Sustaining Interdisciplinary Collaboration: A Guide for the Academy
Regina Bendix, Kilian Bizer, and Dorothy Noyes
Abstract
Both a vision for future scholarship and a slogan for university restructuring, interdisciplinarity promises to break through barriers to address today's complex challenges. Yet even high-stakes projects often falter, undone by contradictory incentives, bureaucratic frameworks, communication breakdowns, and the strong feelings raised by urgent social debates. Jumping into collaborative research without preparation or ongoing attention, researchers often fall back on disciplinary habits and raise disciplinary defenses. Above all, there is never enough time. Born of six years' experience in the ... More
Both a vision for future scholarship and a slogan for university restructuring, interdisciplinarity promises to break through barriers to address today's complex challenges. Yet even high-stakes projects often falter, undone by contradictory incentives, bureaucratic frameworks, communication breakdowns, and the strong feelings raised by urgent social debates. Jumping into collaborative research without preparation or ongoing attention, researchers often fall back on disciplinary habits and raise disciplinary defenses. Above all, there is never enough time. Born of six years' experience in the Göttingen Interdisciplinary Working Group on Cultural Property, this book examines social research as social process, identifying characteristic challenges of funded interdisciplinary projects: the clash of positivist, interpretivist, and normative approaches, the hierarchies and personalities among researchers, and the interaction of academic knowledge work with the common sense of social problems. While calling for reforms in research policy and administration, the book's immediate goal is to help researchers make the most of existing conditions. Drawing on economistic models of exchange and anthropological accounts of play and ritual, six chapters trace the life cycle of an interdisciplinary project--a temporary community of practice partially removed from everyday academic life--from its initial formulation to closure and aftermath. A seventh chapter provides recommendations for funders, administrators, principal investigators, and junior researchers. Reflexive attention to the research process can shepherd interaction across disciplines and capture insights as they emerge.
Keywords:
interdisciplinarity,
collaborative research,
cultural property,
university research,
project-based research,
community of practice,
knowledge work,
common sense,
social problems,
research policy
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780252040894 |
| Published to Illinois Scholarship Online: September 2017 |
DOI:10.5406/illinois/9780252040894.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Regina Bendix, author
University of Göttingen
Kilian Bizer, author
University of Göttingen
Dorothy Noyes, editor
Ohio State University
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