Dr Justin Greaves University of Warwick Interaction With Social and Economic Sciences (the RELU Experience)

‘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)

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 Disease (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

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 21 st Century)

Our projects in practice Benefit of close geographical proximity Importance of 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 Perhaps the greatest 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

Please visit our websites biopesticides c/gld Thanks to all members of the RELU 1 and RELU 3 project teams (principal investigators Wyn Grant and Graham Medley)