SHAPE AND ENCOURAGE YOUR INTERDISCIPLINARITY - Talk about your interdisciplinarity
Our experience: given that exploring interdisciplinarity was part of the aims of our project, we had to confront the concept as a team from the outset. Like many we struggled with its heterogenous nature, and wondered what sort of disciplinary collaboration we were undertaking. By ensuring that interdisciplinarity remained an ongoing part of our project conversations we were able to continuously assess and reassess how we thought we were interdisciplinary. Through identifying key aspects of our project’s working we developed a number of identifying elements of our interdisciplinarity. These included amongst others: hybrid methods we had developed, drawing upon the skills of different disciplines amongst the team; changes to the way team members now approached their research due to learnings from the project, and a particular style of meetings and language pertinent to us.
Why?
This overlaps closely with Defining your ways of working – also in this section. As discussed by much of the literature on the subject, interdisciplinarity is an ambiguous concept. Therefore, defining how you are interdisciplinary as a project team is fraught with difficulty. Barry and Born (2008 - see Further reading) offer some fantastic definitions of types of disciplinary working, which may help you to pin down which form of disciplinary collaboration your project is undertaking. But you then need to identify how and through what means that that particular collaboration is occurring. Otherwise, how are you to evaluate and map how you are interdisciplinary?
How?
Firstly, don’t be afraid to bring up the ‘ID’ word. The more it is talked about, the more familiar team members’ get with it and can begin to question its part in the project.
Secondly, try to find time to sit down and talk about your project’s interdisciplinarity. If you have someone specifically assigned to that role (see Facilitation and Maintain and stabilise your Project) then even better, as they can prompt discussions. If you’re struggling with how to do this then try thinking about what is unique to your project? What are the key things that make up your project? What are its themes?
For instance think about (also see Defining your ways of working):
• Do you have a particular style of meeting? Communication? Language?
• What methods are you using? Have you fused specific methods together from different disciplines to approach your research problem? If so what are they? What do they involve?
• Do you have a core/periphery of team members? How does this work?
• Are there specific roles allocated to specific team members?
• Have you found that project partners are stepping out of their disciplinary boundaries to try new approaches? For example, an engineer or physicist holding a focus group, or a social scientist working in a lab setting?
• How do team members feel they are being changed by being involved in the project? Have their ideas/approaches to research changed? Their opinions/expectations of other disciplines?
Different forms of collaboration at different times
Finally, it is worth being aware that as a project you may go through several different forms of disciplinary collaboration throughout the life course of the project. Using the Barry and Born definitions you may at some points be multidisciplinary and at others inter. There may also be elements of transdisciplinarity which can be teased out.