Special Section

STS Researchers as Technology: Multiple Positionalities as Interpretations of Participant Expectations and Agendas

Ashley Lewis

Independent Researcher
Ashley.Lewis@bailliegifford.com

Abstract

Science and technology studies (STS) researchers integrated into interdisciplinary research projects learn important lessons of collaboration dynamics by analyzing the lived experience of the research participants. Previous approaches of STS researchers included laboratory studies and reimagining the collaborative process as a research method. However, previous research on interdisciplinary projects repeatedly cites recurring challenges, indicating that more sharing of this lived experience is needed. My autoethnography of an interdisciplinary project interrogates the various positionalities I embodied as research technologies. In adopting a feminist analytical approach, this paper forefronts emotional affect and interrogates technological labels of the social science researcher to understand power dynamics and interpret what is meant by “good science” across disciplines. These findings help us understand how individuals appraise interdisciplinarity, setting realistic expectations for addressing future interdisciplinary collaborations more deliberately. Lastly, I also consider the ethical considerations necessary to care for the ethnographer in interdisciplinary collaborations, as they are often caught in the crosshairs of the frustrations in collaborating.

Keywords

interdisciplinary collaboration, reflexivity, research methods, science and technology studies, autoethnography

Introduction

“How’s the spying going?,” asked a postdoctoral researcher when I entered the communal kitchen to make a cup of tea. Over the past month, this researcher repeated this greeting to me, smiling, whenever I entered the room. I recorded “ethnographic researcher as informant” in my field notes. Rereading my entry forced me to consider the other roles I played, or perceived to be playing, during the project.

While I understood that ethnographic research is an iterative and nonlinear process, I still felt I was winging it. My feelings sprouted from my insecurities as a junior social science researcher working on a positivist research project. As a result, any suggestions from collaborators that my methods lacked rigor led me to try and accommodate my research to fit their perceptions of validity.

For example, a natural scientist suggested that I install recording equipment in the offices to capture everyday conversations amongst researchers in shared spaces, as he assumed these exchanges were the “seeds” of interdisciplinary collaborations. He suggested a systematic method to sample from the recordings and assumed that we could trace the origins of interdisciplinarity. Though positivist ideals of systematic sampling have no place in ethnography—and I felt uncomfortable subjecting my research participants to audio-recorded surveillance—I was tempted to adopt his plan. My lack of confidence and junior status made me question my expertise, and I felt pressured to accommodate his methods. The hierarchy dynamics between me and the more experienced senior researcher created implicit pressure based on assumed research experience and academic seniority.

The role of a science and technology studies (STS) researcher many times takes place within a research “lab,” such as a social science division within synthetic biology research centers (Calvert and Martin 2009) or social scientists implementing a public access Wi-Fi service with computer scientists (Goulden et al. 2017). The labs they study mirror Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s (1979) natural science laboratory space.

My lab was an academic office on a university campus in the UK. The experiment was an interdisciplinary collaboration within the context of urban sustainability. On the first floor of an old Tudor building, I sat in an office crowded with desks and PhD students working together on different disciplinary problems associated with creating a sustainable city. My lab extended across the hall where the postdoctoral researchers worked.

A trust funded the project, and its principal aims were to understand the components of sustainable cities using an interdisciplinary project team. The twenty-six researchers on the project came from various disciplines, including but not limited to sociology, economics, geography, physics, engineering, mathematics, and computer science. At its inception, the project work was divided into six themes: Environmental, Social and Cultural, Economic, Measurement and Data, Modelling and Optimisation, and Policy and Governance. The project's principal investigator who put together the funding proposal was from the physics department.

The main idea of the project, imagined by the principal investigator, was that the Environmental, Social and Cultural, and Economic themes would develop conceptual and simulation modeling to understand, produce, and compare different visions of a sustainable urban environment (including its inhabitants and existing infrastructure). The Modelling and Optimisation team would oversee these three themes to optimize and create the models. In contrast, the Measurement and Data theme would provide and validate the data needed for the multiple models. Finally, the Policy and Governance theme would investigate how these models could support decision-making in the city. The final simulations could then be run to test how different policy, social, economic, or environmental initiatives would impact that city.

