Angela Last
As a geographer, one of the first things you learn about your discipline is that it is not necessarily considered to be one. In fact, the subject was nearly eradicated in North American universities in the 1940s for lack of academic integrity. The geography department at Harvard, for instance, was closed for being ‘hopelessly amorphous’ (Neil Smith, cited in Paglen 2009). Getting rid of geography meant getting rid of unscientific descriptions of places, more fit for the school classroom or the fanciful travelogues of aristocratic explorers. Instead of physical and human geography, the subject could simply be split into geology and sociology. This struggle for legitimacy continues and now extends to geographical information systems (GIS), which are, again, seen as ‘unscientific’ and lacking disciplinary integrity (Drummond, cited in Last 2015).
There is still much debate over what constitutes the essence of geography, despite claims that disciplinary debates have been ‘railroaded’ in favour of debates around interdisciplinarity (Griffin, Medhurst and Green 2006: 7). For decades, human geographers have been indoctrinated to answer ‘space’ to any enquiries about their central concept or identity (Johnston, Gregory, Pratt and Watts 2000: 353; Massey 2005). More recently, some geographers have controversially proposed the Earth and its processes – the ‘geo’ of geography – as a more appropriate, or at least additional characteristic that takes the material relations of Earth systems more strongly into account (Clark 2011), drawing predictably hostile reactions from the ‘space defenders’. Such boundary making becomes even more pronounced when you enter geography as an outsider and are constantly scrutinized for the correct performance of ‘geography’. Despite such stabilizing impulses, geography continues to be a discipline that is amorphous enough to allow for a great amount of interdisciplinary work.
Another piece of geographical history that is helpful in understanding interdisciplinarity, and its link to innovation and internationalization, is the discipline’s association with geopolitics and colonialism. Geographical methods are not innocent and often hide violent histories around resource extraction, land appropriation and the construction of unequal infrastructures and divisions, whether we are talking about cartography or the use of statistics (Warren and Katz 2015). What becomes apparent is that methods can never be divorced from their context, and if they are, the context will keep surfacing. Academics and other commentators from colonized countries have repeatedly noted how the objectification of indigenous and other colonized peoples continues, as well as the imposition of European concepts and categorizations (Deloria 1991; Kukutai and Taylor 2016; Smith 2012). Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012), for instance, argues that not only research questions and methods need to be revised, but also questions relating to the power structures in which these are embedded. For her, such questions should be extended to include:
Who defined the research problem?
For whom is this study worthy and relevant? Who says so?
What knowledge will the community gain from this study?
What knowledge will the researcher gain from this study?
What are some likely positive outcomes from this study?
What are some possible negative outcomes?
How can the negative outcomes be eliminated?
To whom is the researcher accountable?
What processes are in place to support the research, the researched and the researcher?
2012: 175–176
While researchers already think they address these questions, often in front of ethics committees through which their proposals need to pass, dynamics between researcher and researched/ other researchers can work out very differently in practice (see Newell et al. in this section). Smith herself uses her book Decolonizing Methodologies to document and propose 25 example methods – from claiming to sharing – that have been used as alternatives by indigenous communities (2012: 143). In such circumstances, methodological innovation can literally become a lifesaver.
Both disciplinary identity and problematic histories point to a fundamental question, implicit in Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s set of questions: how does a method come into being? This question is important, because it is easy to lose sight of our research processes and what has shaped and continues to shape them. Take, for example, interviews. How come we are using interviews? How did the methodological guidelines for interviews come into being? How can interviews be done differently?
When students learn about methods, they are told that these are needed to produce ‘new knowledge’. What counts as knowledge is, again, determined by historical, geographical and social context, and this, in turn, affects the conception of methods. There is no stable ground or yard stick. This is a problem that has occupied many researchers and writers. One of them is Georges Perec, a French writer whose parents ‘legally’ died violent deaths in the Second World War – on the battlefield and in a concentration camp. This personal history played a key role in his questioning of the processes that go on in the world and count as ‘normality’ and acceptable practices. One of his questions could be described as: if we take methods to be the outcome of a decision of what we want to measure and how we want to measure it, the issue that remains is: what tells us that our method is appropriate? As he emphasized in his striking methodological experiments, such as those found in the collection Species of Spaces (Perec 2008), there is nothing we can rely upon in terms of external constraints that can function as a marker for appropriate conduct. Of course, there are temporary markers: at the present time, for instance, we cannot go out and ask random people about a specific topic and call it ‘research’. We also cannot undertake research with particular populations (such as children or patients) without complicated processes of consent. However, at a different point in time, this could have been – or could be – entirely appropriate. As Perec proceeds to undertake apparently absurd projects – from experimenting with alternative address systems to minute descriptions of spaces and events that do not seem to matter – he communicates an urgency: to ‘question the habitual’ (2008: 210) and to always ask what circumstances led to something becoming normalized.
