In her blog Zoe pointed out some of the benefits and challenges of interdisciplinary research. I would like to follow Zoe’s lead as I believe that interdisciplinary work will in the future become the norm rather than the expectation. But I am also of the opinion that until now we still lack some of the skills to make interdisciplinary scholarship a genuine practice.
Due to the complexity and uncertainties that characterise many societal issues (e.g. climate change or water scarcity) it has been acknowledged that these issues can no longer be explained through the lens of one discipline but require interdisciplinary scholarship. While such a statement is very appealing to most of us it is certainly not easy to put into practice. Trying to incorporate insights from other disciplines is challenging as similar concepts might be used in different ways by the respective disciplines or different key variables or units of analysis are used to describe or explain a particular phenomenon.
As pointed out by Zoe interdisciplinary work requires of the researcher to step outside her or his disciplinary boundaries and reflect on her/ his assumptions while at the same time show the willingness to engage with other disciplines and their traditional roots.
I found that bi-lateral (or international) collaborative research projects that are supported by funding institutions such as the NRF (and their matching counterpart in the partner country) are a great opportunity to foster interdisciplinary scholarship and the co-production of new knowledge.
In our case it was a three year joint research project that brought together a group of young researchers form UCT under the leadership of Prof Ralph Hamann as well as a team of researchers from our partner university in Germany, the Freie University Berlin. The objective of the project was to investigate the role of business in climate governance. Whereas our German collaborators had a lot of expertise in the political science field and the governance literature, the South African team could offer expert knowledge on the subject of climate change adaptation and mitigation (especially emerging economies such as South Africa).
Now this sounds like the perfect recipe for interdisciplinary research. However, just adding the particular expertises is by far not enough to turn a collaborative research project into interdisciplinary scholarship. It required a regular and systematic exchange among the researchers involved in order to:
- understand the key concepts of each discipline and to see how those concepts may complement each other;
- develop jointly a overarching framework that would guide the individual case studies and;
- stimulate the co-production of knowledge by integrating the findings from the individual case back into the proposed conceptual framework.
The project took a lot of work, tough thought processes, good leadership from the senior researchers and genuine commitment from all of us to step outside our disciplinary territory. However, the financial support from the NRF (and the partner funding institute in Germany) allowed us to meet on a regular basis and to exchange ideas through joint writing workshops and individual research visits at each other’s institute. This made it possible for us to engage in a joint learning process, to reflect, and in my humble opinion, enabled us to make a considerable contribution in the area of climate governance. (We hope that our book will be published early next year.)
Based on my experience, I encourage everyone to use opportunities put forward by the NRF and other funding institutions to develop (or participate in) interdisciplinary research projects and to learn from the experiences in those projects. In the end it is up to us researchers to make the most out of such opportunities and to live up to the call for more interdisciplinarity. It probably will never be an easy journey but it is a very rewarding one and with each time we grow a little more in our own area of expertise!
P.S. One final remark: I believe that having a solid disciplinary foundation is a very good starting point for interdisciplinary scholarship.