The senior researchers who led the six different themes of the interdisciplinary project remained in their department offices spread across the campus. Every other week on a Friday, they would travel to the Tudor building on the edge of campus to meet for progress meetings and workshops. The interactions in those rooms of the building created my lab for interdisciplinary study.

With everyone on the project meeting together, these meetings were an obvious place to bring my tape recorder and document the conversations. The principal investigator usually set the meeting agenda and led the discussions by deciding who would update the team on their work and ask clarifying questions about how they would take their work forward. Once members shared what they were working on, the principal investigator expected that others in the room (ideally someone from another discipline) would be able to see a connection with their work and use that moment to start on an interdisciplinary piece of work together. The other regular meetings I recorded were the monthly board meetings with only the principal investigator and the senior co-investigators on the project. The principal investigator suggested I attend these meetings as well, and he thought it would help gather data about the different pieces of work happening on the project. More sensitive discussions happened here, like allocating budgets to different themes from project funding and conflicts around authorship practices across different disciplinary norms.

The project’s principal investigator wrote into the grant an ethnographer position at the PhD level to study the interdisciplinary process. At the outset, the goal was to understand the group dynamics and suggest how team members could communicate better, create connections between researchers, and facilitate interdisciplinarity. The funding proposal states that the ethnographer aimed to “shed light into the effectiveness of the research process and…lead to improved communication within the team.” This statement indicated that the senior academics intended the ethnographer’s role to be practical; I would be a tool to facilitate interdisciplinary working as the interdisciplinary expert.

Interdisciplinarity does not have a single definition but can be defined as a practice or a project outcome in and of itself. In the context of this project, interdisciplinarity was expected to “bridge” two or more disciplinary practitioners (Repko, Szostak, and Buchberger 2017) to connect different perspectives and therefore reach an outcome that could not have otherwise been achieved using one discipline alone. Interdisciplinarity had a utilitarian function in the university; it was a way to earn research funding. Much like the utilitarian function of diversity initiatives in higher education (Ahmed 2019), it indicates a direction of research for professors to take.

Despite the desire to use collaboration to gain access to funding and fulfil the promise of innovative research (Darbellay 2015) through interdisciplinary means, researchers, particularly in disciplinary-organized university institutions, struggle with the practical mechanics of interdisciplinary working. Without clear parameters of success, the process of interdisciplinarity remains an enigma.

Studies investigating the interdisciplinary process repeat the common challenges of collaboration (Datta 2018; Hadfield-Hill et al. 2020; McBee and Leahey 2017; Stavrianakis 2015). Some of these challenges include a sense of unproductivity because of the long lead times required in interdisciplinary research (McBee and Leahey 2017). Another is the perceived difficulty in communication between researchers from different disciplines, often leading to misunderstood or conflicting goals within a research project (Cairns, Hielscher, and Light 2020). Despite these challenges, the assumption is that interdisciplinary research is a useful tool to connect the previously unconnected, leading to superior research findings (Frank 2017).

Conceptualizing interdisciplinary collaboration as a tool is a good starting point for observing the shortcomings in interdisciplinary experiments. I propose we think of interdisciplinary practices as technologies. Much like interdisciplinarity is meant to be more than the sum of its disciplinary parts, “technology not only consists of the artefacts which are employed as tools but also includes the sum total of the kinds of knowledge which make possible the invention, making and use of tools” (Gell 1998, 6). My label as a spy reflected the researcher’s assumption of me as a tool, a sneaky information-gatherer for senior management. This definition demonstrates Sara Ahmed’s (2019) conceptualization of “use,” which emphasizes my ethnographic role and interdisciplinarity research as utilitarian components towards a useful end. Interdisciplinarity is not practiced for curiosity but is evoked to get research funding. My role as the interdisciplinary ethnographer was conceptualized as a useful tool to ensure interdisciplinarity occurred. Latour’s explanation of “technical” emphasizes the important yet submissive quality of functional roles in research. Latour describes technical as the “role of people, skills, or objects that occupy this secondary function of being present, indispensable, but invisible” (1994, 43). Bringing together these concepts of use and technologies provides a framework to think about my multiple roles in the project.