Across the sciences and social sciences, we now look upon a significant chunk of past research with horror, in terms of the methods and ethics applied. Books from anthropology to the history of science are full of examples of what we now recognize as systematic violence, especially against marginalized populations (for example, Brandt 1978; Nelson 2011). If past methods are not violent, they often appear naive or silly. They did what to measure psychological disorders? They did what to demonstrate the inferiority of women and people of colour? How could researchers adopt such appalling methodological standards? Although we like to think that methodological insanity is a thing of the past, headlines about problematic studies are not likely to disappear. For all we know, the methods that we are presently employing might be ridiculed only 20 years later. On the other hand, methods that now seem utterly ridiculous to people who have undergone standard methods training – some performative methods spring to mind – might become perfectly acceptable in the future.
At present, for instance, there is considerable debate around the benefits and hyperbole of interdisciplinarity. To adherents to disciplines, the investment in interdisciplinarity as a superior approach to problem-solving often seems overstated – and overfunded (Barry, Born and Weszkalnys 2008; Thrift 2006). Many such researchers would even agree that there cannot be such a thing as interdisciplinary methods – perhaps a negotiation of methods or a common practice such as a survey or an experiment. The good news is that instances of ‘methodological insanity’ are not always a bad thing. In some fortunate moments, some of us might get thrown into such a state right in the present. Often, the occasion is indeed cross-disciplinary and international collaboration, where colleagues from different methodological traditions – most likely including yourself – make seemingly unspeakable proposals. In the moment when everyone is taking turns to justify their method, you might suddenly realize not only why a particular method is weird, but also why it could make sense in a particular context.
Further, one of the key obstacles to any method is what is commonly described as ‘the field’. ‘The field’ – understood as the site of study, whether this be a lab, an archive or a geographical region – is where all good methodological intentions seem to fail. Whether you look at field notes, published government reports, articles, theses, monographs – there are numerous documentations of how methods did not work, or had to be ‘tweaked’ to produce any kind of useful research. Some of the resulting ‘rogue methods’ are more controversial than others. Here, the work of Nancy Scheper-Hughes on organ trading (2004) and Irish bachelors (2000) is often cited as a key reflection on how a researcher moved into a field with noble intentions and ended up in an ethical and methodological car crash – albeit not without educational and ‘rogue ethical’ side effects. Such examples show not only how methods are challenged by the environments in which they are placed, but also how they are potentially reshaped into something unexpected.
In this context, I would like to come back to the earlier question of ‘how does a method come into being?’ If method is not a neutral practice, but a practice that is shaped by context – by the field as well as wider systems in which research is embedded – one should really ask the question: what gives rise to interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary methods? Is it the research problem, the collaboration, the specific institutional context and availability of resources, the field, economic drivers or even geopolitical dynamics? Although wider drivers for inter-disciplinarity are in place – such as the demand for interdisciplinary research from research councils and other funding bodies – the answers can be very different from project to project. This section provides space for reflection on the role of the contexts – the varying geographies, institutional and personal negotiations, field provocations and economic considerations – of interdisciplinarity.
Of the things that give rise to interdisciplinarity, collaborations form an important point of methodological emergence. While interdisciplinarity does not have to take place between people – you can be an interdisciplinary researcher by drawing on resources from different disciplines – exchange between researchers remains the most visible basis. It also remains the most institutionally supported mode, as innovation is imagined to take place through cross(disciplinary)-fertilization. Since collaborations tend to be complex negotiations, many pages have been filled with studies of cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary projects, often in grinding detail. How do you make yourself understood in a collaboration? How do you manage relationships between many, often speedily thrown-together project partners? How do you co-write a paper with a multitude of other authors? How do you innovate?
