This week the Research Methods Café involved a discussion around the theme of what it means to move between disciplines. The discussion covered the skills and experiences that can be gained through embracing interdisciplinary perspectives and strategies for exploring numerous frontiers simultaneously.
Several challenges to interdisciplinary work were highlighted early in our discussion. First existing funding structures make it difficult to progress interdisciplinary work. Some funders see interdisciplinary work as insufficiently specialised to be of value to the kind of work they are trying to foster. Similarly, reward structures often assume patterns of work that are not immediately aligned with interdisciplinary methods. Finally, it was noted that the number of papers published by a department is of significant importance to the department – a feature of academic life that complicates cases where a PI might straddle a number of disparate research fields. How can departments accrue credit for interdisciplinary work when they have only a partial association with the work itself?
From a teaching perspective, the way the boundaries between departments could be limited through the sharing of modules was highlighted. This has been done successfully, for example, by the MA in Research Methods. A PhD student who had completed this course gave a great insight into the strengths of this course. Clearly, students really benefit from courses such as MARM where a wide range of different ideas and perspectives are constantly being exchanged.
A number of challenges to the notion of interdisciplinarity were, nevertheless, highlighted. First, not everyone should be a generalist. Second, one might be a researcher in the field of, say, Earth Sciences, but this is already a very broad field in itself, posing a real question, especially for younger researchers, on how to position themselves within this field and build a career. The answer to this question is often hostile to a generalist academic posture. Tangentially, this also emphasises the way interdisciplinarity is a relative phenomenon: one can be a generalist within Earth Sciences, but still a specialist to a researcher who works across multiple traditional disciplines simultaneously.
The relevance of non-profits that operate within the academic realm was highlighted here. For example, Geology for Global Development tries to link geoscientists with social scientists and development experts. It provides training courses too. Here the fusion of often disparate disciplines is a crucial part of furthering the aims of geoscience for sustainable development. Often interdisciplinarity is considered a handy ‘extra’, but here we see an interesting case where the research question almost gives interdisciplinarity a level of inevitability. We see then that the meaning of interdisciplinarity is variable and dependent on context.
To counteract this impetus away from interdisciplinarity, the following important point was made: researchers might be well served in some cases to refrain from asking “who am I?” questions. Instead, research should be driven by questions and not disciplinary boundaries. This is certainly easier said than done and is not intended to criticise the move towards greater specialism within the academic community. Instead, for me at least, it reminded me of the value of curiosity not only as in intrinsic part of originality but also of innovation and discovery.
Many thanks to the participants who joined in with this conversation.
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This blog expresses the author's views and interpretations of comments made during the conversation. The author is responsible for any errors or omissions.
Mark Turner is a Research Software Engineer at Advanced Research Computing, Durham University.
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