In reflecting on my ethnographic role as a technology, I seek to understand the purpose of my multiple identities, both adopted and assigned, and what “uses” (Ahmed 2019) people give them. My identities result from meaning-making when researchers “meet” at multiple points in the research project. Although sometimes uncomfortable, assigned identities can reveal important assumptions that contribute to the difficulty in interdisciplinary collaboration. In unpacking the logic behind these identities, I reconstruct the various technologies of the STS researcher and the roles they served.

Reflexivity and Emotional Affect

Ethnography accepts and embraces that ethnographic research is a subjective and partial endeavor, and ethnographers use reflexivity to show the lens through which the research is filtered (Davies 2008). Reflexivity extends to the researcher herself, and feminist approaches operationalize Sandra Harding’s (1992) proposition that since subjects (those who study) of knowledge are necessarily always socially situated (Haraway 1988; Ryan-Flood and Gill 2010), they are also objects of knowledge. The social forces that shape objects of knowledge also shape the researchers and the scientific projects themselves (Harding 1992) and should therefore be made visible and acknowledged in research.

While self-reflexivity makes researcher positionality visible, it is not without its limitations. Self-reflexivity is, by nature, partial; access to some parts of the psyche, particularly the unconscious mind, are inaccessible and, therefore, cannot be included in the research (Proudfoot 2015). A danger in practicing self-reflexivity is to trick ourselves into thinking that we can objectively assess our presence, reproducing the illusion of objectivity that self-reflexivity attempts to address (Proudfoot 2015). Continuously engaging in self-reflexivity also raises mental health issues; it can be emotionally taxing on top of tiring fieldwork (Thajib, Dinkelaker, and Stodulka 2019).

Other feminist discussions of ethnographic practice raise ethical issues for the researcher and the researched. Ann Oakley (1981) proposes that the interviewer offer some personal information in exchange to develop rapport with the interviewee and create a non-hierarchal dynamic in the interview. In practice, this rapport building can still be exploitative because the relationship building can be used to extract information rather than build a lasting connection outside of the research project (Duncombe and Jessop 2002). Conversely, the interviewer then faces a moral dilemma, balancing conducting rigorous data collection in the field under the condition of comradery if the resulting observations are viewed as a violation of trust.

These dilemmas can be anxiety-inducing for the researcher, bringing up negative emotions of self-doubt. However, rather than considering emotional affect as a side effect of difficult interdisciplinary and ethnographic interactions (Cairns, Hielscher, and Light 2020; Strober 2011), taking a feminist perspective to attend to these affects directly can create productive interdisciplinary engagements (Smolka, Fisher, and Hausstein 2021). Incidences of “disconcertment” lead to knowledge production of interdisciplinarity as a subject (Smolka, Fisher, and Hausstein 2021), and feelings traditionally reserved for the personal space can be taken into (ethnographic) work as generative for epistemic knowledge production (Thajib, Dinkelaker, and Stodulka 2019).

The sociology of emotion acknowledges the difficult emotion work undertaken by women at their place of employment. It investigates how this emotion work results from existing relationships between expectations in cultural norms and political structures (Hochschild 1979). In this article, I draw from the theory that emotions are not just biological but social and that feeling rules and display rules determine the expected reactions in social situations (Bericat 2015; Hochschild 1979). These expectations create a conflict when the actual and expected emotions are different.