When I taught on the MA in Art and Science at Central Saint Martins, London, for instance, the art students frequently struggled to keep the science students interested in their work. Since there were already a growing number of collaborative project documentations online I pointed them to a variety of ‘behind the scenes’ reflections on the success or failure of joint research. One of these reflections was by the collaborators behind Micespace, a project on rodent welfare in experimental science between the artist Helen Scalway and the geographer of science Gail Davies. The project began as a spontaneous exploration and has very much retained the spirit of its origins throughout its ‘mutations’, including its online presence (www.micespace.org/). As Scalway and Davies describe it:
This website is our own mutated mouse repository: it is offered as an ‘anti-archive’. Micespace is a provocative, messy and speculative collection, inviting reflection and hesitation around what the conventional curation of scientific data may elide, miss out, or skip over: incommensurable logics, unanswerable conundrums, and aporias in meaning.
So far, this ‘anti-archive’ has turned out to be valuable for both collaborators – as a means of reflection and communication – as well as for outsiders such as my students who appreciate it as an example of how a collaboration can not only be documented but grow through processes of private and public reflection. Davies’ and Scalway’s entry also beautifully illustrates how methods that at first appear very different, such as scientific and artistic experimentation, can emerge from very similar objectives and be brought together with a shared vocabulary – in this case, that of diagramming.
The scale of the project – an organically evolving experiment between two people that is not so much confined by the start and end date of a set research project – also impacts on the way the research is conducted. Despite the serious topic, the project has a playful feel, with which Scalway and Davies explore the different connections between human and nonhuman research subjects.
We were looking together at a drawing I’d made of an alert mouse and Gail said something like, the problem is, this is just a picture of a mouse. Then she had to leave the studio to make a phone call and in a trice my mind somehow somersaulted me into banging a large piece of paper up on the wall and frantically scribbling, as if from a mouse-eye view, the inside of a lab cage with bars and nesting materials and scent-trails, so that when she came back we were both in a charcoaly, smudgy, very crudely suggested mouse world.
Scalway 2015
This does not have to mean that large-scale and more time-constrained projects cannot be playful. In fact, a report by Blackwell, Wilson, Street, Boulton and Knell (2009) recommends that all interdisciplinary projects should ‘embrace chaos’ and play, no matter at what scale, to overcome disciplinary habits (2009: 121). The authors suggest, for instance, ‘coin[ing] novel, playful terminology’ as a means of overcoming disciplinary jargon: ‘be playful in the early stages, engage in experiments and avoid theory’ (op. cit.). A good example of this approach is the Hearing the Voice project, an interdisciplinary medical humanities project that explored the phenomenon of voice hearing, based at Durham University. Some of the project conditions were described by Angela Woods, co-investigator of the project, in an article on interdisciplinary authoring:
The 17 members of the ‘Interdisciplinary approaches’ working group were based in 7 different time zones and brought expertise from 19 different fields, ranging from medieval history to clinical psychology to neuroimaging. While a majority of authors were able to meet in person at the ICHR, most of our discussions, and particularly the planning and revising of the article, had to be conducted via email. It’s not difficult to imagine some of the challenges that teamwork at this scale presents, and some of these are clearly specific to, or heightened by, working across disciplines.
Woods 2015: 5
As a starting point to manage such challenging conditions, the project members created ‘Voice Club’, fortnightly meetings in which a variety of media, from games to talks, were employed to get to know one another’s perspectives (Robson, Woods and Fernyhough 2015).
At the same time, there are other challenges in collaborations that are less easy to negotiate and often extend beyond the scale of the team. An added pressure, for example, was the desire to undertake methodological development. In the project: the researchers neither wanted to ‘unnecessarily “tweak” existing methods’ nor necessarily stick to established methods, but instead used the multi-disciplinary environment as a gauge as to where established methods might be insufficient and could benefit from mutual exchange (Wilkinson and Smailes 2015: 3). A downside of this approach to developing interdisciplinary methods was the required work and time intensity, which, the participants observed, resulted in fewer, albeit potentially more innovative outputs (op. cit.). As Wilkinson and Smailes (2015) argue, such differences need to be taken into consideration not just by researchers, but also by funders.
As indicated at the beginning of this essay, the shape of collaborations is dependent on many things, including what normally become labelled as ‘external factors’. I realize that I follow a reverse movement to recent propositions that interdisciplinarity might perhaps be better understood if the focus moved away from institutional structures. As Felicity Callard and Des Fitzgerald (2015b) ask: ‘How would our understanding of – and capacity to improve – interdisciplinary research change if we focused less on funders and journals and universities, and more on the mundane, day-to-day lives of collaborative researchers?’ From my own experience, however, these ‘mundane, day-to-day lives’ and activities are so much infused by wider dynamics that I would like to zoom out again to highlight issues such as geopolitical divisions, and what is generally referred to as the ‘knowledge economy’ (how knowledge can be measured, valued and made to count in economic terms).
