists began working on a cross-disciplinary special issue of a long-running and highly regarded journal in the biological sciences, The American Naturalist, titled “Nature, Data, and Power: How Hegemonies Shape Biological Knowledge.” They imagined the issue would bring scholars from the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences together to examine the role of white supremacy, misogyny, colonialism, cisheterosexism, and other relations of power in theories and practices of organismal biology. Assessing abstract proposals and reviewing submitted articles brought into stark focus the challenges of collaborating using what felt at times like incommensurate knowledge systems even when goals were closely aligned. The project became an STS laboratory of sorts, as epistemological problems the issue’s editorial team had all read about became practical conundrums to work through. In this roundtable, the team will discuss how they navigated differences in evidentiary standards and what counts as a legitimate form of knowledge worth publishing, translated concepts and language across fields, and developed a journal issue that aimed to perform the sometimes contradictory expertise of multiple disciplines at the same time. They foresee this conversation contributing to recent scholarship on methods of mutual engagement, transgression and transdisciplinary knowledge production, and relation building (e.g., work by Angela Willey, Cyd Cipolla et al eds, Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, and Max Liboiron). Panelists will also reflect on unsolved problems and ideas for continuing this relation-building work going forward, with an eye towards building a more just science that takes anti-racist, feminist, queer, and indigenous methods seriously.

Presenters

• Beans Velocci, University of Pennsylvania

• Banu Subramaniam, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Ashton Wesner, Colby College

• Ambika Kamath, University of Colorado Boulder

• Vincent Formica, Swarthmore College

• Nancy Chen, University of Rochester

• Maria Rebolleda-Gomez, University of California, Irvine

Session Organizers

• Beans Velocci, University of Pennsylvania

• Ashton Wesner, Colby College