In my study, I attend to these affects to analyze how participants interpret interdisciplinarity, which therefore plays a prominent role in determining their approaches to collaboration and each other. These interdisciplinary meetings provoked researchers to consider alternative methods, as we were all confronted with different disciplinary rituals that determined research methodology, paper authorship, and ethical considerations. I viewed the emotions felt by researchers in these meetings when confronted with (unmet) behavior expectations within the context of feminist theories of ethnographic practice and the sociology of emotion. In these comparisons, the process comprising interdisciplinary collaboration can be better understood, linking the gap between interdisciplinary expectations at the start of the project and the difficulty of implementing interdisciplinarity throughout the research.

Multilayered Identities

Accounts analyzing the lived experience of collaborative interdisciplinary projects document a range of reflections, from STS researchers as peer collaborators (Freeth and Caniglia 2020), to observers (Cairns, Hielscher, and Light 2020), to processors (Smolka, Fisher, and Hausstein 2021), to critics (Balmer et al. 2015). What is interesting is not the range of identities but how these identities are “contradictory, partial and strategic” (Haraway 1991, 156). The labels are not merely a representation but partial technological fictions that blend with my person, a “cyborg” of machine and organism (Haraway 1991). In this reflection, I grapple with the multiple technological identities as a junior female social science researcher.

In this paper, I embrace the multiplicity of the identities I embodied in meetings with my collaborators as framing devices to analyze the interdisciplinary team's underlying emotional and collaborative dynamics. In focusing on the researchers’ emotional affects and the mundane practices of collaboration, I bring to the forefront the powerful effects of emotional labor in determining collaborative approaches in interdisciplinary research (Hillersdal et al. 2020; Smolka, Fisher, and Hausstein 2021). The mundane rituals of attending group presentations, writing regular progress notes, and group lunch conversations in the communal kitchen required specific negotiations in an interdisciplinary setting. Work progress notes needed to show attempts to reach across a disciplinary divide, and work presentations required the presence of different disciplinarians in the hopes that a different disciplinary perspective might rub off onto the work in progress. The labels I present below are both adopted and assigned; they are created in social relations between collaborators and me and have technological characteristics.

The Spy

As an ethnographer with senior academic support, I received privileged access to specific spaces. This knowledge put me in a relatively powerful position. My position to tell the interdisciplinary narrative of the project also gave me power, as my PhD thesis would tell the story of what happened. This powerful position was most apparent when jokes about my role as the spy or from internal affairs were made.

Multiple times throughout the project, critical incidents where I experienced discomfort principally came from comments such as, “Wait! Don’t record that!” “How is the spying going?” "Uh-oh, here comes internal affairs again; everyone stop talking.” Despite the smiles and laughter, I perceived discomfort. Spies and internal affairs report to someone, and I understood that the researchers assumed I was spying for the senior academics to ensure that enough interdisciplinarity was occurring. The spy label initially segregated me from the research subjects, both as an observer and as the participants’ observed object (Mosher et al. 2017).

My collaborators assumed I would share information because (1) senior management wanted an ethnographer of interdisciplinarity on the project, and they supported my work; (2) I was the only junior researcher in attendance at senior board meetings; and (3) senior members of my supervisory team may have access to my research drafts and fieldwork data. These multiple touchpoints with senior management gave me frequent opportunities for senior academics to enquire about the progress of interdisciplinarity on the project.

As a result, my status was multilayered. Automatic approval from senior leadership felt like the ultimate insider position because I did not need to negotiate access. However, I was never entirely inside those leadership meetings, as I did not participate in the project’s decision-making. At the same time, the spy statements segregated me from my colleagues as an informant. Yet I was also a junior researcher, like them. Therefore, I never fully experienced feeling inside either of these spaces.

Although some saw me as having the “power” to tell the project’s narrative, this dynamic was more complex. As a junior researcher, my ability to tell the narrative could be influenced by my supervisors on the project, who were also senior project participants. For example, within the university’s academic power dynamics, I felt pressure to adopt positivist research approaches, such as systematically recording research participants. Therefore, through me, senior leadership could influence which stories to highlight and what methods to employ, and overlay their interpretations on any events. The danger of “going native” felt the most pronounced in this relationship, as there was an incentive for senior academics to produce reports back to the funder to tell a particular (success) story about the interdisciplinary process.