When it comes to its relationship with institutions, interdisciplinarity is often placed within a narrative that can be framed in terms of ‘global challenges’ and ‘global competitiveness’ (Ledford 2015; Science Europe 2012). According to this narrative, interdisciplinarity is attributed with ‘a heightened significance due to a more general association of innovation with processes of boundary crossing, collaboration, and the integration of different kinds of knowledge’ (Blackwell et al. 2009). Innovation and interdisciplinarity can end up, as Blackwell et al. remark, being used more interchangeably than can be justified (2009: 10–11). Not only might interdisciplinary outputs take longer to emerge, as stated in the preceding part on collaborations, but they are apparently also slower to manifest in the form of citations. As a recent report by the publisher Elsevier to the UK Research Councils found, ‘it takes longer for interdisciplinary research impact and value to be recognized’ (Elsevier 2015: 3). Moreover, while potentially advantageous in economic terms and globally recognized as a research priority (Global Research Council 2016), interdisciplinarity is facing institutional obstacles. UK research councils, for instance, have noted issues within their own structures, as well as other academic infrastructures. Similar issues persist elsewhere, too (Bozhkova 2016). At present, attempts are being made to remedy this situation, through cross-institutional funding programmes and also through transnational programmes, since international interdisciplinary research has been identified as having a greater impact (Elsevier 2015: 3).
The reality is that the uptake of interdisciplinarity, while seemingly universally desirable, is uneven. This not only has to do with geographical differences in university systems, but with resources and purpose-orientation: an institution or system has to decide what inter-disciplinarity is and what it is for. Achille Mbembe, in his talk about the future shape of South African universities and knowledge production, argues that some fundamental decisions about what counts as knowledge and discipline need to be made first, both for local and global contexts (2015). Similarly, academics have decried the emphasis on interdisciplinarity that is driven by economic outcomes, rather than problem orientation (Thrift 2006). Some problems are less profitable than others, a fact that has already been an issue in disciplinary research, most notoriously medical research, where diseases affecting poorer people or women remain under-researched (Morel 2003).
In this section, Nina Lykke stresses the importance of the history of interdisciplinarity in the social sciences and charts the concept’s recent trajectory from radical intervention to institutional convention. Over the last 50 years or so, interdisciplinarity has not only been perceived differently, but served very different purposes. As Lykke emphasizes, one history of interdisciplinarity is closely associated with projects such as critical gender and race studies that emerged bottom-up – from activist and student movements. This is a different situation from today, where inter-disciplinarity is often a top-down demand, despite lack of adequate infrastructures (British Academy 2016: 5). In the interview, Lykke argues that, on the one hand, institutional uptake can be regarded as a success – interdisciplinary research is now widely supported, from local to global research councils issuing statements on their valuing and handling of interdisciplinarity (e.g. Global Research Council 2016). On the other hand, she argues that institutionalization and economic imperatives can lead to uncritical and unethical practices that undermine activist goals, cross-cutting inequalities and institutional elitism.
Such institutionalization of radical values is often hitting the very people it was initially intended to support and protect, as their demands increasingly grate against the new norms of interdisciplinarity. In their book on interdisciplinary research with social scientists and neuroscientists, Callard and Fitzgerald (2015a) flag how some counter-productive dynamics can be amplified through interdisciplinarity, for instance around status and value. When the emphasis is on negotiating disciplines, they suggest, other factors such as race, gender or class can end up becoming side-lined. At the same time, when it comes to the distribution of roles within a project, these factors tend to creep back in, especially in the distribution of low- and high-status work. In response, Callard and Fitzgerald offer a checklist of questions that are aimed at making valuation transparent. Among the topics are administration or ‘housework’, conceptualization versus data collection, public engagement work, publishing outlets (high ranking/low ranking; open access/standard publishing model; online/print) and author hierarchies (2015: 110–111). Such lists can be a useful component of project design, especially when hierarchies are not clearly pre-established as in most interdisciplinary projects. Again, additional administrative clout such as equality charters can be brought into the discussion as a means of holding people accountable. In practice, success depends very much on individuals as well as on structures, but even if such attempts at questioning value prove unreliable, they at least constitute one available tool.
