Dr Justin Greaves

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Crossing the Interdisciplinary
Divide

• Dr Justin Greaves
• University of Warwick

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• We are not students of some subject matter, but
  students of problems. And problems may cut right
  across the borders of any subject matter or
  discipline (Popper, 1963)

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The RELU programme

• The Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) is a 25
  million research programme, funded by the ESEC,
  BBSRC and NERC
• Committed to pursue interdisciplinary working
  across the social and natural sciences in every
  research project it funds

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RELU 1 at Warwick

• Project on the regulatory and environmental
  sustainability of biopesticides
• Essentially a collaboration between political
  scientists and plant scientists
• The University of Warwick sought to bring
  together natural scientists from Warwick HRI with
  social scientists from the main campus to explore
  possible common research projects
• The creation of the RELU programme created a
  relevant funding opportunity

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RELU 3 at Warwick

• Project on the Governance of Livestock Diseases
  (GoLD)
• One challenge here has been the large and diverse
  mix of disciplines involved. There are four team
  members from Biological Sciences (including a
  veterinary epidemiologist, an infectious disease
  epidemiologist, an ecologist and a mathematical
  modeller), two from Political Science, two from
  Economics and one from Law

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Politics a junction subject?

• In many ways politics is the junction subject of
  the social sciences, born out of history and
  philosophy, but drawing of the insights of
  economics and sociology and, to a lesser extent,
  the study of law, psychology and geography
• This openness (eclecticism) can be seen as a
  strength allowing interdisciplinary work to
  flourish

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However.....

• A recent ESRC benchmarking review of political
  science notes that interdisciplinary networks
  are patchy
• Relatively little co-operation between natural
  scientists and political scientists
• Writers such as Moran (2006) and McKenzie (2007)
  take a rather pessimistic view of
  interdisciplinary collaboration
• Recent symposium issue of European Political
  Science on interdisciplinarity

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What is a discipline?

• Discrete sets of knowledge that share
  understandings about the most salient questions
  to ask, variables to explore and the most
  appropriate methods to employ (Warleigh-Lack and
  Cini, 2009)
• A discipline is distinguishable by features
  such as a defined area of study, a unique
  approach to its field, and specific theories,
  concepts and methodologies being employed to
  describe, understand and explain phenomena
  (Kelly, 2009)

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Another approach

• We take a discipline to be a branch of learning
  or scholarly instruction ... which is defined by
  institutional boundaries constructed by the needs
  of teaching, funding, administration and
  professional development (Bracken and Oughton,
  2006)

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Five questions to ask?

• A distinctive subject matter?
• A distinctive methodology?
• An area of expertise that needs specialised
  training in order to become a practitioner?
• A professional association which manages the
  profession and to which most practitioners
  belong?
• A mission?

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Is Politics a discipline?

• We cannot talk about political science as a
  discipline if those who call themselves political
  scientists and pretend to teach it are unable to
  agree on its basic substance and methodology
  (EPSNet, 2003)
• It is questionable whether politics is a
  discipline in the strictest sense at all (Kelly
  2009)
• A field of enquiry rather than a discipline?

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What is interdisciplinarity?

• I think what we mean .. is people from different
  disciplines coming together with the various
  research methods, tools, techniques and processes
  that they know about. . . and doing two things
  sharing that knowledge between the disciplines,
  so theres a kind of import and export of
  knowledge between them, but actually bringing
  those things together to create new tools,
  research methods, which can be applied to
  problems that genuinely sit between or problems
  that disciplines have in common or problems where
  you need a multi-disciplinary approach to solve
  them (Tom Innes, Director of Designing for the
  21st Century)

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Biology and Political Science

• Aristotle first asserted the biological
  uniqueness of human political behaviour with his
  famous observation Man is, by nature, a
  political animal
• The first chapter of Mackenzies survey of
  political science is The Biological Context
• Punctuated equilibrium models have their origins
  in evolutionary biology
• The interaction between entity and setting is one
  that is amenable to political scientists