At first, I tried to resist the “spy” label assigned to me while simultaneously trying to deny the negative emotions it brought up. I even tried to suppress how it made me view the researcher negatively because I worried these feelings compromised me as a professional researcher. After reconceptualizing the spy label and dealing with the negative emotions, I interpreted a clearer picture of the interdisciplinary assumptions present in the team, so although I found the label deeply uncomfortable, I understood the dynamics that created it. Appointing an interdisciplinary ethnographer to the project sent a message to the funder and the other researchers that conducting research was important, but running it in an interdisciplinary way was of utmost importance. This message reinforces the dominant narrative that interdisciplinarity is a valuable research method without critically engaging with the concept itself or the diverse ways it could be interpreted. The senior leadership’s desire to tell a success story about how well interdisciplinarity was going on in the project also reinforced that interdisciplinarity as an ideal was taken as a given. In the vein of Alfred Gell’s technology as magic, senior academics take of my role as a positive witness to the magic of interdisciplinary collaboration to enchant (Gell 1988, 7) others in academia to perceive a social reality where they succeeded in interdisciplinarity.

The negative feelings I experienced toward the researcher and my anxiety about doing a “good job” revealed that I had my own ideal expectations of the ethnographic project. I felt I was failing at my role because, instead of being seen as a trusted confidant, I was being treated with suspicion and potentially being left out of meaningful conversations that might have some interdisciplinarity sprinkled in, and I would miss them. A revisiting of this assumption revealed how I thought about interdisciplinarity, that it was something that could be found if I just overturned the right stones.

My dynamic positionality granted me the vantage point to observe interdisciplinary assumptions. However, my position in and of itself created power dynamics when I encountered my collaborators. Appointing an observer created the feeling of being watched and evaluated on the specific metric of productive interdisciplinary collaboration. Being assessed at work can already put people on edge. However, in this instance, feelings of uncertainty are compounded because the participants lacked indicators of good interdisciplinary collaboration and did not know how to do interdisciplinarity. The objective of the project was not just to conduct research in an interdisciplinary way but that interdisciplinary research was the technology that would give them superior research results. Participants could ascertain that I functioned as a catalyst for the interdisciplinary objective, a mechanical switch that could turn interdisciplinarity on for others. Interdisciplinary meaning and priority were co-created in meetings with me.

The Interdisciplinary Catalyst

My presence sent a strong message about interdisciplinary priority. The message, therefore, acted as the catalyst for researchers to reflect on their interdisciplinary efforts and question what interdisciplinarity meant to them. My presence as the interdisciplinary catalyst was enough to change the participants’ behavior, revealing how they imagined interdisciplinarity to function. Watching how they approached interdisciplinarity, they showed me that they thought interdisciplinarity was bridge-building across the natural and social sciences, with a clear output to evidence the exchange. Interdisciplinarity, in this case, emphasized the inter- prefix we find in interdisciplinarity. The inter- implies the spatial location of being in between (Callard and Fitzgerald 2015). My collaborators conceptualized interdisciplinarity as the meeting between two or more disciplinarity researchers, including the disciplinary knowledge scientists bring and represent.

This vantage point as the interdisciplinary catalyst revealed underlying power dynamics between junior and senior researchers and the diverse ways in which they framed interdisciplinarity. While researchers wanted interdisciplinarity to occur, the junior researchers found the challenge difficult to fulfil. In shifting my perspective, my role changes from a facilitator of interdisciplinarity and observer of participants (as was outlined in the research proposal) into the creator of interdisciplinarity itself. When I met junior and senior researchers, they constructed interdisciplinary understandings and perceptions that revealed what interdisciplinarity meant to them.