Another issue is metrics and their use in evaluating interdisciplinary work. This can be witnessed, for instance, in the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), a university audit that in part determines the distribution of research funding. An issue of the last REF was the inability of the system to adequately deal with interdisciplinary work (Bhandar 2016; Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy 2016). For many interdisciplinary researchers, it was considerably more difficult for their work to be included in the REF (British Academy 2016: 32), or to find a job during the period of strategic hires that preceded the exercise. Anything from publishing in interdisciplinary journals to publishing with project partners in journals outside of the Global North became a problem in the face of the metrics employed (Bhandar 2016; RACE 2016). While the criteria are currently being reviewed to take this kind of work into consideration, this process is not likely to be straightforward, especially when an international dimension is added. Whose evaluation criteria are going to dominate the project? This also leads to a bigger issue in knowledge production that could be described as the ‘geopolitics of method’.
How should the ‘geopolitics of methods’ be understood, and why should we care about it? Interdisciplinary scholar Richa Nagar offers a reconsideration of the fashion for seemingly bounded ‘border crossings’:
Crossing borders is on the agenda. Foundations wish to fund projects connecting the global with the local, academics with practitioners. Editors are excited by cutting-edge scholarship that blurs disciplinary boundaries, and emphasises hybridity. This is energising, but the popularity of these border crossings in the present political climate should give us pause.
Nagar 2014: 86
What Nagar talks about is the impact of global inequalities on the way we conduct research. In her book Muddying the Waters, she calls for a feminist scholarship that takes such issues into account – issues that not only surface in international collaborations.
When thinking about the ‘geopolitics of method’, ‘geopolitics’ can be thought of as a method as well as a mode of power – the two cannot be separated. As a disciplinary field, geopolitics imagines territorial relations, and often claims to predict political developments across the world through an analysis of geography, including demography. It has been the subject of controversy, because of its association with environmental determinism, imperialism and fascism. A few decades ago, critical geopolitics developed as a way of critiquing the concepts and worldviews of classical geopolitics while re-emphasizing the importance of geography (Smith 2000: 370). As a mode of power, geopolitics impacts through its portrayal of power connected to geography. The starkest geopolitical division today, perhaps, is the imagination of the Global North and South, with the Global North presented as an aspirational model for the Global South.
I would like to argue that methods, too, are tied to geopolitical imaginaries in ways that impact on how they are practised and taught. In Science and an African Logic, Helen Verran (2001) argues for the cultural relativity of methods and measurement. Reflecting on her employment in teacher training in Nigeria, she shows how methodological hegemonies, in this case brought about through colonialism, can negatively impact on those whose methods continue to be devalued:
Mrs Babatunde had an interest in the discipline sought by the official mathematics curriculum, which says that measuring volume should be achieved through the prior notion of a singular uniform extension. The curriculum insists on a very specific sequence of small bodily gestures as the proper way to measure volume. Those who are authorities in the matter of quantifying, insist that that is the way to proceed. Mrs Babatunde might suffer if she fails to instil in the children the specific, required routines, developing in them the proper bodily habits of enumeration. If she failed my subject because she taught incorrectly, she might lose her job. At the same time, Yoruba children embodied an important set of interests for Mrs Babatunde. She knew that they might not get it if she presented volume in the prescribed way, the little routines, gestures with hands and eyes, words and chart, might not congeal as number, and then she will have confused and rowdy children on her hands.
Verran 2001: 8–9
This is but one example of how geopolitical power impacts on methods. Another one is the teaching that many of us have received in the social sciences where methods are routinely described as having emerged from a particular genealogy of thought and practice, mainly populated by white European men who brought about paradigm shifts that, in turn, brought about new methodological requirements.
While this critique is by now well-known through the work of de-colonial and feminist scholars, it also helps put matters into perspective (Harding 1993; The Black Scholar 1974). For many white Western scholars who are interested in a different perspective, this has meant trying to look at other methodological systems, vocabularies and practices. In their paper ‘Provincialising STS’, John Law and Wen-yuan Lin (2015) struggle with exactly this issue: how to not take Western concepts as universals, in their case in the field of science and technology studies (STS). What would a postcolonial STS look like? Like the experimenters who have developed ‘Asia as method’ discussed by Celia Lury, their suggestion implies applying concepts from other knowledge traditions to Euro-American contexts, as they may allow for a different story to be told. As, to some scholars, this might look like another form of cultural appropriation, it becomes clear that the effort to provincialize European knowledge is not one that can easily distance itself from the usual dynamics. Helen Verran, too, has experimented with responses to the issue of knowledge inequalities. Through her experience of different knowledge systems and her dialogue with STS scholars, she has come to see everything in the world as emerging out of practices. Thinking in terms of ‘bundles of practices’ (Verran 2014: 530) gives rise to a ‘flatland’ where even basic (Western) knowledge boundaries between the sciences and humanities disappear. In her writing, she pursues the strategy of ‘attempting to provoke readers to think “ontologically” – to question and experiment with the very foundations of knowledge that we take for granted, and also our place within them’ (2014: 531).
