Interdisciplinary frontlines Harriet Bulkeley Department of Geography Durham University

Outline Interdisciplinary attractions Cities and climate change Renewable energy systems Interdisciplinarity and urban environments Outlooks

Hope over experience? Calls for interdisciplinarity over the past decade – limited success and renewed rhetoric In this context, why be interdisciplinary? Curiosity Use Relevance

Cities and climate change Bulkeley (Geography) and Betsill (IR) Transnational municipal network: CCP Role of local government in mitigating climate change (planning, transport, housing, energy efficiency programmes) Interdisciplinary approach driven by ‘need’

Disciplinary relations International regime National politics Local government and planning; interest groups Urban form and development; transport, energy and housing practices SCALEDISCIPLINE International relations, geography Political science, policy studies, geography Local government studies, planning, urban studies, geography Planning, urban studies, transport studies, housing, sociology, geography

Engaging audiences Challenges of moving the finished product (a book) between disciplinary audiences Attempts at publication in conceptual IR journal (Millennium) frustrated Limited audiences for interdisciplinary work?

Renewable energy Development of a research proposal Whole systems thinking Socio-technical systems Add earth system science and stir? Time, trust, humour as extra ingredients Half-baked and over-cooked? Back to the social science recipe book…

Interdisciplinarity in urban environments ESRC Transdisciplinary seminar series Judith Petts (Birmingham) Susan Owens (Cambridge) Knowledge and Power: Exploring the Science/ Society Interface in the Urban Environments Context Six seminars, 100 participants, including academics and policy makers Paper forthcoming in Geoforum

Disciplinary cultures ‘disciplines have survived for so long in the academic world because they serve a very useful function of constraining what the academic has to think about’ Bruce et al. 2004: 467 disciplines become deeply structured and such structuring is too deep to be overcome by ‘good intentions, snappy commonsense thinking or some optimum design fix’ Degelings1995: 295

Border troubles The linking of interdisciplinary work with applied research, and mutual downgrading Problems are not self-evident, but are defined by disciplines, and hence issues of agenda setting Appropriate academic divisions of labour The ‘hard wiring’ of academic research

Pure knowledge ‘We prided ourselves that the science we were doing could not, in any conceivable circumstances, have any practical use. The more firmly one could make that claim, the more superior one felt’ C. P. Snow (1964: 32)

Outlooks Continual work on frontlines Increasing recognition of need to create capacities for interdisciplinary working Is interdisciplinary work necessarily well received and used? Rather than grand projects, small victories offer potential route to interdisciplinarity