For example, in an interview, one researcher reflected on interdisciplinarity in the project before my arrival, prompting him to address any dissonance he perceived about the lack of interdisciplinarity taking place: “There is someone coming in to look at us working interdisciplinarily [sic], but where is that happening? So, they are going to be really disappointed…So we went, right, let’s try and encourage some work together.” My presence and the anticipation of my arrival initiated a reflection of interdisciplinarity and efforts to ensure more was happening. It is also clear that this role as an interdisciplinary creator is entangled with my role as the spy. The researcher also reflects on some of the anxiety around being evaluated on the quality of interdisciplinarity taking place.

The anxiety I experienced around this label differed from the anxiety I felt being a spy. As a spy, I was distrusted, but as a catalyst, I was responsible for sparking interdisciplinary collaborations. There was a feeling that some people were waiting for me for interdisciplinarity to happen. If any cross-disciplinary collaborations did not occur in the project, I would be responsible for allowing those opportunities to slip by. Because I had been given privileged access to board meetings and other spaces inaccessible to some, it was expected that I was omniscient and therefore had the power to spark interdisciplinarity using all of the secret information I gathered in individual interviews and senior meetings.

Creating a dedicated role certainly elevated the importance of the interdisciplinary objective. At the same time, this dedicated role was assigned to the most junior (PhD student) female social scientist on the project, which sends a different message in the context of a largely positivist science project. I was solely responsible for researching interdisciplinarity, but without the full autonomy to research it without formal supervision and influence from positivist research assumptions. I further explore the implications of assigning this job to a female social scientist as an interdisciplinary carer.

The Interdisciplinary “Carer”

After a small meeting of interdisciplinary researchers from the team, a postdoctoral researcher approached me as I gathered my notes and turned off the recorder. He expressed “disappointment” in my research so far because he expected me to be more “active” and tell the group how they were doing and suggest ways they could connect “better.” He told me this after I silently sat through a meeting, tapped notes into my laptop, and recorded the conversation. This exchange recalls Diana Forsythe’s “walking tape recorder” (1999, 140) and how ethnographic research is often invisible to researcher collaborators. The social reality of the useful person/tape recorder is not recognized as a research method but an administrative task that could be outsourced to nonhuman technological machinery. The researcher struggled to understand the usefulness of my research if I did not practically and directly feed into the interdisciplinary objective of the wider project. His comment initially made me feel uncomfortable, as it spoke to my insecurities of not doing enough and failing to meet the expectations of my team members. This incident highlights one of the challenges also encountered in interdisciplinary projects, particularly with ethnographers, that the goals of the ethnography do not align with the goals of some of the research subjects (Cairns, Hielscher, and Light 2020). When this mismatch occurs, the additional value of the recording outside of the administrative task of documenting the conversation cannot be seen.

The practical research outlined above contrasted with the sociology department’s idea of sociological research. In the early stages of my PhD, when I embraced the facilitator role, my home school deemed my work non-traditional. As a result, the administration required me to restructure my preliminary research report and create research questions that made my PhD look more like a work of sociology. My home school did not consider practitioner work as good science, and to ensure I remained on track to earn my PhD, I adjusted my research approach.

However, even after receiving support from the department for a critical research approach, the pressure within the project to be the interdisciplinary facilitator continued. With my fieldwork underway, I presented some preliminary findings to the rest of my team. After the presentation, I received mixed responses. Some members found that the reflections represented their experiences. However, a natural scientist in the group disagreed with my research objectives given in the presentation. From the following transcription excerpt, he makes it clear that he is looking for practical contributions from my research: “I’m interested to understand what the attributes, so what are the ingredients for successful interdisciplinary work, and that’s one of the things that we are trying to get to the bottom of.” The natural science researcher wanted clear indicators that signify successful interdisciplinarity. Again, there is an assumption that interdisciplinarity is a desirable way to conduct the research project and that my role as the resident interdisciplinary researcher was to find out how to do it well. Natural scientists on the project tended to envision my role as the interdisciplinary facilitator. Navigating between their expectations versus my new critical approach (with support from my home discipline school) continued.