A further layer to the debate around knowledge hierarchies is added through the top-down demand for internationalization by university managements and publishing companies. These, too, are embedded in geopolitical dynamics and hierarchies that directly shape research practices. Not only are British universities increasingly reliant on recruiting international students, they have over 200 satellite campuses in other countries. International students constitute a growing market both in the UK and abroad – in terms of tuition fees and consumers of publications. The same is true for research grants. It is not only interdisciplinary research that is increasingly desired, but international research as well. Due to unequal geopolitical and economic dynamics between the so-called Global South and Global North, there is often a greater support for knowledge from the Global North and a devaluation of knowledge from the Global South. This, for instance, translates into funders from the Global North having a greater say in project decisions. The critique ‘Participation: the new tyranny?’ (Cooke and Kothari 2001) gives examples of the problems of such imposed paradigms. Documented in this edited collection is the role of ‘participatory methods’ for development – fashionable in the Global North – and its unintended reinforcement of power structures through group dynamics and access issues.
In this section, paradigm failure is represented by the reflections of the DIRTPOL team. The project, on cultural perceptions of dirt, put together by researchers from different disciplines at Sussex, Lagos and Kenyatta universities, was accompanied by a series of blog reflections on what could be called methodological failure, re-evaluation and adaptation. This documentation showed not just the cultural conditioning of methods, but also the counter-productivity of insistence on methodological universality. In their chapter, the DIRTPOL team takes this argument further and argues that non-conforming, or ‘dirty’ methods can be not just a more appropriate, but a more ethical practice.
Ethics remain a serious issue in international interdisciplinary research. What a consideration of geopolitical dynamics demands of us is to ask some very basic questions such as: why am I collaborating with a particular researcher and what are the conditions of this exchange? In the case of this handbook, for example, the relatively standard production conditions became problematic for me as an editor when it came to soliciting international contributions. Apart from asking for many hours of sometimes unpaid labour for a book that most people, let alone libraries, will not be able to afford, I had to be sensitive to differences in authors’ working conditions across the world. I was also aware of the conflict that many academics from the Global South experience around assimilation into the Global North, which further seems to feed its cultural dominance (Joseph 2015).
Tahani Nadim’s entry on seed archives describes the lingering colonial histories and paradigms that resurface in present-day museum narratives. Her text makes apparent the constant supply of energy that is required to maintain and renew these narratives and ensure the future of convenient exclusions. In her context of archives, collections and museums, interdisciplinarity and the global dimension open a connection to other epistemologies and ontologies around the world that perform different sorts of ‘disciplining’ of materiality (see Todd 2016). An explicit concern in her entry is the role of the nonhuman, something that rarely seems to figure in discussions of either interdisciplinarity (Latour 2004) or globalization (see Clark 2002; Mbembe 2015). What provocations can different considerations of the nonhuman issue towards not only method but geopolitical considerations of method?
From the contributions in this section, a variety of questions and provocations arise. A theme that runs across all the contributions for me and which, I feel, is central to the design and practice of method in general, is negotiating exclusion. This is also reflected in the work of many philosophers who have written on method, such as Isabelle Stengers (2010), Michel Serres (1995) and Edouard Glissant (2010). Stengers’ ‘cosmopolitics’ specifically attempts to cultivate a sensitivity to what is excluded from politics, which, for her, means expanding our notion of the political and to where it extends. For me, this includes our daily practices as researchers, our ‘doings’. A method excludes by necessity, but there are always different choices that can be made, whether these choices simply concern techniques or seemingly prescribed delineations between life-forms or geopolitical territories.
Michel Serres cautions against the rigidity and exclusionary violence of the academy, as enacted in method. He describes his own method as ‘anti method’ (Serres, Harari and Bell 1982: xxxvi), as being ‘fertilely inventive in the middle of chaos’ (Serres and Latour 1995: 117). Deliberately unsystematic, Serres creates excessive, intertwined texts, which he hopes will enable readers to make their own connections. The ‘noise’ of Serres’ texts further serves the purpose of building immunity to being stripped to reveal something that is manageable as a tool. Rather, a method, especially an interdisciplinary one, is supposed to be ‘less a juncture to control than an adventure to be had’ (Serres, cited in Brown 2003: 189). As discussed earlier, an element of adventure and play is always desired as a condition for innovation – Goldsmiths College in London, for instance, has a ‘Unit of Play’. The question here is: how shall we, and can we, play under the current institutional-economic conditions? Or perhaps: why do we play?
