Dr Justin Greaves

University of Warwick

Crossing the Interdisciplinary Divide

• ‘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)

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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)

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?

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?

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 there’s 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)

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 Mackenzie’s 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

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

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

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

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

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’

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

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?

‘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

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’

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

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?

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)

Please visit our websites• http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/

pais/biopesticides• 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)