Negotiating between the perception of my functional role as a technology to provide practical recommendations versus my approach to finding out how researchers negotiate interdisciplinarity was a constant feature throughout the project. On top of that, being held to account by different powerful authorities to determine my work’s success proved difficult when their ideas conflicted. Navigating between the useful and critical approach yielded information about how different researchers understand the value of research in terms of visible impact and the expectations of what an ethnographic project can contribute to collaboration.

Discussion

The multilayered perceptions of interdisciplinarity and the recognition of my own multiple identities are a messy latticework of interdisciplinary science making. This autoethnographic reflection also rejects positivist assumptions that including emotions in work is “unscientific” (Thajib, Dinkelaker, and Stodulka 2019) and uses them epistemologically. This paper itself constitutes an experiment in my understanding of interdisciplinary research. This reflection finds interdisciplinarity is an amalgamation of disciplinary meetings between researchers, a power struggle between disciplinary research methods, and a desired research objective encouraged by the research politics of the day all at once.

While practicing self-reflexivity, my different positionalities in the sustainability project became clearer. As a PhD student on the project, I occupied a lower status in the academic hierarchy. Natural scientists tend to assign social scientists the role of a feminine support position (Balmer et al. 2015) to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration. Sometimes resisting this support role, my presence activated reflexivity amongst the other researchers as they struggled to define interdisciplinarity. My mobile location between my desk in the PhD student office and access to senior board meetings gave me different vantage points on the project. My positionality reflected a dynamic and relative quality rather than a fixed position.

Initially, I could feel myself resisting the technological, “useful” labels that reduced my role as a tool to be used and shaped as others saw fit. I did not want to be a spy, a tape recorder, or an interdisciplinary carer. However, upon researching different feminist perceptions of technology and use, I could then reframe my roles in ways that served my research process and make sense of the roles that collaborators assigned to me. Although I did not see myself as the project spy, reflecting on my collaborator’s perception of me as a spy helped uncover his insecurity that perhaps he did not feel enough interdisciplinarity was happening on the project. I could then use those feelings as a starting point to investigate what interdisciplinarity would look like to him. The label itself did not help the interdisciplinary process, but understanding how the label’s construction came to be did.

In the imagination of some collaborators, ethnography constituted nothing more than a passive recording of meeting conversations. The ethnographic work I was doing to understand interdisciplinary dynamics was invisible to them. It needed to be more useful. From the perspective of the positivist researchers, their understanding of interdisciplinary challenges was limited to a difference in language or a lack of cross-disciplinary understanding. The challenge extended to me because they perceived I did not do enough to uncover the ingredients of interdisciplinary working and actively tell them how to do it correctly. While communication challenges certainly have their place in interdisciplinarity, the emotional and personal dynamics played a prominent role but were rendered irrelevant to the mechanics of successful interdisciplinary working. Academic and personal insecurities prevented the researchers from taking the space to experiment in interdisciplinarity and allow themselves to potentially get it wrong.

Power dynamics between social and natural scientists also prevented collaborative opportunities. As the project aimed to bring together perspectives for an ultimately positivist approach to analyzing cities, social scientists felt their work needed to be more valued. These power dynamics and feelings of being undervalued pushed everyone further into their disciplinary home rather than together. For example, a geographer on the project recounted his interaction with a computer scientist on the project who was trying to build a computer model of a British city. The computer scientist asked the geographer for the specific economic indicators that should be included in the simulation. What was perceived as a simple request by the computer scientist translated into a perception of being assigned a subordinate, utilitarian role to the geographer and a mismatch between what the geographer interpreted as a collaboration. The geographer commented that the computer scientist just thought of him as “just a repository of economics data, social data, so we can’t integrate because we don’t work like that; it is not what we are doing.” Throughout the rest of the project, the two did not work together, one fearing that the other did not appreciate their position as a legitimate researcher.