The biggest challenge is perhaps issued by Edouard Glissant who challenges us to perform a different kind of globalization which he calls ‘globality’ or ‘worldmentality’ (Diawara 2015).
What we call globalisation, which is the standardisation to the bottom, the reign of multinationals, the standardisation, the ultra-liberalism in global markets, for me, this is the negative side of a wonderful reality that I call globality. This globality is an extraordinary adventure given to all of us who today live in a world that, for the first time, in real and immediate, sudden ways, without wait, is simultaneously multiple and unique, just as much as it presents a necessity for everyone to change their ways of perceiving, of living, of reacting in this world.
Glissant 2005: 15; my translation
While globalization represents increasing restriction, the drive to universalize in ways that create further inequalities, ‘globality’ represents the openness that globalization supposedly promises. This openness emerges from a willingness to being changed by the other (Glissant 2009: 66). Throughout his work, Glissant reminds us that this openness is not some idealistic grand gesture that needs to be performed to garner attention. Rather, it is something that should permeate our most mundane, everyday practices.
Against this background, interdisciplinarity, especially one with the aspiration to enable global exchange, can be a place to practise this openness to be changed by the other. This might seem ridiculous, as the conditions for exchange in the academy often feel instrumental, contrived or, due to their rootedness in ideas of globalization, even counter to ‘globality’. However, in their very banality and commonplaceness, they can still be a provocation to our practices, if we allow ourselves to be open. Whether we want it or not, our seemingly geographically confined practices are entangled in much wider processes. This technically means that any ‘ridiculous’ experiments could reach some unexpected places. Says the geographer.
Barry, A., Born, G. and Weszkalnys. G. (2008). Logics of interdisciplinarity. Economy and Society, 37(1): 20–49.
Bhandar, B. (2016). The Stern Review. LRB Blog. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/08/02/brenna-bhandar/the-stern-review/
Blackwell, A. F., Wilson, L., Street, A., Boulton, C. and Knell, J. (2009). Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with interdisciplinary teams. University of Cambridge, Technical Report No. 760. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-760.pdf
Bozhkova, E. (2016). Interdisciplinary proposals struggle to get funded. Nature News 29 June 2016. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: www.nature.com/news/interdisciplinary-proposals-struggle-to-get-funded-1.20189
Brandt, A. M. (1978). Racism and Research: The Case of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The Hastings Center Report, 8(6): 21–29.
British Academy (2016). Crossing paths: interdisciplinary institutions, careers, education and applications. July 2016. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: www.britac.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Crossing%20Paths%20-%20Full%20Report.pdf
Brown, S. C. (2003). Natural writing: the case of Serres. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 28(3): 184–192.
Callard, F. and Fitzgerald, D. (2015a). Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Callard, F. and Fitzgerald, D. (2015b). Why it’s time to get real about interdisciplinary research. The Guardian. 14 October 2015. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2015/oct/14/why-its-time-to-get-real-about-interdisciplinary-research
Clark, N. (2002). The demon-seed: bioinvasion as the unsettling of environmental cosmopolitanism. Theory, Culture & Society, 19(1–2): 101–125.
Clark, N. (2011). Inhuman Nature. London: Sage.
Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. (2001). Participation: The New Tyranny? London: Zed Books.
Deloria, V. (1991). Research, redskins, and reality. American Indian Quarterly, 15(4): 457–468.
Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (2016). Building on success and learning from experience: an independent review of the Research Excellence Framework: July 2016.
Diawara, M. (2015). Edouard Glissant’s Worldmentality: An Introduction to One World in Relation. South as A State Of Mind Journal #6 (documenta 14 #1). Kassel: documenta und Museum Fridericianum. Online Version. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: www.documenta14.de/en/south/34_douard_glissant_s_worldmentality_an_introduction_to_one_world_in_relation
Elsevier (2015). A Review of the UK’s Interdisciplinary Research Using a Citation-based Approach: Report to the UK HE Funding Bodies and MRC by Elsevier. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: www.hefce.ac.uk/media/HEFCE,2014/Content/Pubs/Independentresearch/2015/Review,of,the,UKs,interdisciplinary,research/2015_interdisc.pdf
Glissant, E (2005). La cohée du Lamentin. Poétique V, Paris: Gallimard.
