Discussions of the challenges and opportunities in interdisciplinary working

1. Getting comfortable in
new intellectual terrain
(and shaping that terrain)
© Phelps 2006
Sarah Cornell
Planetary Boundaries Research Initiative, SRC

2. Interdisciplinary knowledge and research are important because:
1. Creativity often requires interdisciplinary knowledge.
2. Immigrants often make important contributions to their new field.
3. Disciplinarians often commit errors which can be best detected by people familiar
with two or more disciplines.
4. Some worthwhile topics of research fall in the interstices among the traditional
disciplines.
5. Many intellectual, social, and practical problems require interdisciplinary approaches.
6. Interdisciplinary knowledge and research serve to remind us of the unity-of-
knowledge ideal.
7. Interdisciplinarians enjoy greater flexibility in their research.
8. More so than narrow disciplinarians, interdisciplinarians
often treat themselves to the intellectual equivalent of
traveling in new lands.
9. Interdisciplinarians may help breach communication gaps in the modern academy,
thereby helping to mobilize its enormous intellectual resources in the cause of greater
social rationality and justice.
10. By bridging fragmented disciplines, interdisciplinarians might play a role in the
defense of academic freedom.
Nissani, M. (1997) Ten Cheers for Interdisciplinarity. Social Science Journal 34 (2) 201-216

3. My own trajectory
Time…

4. Taking those steps into new terrain…
Statistical methods
Researcher responsibility
Analytical techniques …Real world problems
Data quality issues
Real world problems
You don’t necessarily
know what skills you’re
building up as you go
along, but you’d better
make sure they are Synthesis skills
good ones! Research strategy planning
Practical policy insight
…And more real world problems

5. Unmapped terrain…
In many institutions, interdisciplinarity is
flourishing behind a “subject facade”
What do we do about the “concealed reality
of interdisciplinarity”?
Keith Clayton (1985), in L. Levin and I. Lind,
Interdisciplinarity Revisited
Who is actually And what is
doing this work…? research? Isn’t it
Often: students all unmapped
terrain…?

6. Piece of advice No. 1…
• Have fun – enjoy being undisciplined

7. What tensions
do we face?
rigour innovation
“alien” “native”

8. Problems in resolving the tensions abound…
ESF-COST RESCUE, 2012
EURAB 2004
US National Academies COSEPUP, 2004
ESSP Amsterdam Declaration 2001…
But surely the right way ahead!…
Previously men could be divided simply into the learned and the
ignorant… But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of
these two categories.
He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter
into his specialty; but neither is he ignorant, because he is “a scientist”
and “knows” very well his own tiny portion of the universe.
We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very
serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in
the fashion of the ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who
is learned is his own special line.
(Ortega y Gasset, The revolt of the masses, 1932)

9. Rigour ? Innovation

10. There is a playfulness of mind…
as well as a truly fierce drive to
make sense of the world, which the
technician as such usually lacks. Perhaps
he is too well trained, too precisely
M Ramirez, www.cagle.com
trained. Since one can be trained only in
what is already known, training
sometimes incapacitates one from
learning new ways; it makes one
rebel against what is bound to be at first
loose and even sloppy.
C.W. Mills, 1959, The sociological imagination
Rigour Innovation
Reflexivity

11. Piece of advice No. 2…
• Have fun – enjoy being undisciplined
• Whatever you do, do it well

12. “Deep interdisciplinarity” =
Earth system science’s research relationships
with the human and social sciences
What have I learnt about research relationships?
• Some are easier to promote than others
 but there’s no telling in advance which will work!
• ‘Ambience’ matters
• So does serendipity
 opportunities for serendipity can be planned
• A sense of collaborative endeavour grows with time

13. Foundations
Image from
www.ribbonfarm.com

14. On pragmatism…
Timeframe
Language
Dis/Comfort

16. My worldview is not
subjective or arbitrary -
just partial
“Post-Normal science” - carries an
awareness of the limitations of a
single viewpoint in understanding
complex systems
Funtowicz and Ravetz
“Mode 2 science” – Nowotny et al
Jarvie, 1964…

17. Piece of advice No. 3…
• Have fun – enjoy being undisciplined
• Whatever you do, do it well
• Read – write – THINK