The different perceptions of what was useful interdisciplinarity often cropped up in the group, and I looked to my various roles to understand those interpretations. Comments about my being a spy, coupled with the expectation that I was the catalyst that would spark interdisciplinarity, gave me the sense that participants could not understand what I was doing. Still, they also did not understand what interdisciplinary was. On the one hand, I was someone some could not trust, but also a bearer of truth about the mysterious interdisciplinary process they did not have access to. My role as the social science carer who nurtured interdisciplinarity to grow made it clear that most natural scientists valued interdisciplinarity as an input to further their research objectives. Conversely, my role as the spy and interdisciplinary catalyst showed how interdisciplinarity could be an objective in and of itself to show senior leadership and the funder that interdisciplinarity occurred.

Conclusion

In writing up my experiences, I have tried to cultivate an ethnographic research practice that aligns with a feminist orientation. In forefronting my emotions and those of my collaborators, I reflect on the importance of human emotion in interdisciplinary collaboration.

As researchers found it difficult to articulate their collaboration approaches, reflecting on my position and how others perceived me was necessary to interpret their perceptions of interdisciplinarity. By investigating my roles in interdisciplinarity, I better understood the mismatch between the current popularity of interdisciplinarity and the recurring challenges to doing it successfully. In the academic environment, though universities welcome the utilitarian approach of interdisciplinarity, the institution cannot assess multidisciplinary research approaches or incentivize solutions outside of respective disciplinary boundaries. As a result, interdisciplinary projects in academia lacked interdisciplinary indicators of success.

Further, the opaque definition of interdisciplinarity meant that everyone tried to do it, but according to their assumptions of what interdisciplinarity should look like, which may or may not align with other collaborators’ expectations. This uncertainty was compounded in the sustainability research project because the participants looked for missing indicators of good interdisciplinary collaboration. Without success indicators, there was no mechanism to measure an interdisciplinary outcome. The trial-and-error collaboration approach left the researchers disappointed, without a clear output to show for their efforts.

While existing post-reflective accounts of interdisciplinarity reinforced the time barriers and communication difficulties across methodological approaches, reading emotional cues from collaborators reveals the career insecurity and disciplinarity cultures tied to these challenges. Disciplinary-oriented departments each have tacit and explicit requirements for career progression. Publishing in disciplinary-oriented journals, contributing to a specific field of knowledge, and following a specific ethical code of conduct do not make space for collaborations that question or alter these structures. The incentive for experimentation is lacking, particularly for early career researchers trying to establish their academic reputation.

While the labels and emotional interactions with collaborators gleaned useful information about the interdisciplinary process, the emotional toll on the STS researcher to revisit them raises an important ethical consideration. In trying to foster relations with the groups of people we are trying to understand, it must be addressed that, particularly in different disciplinary domains, these efforts may not be recognized or even welcomed. In previous similar cases, the researchers’ concerns are prioritized over the ethnographer’s own to foster a sense of reciprocation (Smolka, Fisher, and Hausstein 2021). It begs the question, how do we set our boundaries as STS researchers and ethnographers? In the vein of recognizing the care role often assigned to STS researchers, who then cares for the ethnographer?

Acknowledgements

The Leverhulme Trust supported the urban sustainability research project presented in this article. I thank the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) in Vienna for funding this reflexive article and, specifically, Dr. Guido Caniglia for his invaluable feedback and encouragement. Thank you, Dr. Coleen M. Carrigan and Dr. Caitlin Donahue Wylie, for inviting me to participate in the special issue. Thank you to the other KLI fellows and the 4S conference panel Caring for Equitable Relations in Interdisciplinary Collaboration for feedback on earlier drafts.

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Author Bio

Ashley Lewis is an ethnographic researcher interested in interdisciplinarity, urban sustainability, and the social dynamics implicit in technological innovation.