Glissant, E (2009). Philosophie de la relation: poésie en entendue. Paris: Gallimard.
Glissant, E. (2010). Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Global Research Council (2016). Statement of Principles on Interdisciplinarity. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/GRC2016Interdisciplinarity-pdf/
Griffin, G., Medhurst, P. and Green, T. (2006). Interdisciplinarity in interdisciplinary research programmes in the UK. University of Hull. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: www.york.ac.uk/res/researchintegration/Interdisciplinarity_UK.pdf
Harding, S. (1993). The ‘Racial’ Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Johnston, R. J., Gregory, D., Pratt, G. and Watts, M. (2000). The Dictionary of Human Geography (4th ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Joseph, A. (2015). Scholarly publishing in South Africa: the global south on the periphery. Insights, 28(3): 62–68.
Kukutai, T. and Taylor, J. (2016). Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an Agenda. Canberra: Australian National University Press.
Last, A. (2015). Notes on GIS & methods. Mutable Matter. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: https://mutablematter.wordpress.com/2015/06/15/notes-on-gis-methods/
Latour, B. (2004). The Politics of Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Law, J. and Lin, W.-Y. (2015). Provincialising STS: postcoloniality, symmetry and method. 2015 Denver Bernal Prize plenary.
Ledford, H. (2015). How to solve the world’s biggest problems. Nature, 525(7569): 308–311.
Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: Sage.
Mbembe, A. (2015). Decolonizing knowledge and the question of the archive. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: https://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20-%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf
Morel, C. M. (2003). Neglected diseases: under-funded research and inadequate health interventions. EMBO Reports, 4(Suppl. 1): S35–S38.
Nagar, R. (2014). Muddying the Waters: Co-authoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism. Urbana, Chicago & Springfield: University of Illinois Press.
Nelson, A. (2011). Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Paglen, T. (2009). Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space. The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: www.brooklynrail.org/2009/03/express/experimental-geography-from-cultural-production-to-the-production-of-space
Perec, G. (2008). Species of Spaces. London: Penguin.
RACE (Race, Culture & Equality Working Group of the Royal Geographical Society with Institute of British Geographers) (2016). Comments on the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: https://raceingeographydotorg.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/race_ref_comments_final.pdf
Robson, M., Woods, A. and Fernyhough, C. (2015). ‘Voice Club’ in Working Knowledge: Transferable Methodology for Interdisciplinary Research. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: www.workingknowledgeps.com/
Scalway, H. (2015). ‘About the comic strip’ MiceSpace. Retrieved 27 March 2017 from: www.micespace.org/about-the-comic-strip/
Scheper-Hughes, N. (2000). Ire in Ireland. Ethnography, 1(1): 117–140.
Scheper-Hughes, N. (2004). Parts unknown: undercover ethnography of the organs-trafficking underworld. Ethnography, 5(1): 29–73.
Science Europe (2012). Position Statement Horizon 2020: Excellence Counts. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: www.scienceeurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/SE_H2020_Excellence_Counts_FIN.pdf
Serres, M. (1995). Genesis. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Serres, M., Harari, J. V. and Bell, D. F. (1982). Hermes-literature, Science, Philosophy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Serres, M. and Latour, B. (1995). Conversations on Science, Culture and Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonising Methodologies. London: Zed Books.
Smith, N. (2000). Is a critical geopolitics possible? Foucault, class and the vision thing. Political Geography, 19(X): 365–371.
Stengers, I. (2010). Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
The Black Scholar (1974) Science and Black People (Editorial Statement Black Science). The Black Scholar, 5(6).
Thrift, N. (2006). Re-inventing invention: new tendencies in capitalist commodification. Economy and Society, 35(2): 279–306.
Todd, Z. (2016). An indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: ‘ontology’ is just another word for colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology, 29(1): 4–22.
Verran, H. (2001). Science and an African Logic. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Verran, H. (2014). Working with those who think otherwise. Common Knowledge, 20(3): 527–539.
Warren, G. and Katz, C. (2015). Gwendolyn Warren and Cindi Katz in Conversation. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: https://vimeo.com/111159306
Wilkinson, S. and Smailes, D. (2015). ‘An interdisciplinary dialogue’ in working knowledge. Transferable Methodology for Interdisciplinary Research. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: www.workingknowledgeps.com/
Woods, A. (2015). ‘Interdisciplinary Authorship’ in Working Knowledge. Transferable Methodology for Interdisciplinary Research. Retrieved 27 March 2018 from: www.workingknowledgeps.com