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Biology and Political Science (2)

• The link between politics and biology is
  reflected in such terms as biopolitics or
  political biology
• A recent paper by Boari (2005) gives solidity to
  the foundation of political theory and political
  economy by anchoring them in biology and opening
  the path towards a unification between the two
  social sciences and their immediate juxtaposed
  science, biology

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Biology and political science (3)

• Fowler and Schreiber (2008) describe recent
  advances and argue that biologists and political
  scientists must work together to advance a new
  science of human nature
• From an interdisciplinary perspective it is
  interesting that Fowler and Schreiber are two
  political scientists writing in Science, one of
  the top rated scientific journals

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Our projects in practice

• Benefit of close geographical proximity
• Importance of email correspondence (electronic
  brainstorming)
• Steep learning curve for the political scientists
• Biologists thought that political scientist might
  be identified with a particular political
  position, or at least researching the legitimacy
  of different political positions

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Creating understanding

• In both projects a procedure followed of each
  discipline reading literature selected from the
  other disciplines and presenting their
  understanding of the article to team meetings
• This allowed misunderstandings to be resolved and
  helped create an understanding of how the other
  disciplines worked in terms of methodology and
  vocabulary

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The importance of interaction

• On the GoLD project we have regular research team
  meetings (organised and run by the post-doctoral
  researchers)
• Importance of informal interaction
• It would be ironic, although historically
  rather symmetrical, if the genesis of future
  great ideas owed more to the consequences of
  lunch than to metrics

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Language and terminology

• Often talk of the need for a common language in
  interdisciplinary research
• The phrase trading zone is often used to denote
  an interdisciplinary partnership in which two or
  more perspectives are combined and a new, shared
  language develops (Collins, Evans and Gorman,
  2007)
• Perhaps the key is a shared understanding
  (Bracken Oughton, 2006). We aspire to a GoLD
  terminology

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Co-authorship

• Another challenge has been writing together for
  joint publications
• Biological scientists are used to tersely argued
  research papers that present key findings in a
  few printed pages, perhaps as few as one
• Political science articles more discursive
• It can be a challenge, therefore, to carve out a
  coherent and readable paper
• How do you standardise the jargon of different
  disciplines without losing thread of the content?
  

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Change consultant

• We are working with a change consultant and
  business coach, specialising in practical,
  measurable methods of improving individual, team
  and business performance
• Given the challenges of an interdisciplinary
  project this should promote effective team
  working. We hope it will allow team meetings to
  be even more productive and improve and focus our
  interdisciplinary writing

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Some broader philosophical issues

• To the positivist natural science and social
  science are broadly analogous
• Interpretivists believe that the natural and
  social world are different and require different
  methods of enquiry
• Interdisciplinary working provides new insights
  into the philosophy of science and philosophy
  of social science

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Scientific Realism

• Scientific realism accepts that there is a
  reality independent of our existence, but also
  that our access to that world is complicated and
  our understanding of it is influenced by the webs
  of meaning that we construct
• Such an approach can straddle the natural and
  social sciences and is compatible with the
  interdisciplinary turn opening up collaboration
  between natural and social scientists

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Structure and agency

• Social science deals with conscious and
  reflective objects which may act differently
  under the same stimuli, whilst units making up
  physical science are assumed inanimate,
  unreflexive and predictable in response to
  external stimuli
• Animal biology, however, involves animate and,
  arguably, reflexive objects. Overlaps with social
  and political science?

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Hard and soft science

• The distinction between hard and soft science
  does not stand up to scrutiny
• Often more overlap than assumed. EG growing use
  of experimental methods in political science
  social and natural science makes use of sampling
  and surveys
• Debates in both social and natural science
  concerning research being speculative and
  unverifiable (eg string theory, the Trouble With
  Physics)

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Please visit our websites

• http//www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/biopesticid
  es
• http//www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/gld
  
• Thanks to all members of the RELU 1 and RELU 3
  project teams (principal investigators Wyn Grant
  and Graham Medley)