Interdisciplinary%20frontlines

1
Interdisciplinary frontlines

• Harriet Bulkeley
• Department of Geography
• Durham University

2
Outline

• Interdisciplinary attractions
• Cities and climate change
• Renewable energy systems
• Interdisciplinarity and urban environments
• Outlooks

3
Hope over experience?

• Calls for interdisciplinarity over the past
  decade limited success and renewed rhetoric
• In this context, why be interdisciplinary?
• Curiosity
• Use
• Relevance

4
Cities and climate change

• Bulkeley (Geography) and Betsill (IR)
• Transnational municipal network CCP
• Role of local government in mitigating climate
  change (planning, transport, housing, energy
  efficiency programmes)
• Interdisciplinary approach driven by need

5
Disciplinary relations
6
Engaging audiences

• Challenges of moving the finished product (a
  book) between disciplinary audiences
• Attempts at publication in conceptual IR journal
  (Millennium) frustrated
• Limited audiences for interdisciplinary work?

7
Renewable energy

• Development of a research proposal
• Whole systems thinking
• Socio-technical systems
• Add earth system science and stir?
• Time, trust, humour as extra ingredients
• Half-baked and over-cooked?
• Back to the social science recipe book

8
Interdisciplinarity in urban environments

• ESRC Transdisciplinary seminar series
• Judith Petts (Birmingham)
• Susan Owens (Cambridge)
• Knowledge and Power Exploring the Science/
• Society Interface in the Urban Environments
  Context
• Six seminars, 100 participants, including
  academics and policy makers
• Paper forthcoming in Geoforum

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Disciplinary cultures

• disciplines have survived for so long in the
  academic world because they serve a very useful
  function of constraining what the academic has to
  think about
• Bruce et al. 2004 467
• disciplines become deeply structured and such
  structuring is too deep to be overcome by good
  intentions, snappy commonsense thinking or some
  optimum design fix
• Degelings1995 295

10
Border troubles

• The linking of interdisciplinary work with
  applied research, and mutual downgrading
• Problems are not self-evident, but are defined by
  disciplines, and hence issues of agenda setting
• Appropriate academic divisions of labour
• The hard wiring of academic research

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Pure knowledge

• We prided ourselves that the science we were
  doing could not, in any conceivable
  circumstances, have any practical use. The more
  firmly one could make that claim, the more
  superior one felt
• C. P. Snow (1964 32)

12
Outlooks

• Continual work on frontlines
• Increasing recognition of need to create
  capacities for interdisciplinary working
• Is interdisciplinary work necessarily well
  received and used?
• Rather than grand projects, small victories offer
  potential route to interdisciplinarity