Special Section

Late to the Party: Articulating Time and Care in Interdisciplinary Projects

Jennifer L. Croissant

University of Arizona
jlc@arizona.edu

Abstract

This article explores the disjunctures and “catch-up” work of developing relationships and getting a sense of the project as community and intellectual venture as a “fill-in” social scientist added late to a large, complex interdisciplinary project. Based on two years of intermittent interactions (live and virtual) and tracking the communications of the group, from grant proposal formulation through the first year of the award, I describe how time operates in several registers: idiosyncratic, disciplinary, institutional, and epistemic. How these registers intersect with and without friction is an unexamined issue in studies of interdisciplinarity. It is more than “time management,” although that is a significant coordination challenge for project leadership. But the (dis)articulations of registers also trace the hierarchicalization of disciplines and practices in ways that challenge effective interdisciplinarity and program goals of inclusivity.

Keywords

time, interdisciplinarity, participant-observation

Context: The “BFP”

In December 2019 I was called to participate in a series of meetings for a research group on an interdisciplinary project in the nonhuman life sciences (soil, plants, fungi, and microbes). We can call the project the “BFP” (Big Friendly Project), with an overall budget of US$3 million over five years. So, not the biggest-of-big science, but large and complex nonetheless. The lead principal investigator (PI), a senior scholar in ecology and evolutionary biology, saw broad interdisciplinarity in the funding call, and the resources of the social sciences as one means for achieving that breadth. While the knowledge from this emerging interdiscipline is of interest, in this paper I will focus on the way that time is working in multiple levels of analysis and shaping knowledge production.¹ The question of time is both an epistemic issue, as a matter of knowledge making across fields, and a methodological issue, as organization in contemporary higher education shapes research practices and frames many of the challenges of collaborative cross-disciplinary work.

“Ecosystem Genomics” is a field-in-formation that takes on scale issues in the life sciences. What are the metabolic processes of species responding to climate stress? What variants in organisms—whether bacteria, fungi, or plants—emerge in changing ecosystems? Included in the research group are specialists in data science, genomics, metabolomics, plant biology, mycology-plant systems, plant-soil microenvironments, ecosystem science, and evolutionary biology. The project combines research with an intensive interdisciplinary curriculum development project. There is also an externally contracted evaluator who conducts assessment activities for the student outcomes of the training component. Separate from the assessment activities by the external evaluator, the social science component was framed in a “cultures of science” (see Knorr Cetina 1999) approach to understanding how disciplinary cultures can be barriers to interdisciplinarity. The natural and social scientists centered this part of the project on the premise that facilitating shared understandings of the cultures of science could overcome those barriers.

I was invited to the BFP because the prior social scientist PI decided that the time commitment expected for the project was unmanageable, or at least unmanageable given her intrinsic interest in the project and other presumably more compelling commitments. She came to this project as an anthropologist studying STS. I was selected by the lead PI because I was available and had a grant-writing and research track record in studies of interdisciplinarity. As Jane Calvert (2013) notes, these invitations reflect funding agency parameters pulling social scientists into interdisciplinary collaborations. I accepted because it seemed intrinsically interesting and because I was going to need new projects as I transitioned away from being a department head. From the time that I was invited to the project, we had about a six-week turnaround before the final (re)submission to the granting agency. The proposal was highly developed after a previous submission and over year of development and redevelopment. At that time of my invitation, however, I was beginning treatments for a cancer diagnosis, and the resultant stress and trauma meant that I was not in a position to significantly rework the social science research plans to what might have been more in line with my interests and capabilities as a mid-career interdisciplinary STS scholar situated in a gender and women’s studies department. But the team of six PIs revised the grant materials and made the deadline, and we then resumed our regular, disparate, activities.

Why is it important that I was late? Lateness allowed me to see the result of negotiations of what a robust social science component meant to the life science PIs and the prior social science PI. The initial design involved monthly interviews, hours of fieldwork observations each month, surveys, focus groups, and regular reporting: an immersive anthropological research experience considered normative in the field. Colloquially, late to the party reflects not just general tardiness, but with a connotation of being slow, perhaps intellectually, or more generally clueless or attending to things (such as fads or pop culture) well after they have reached their peak intensity. This cluelessness is a kind of structured ignorance or ethnographic naivete, which enables the kind of “estrangement” foundational to some versions of anthropological epistemology.² My late arrival meant that I had to figure out what had been previously imagined as the process and outcomes of the project and who the major actors were, and parse the interpersonal power dynamics and hierarchies that shaped group dynamics. And lateness became a pervasive feeling as the demands of fieldwork became increasingly difficult to sustain.

We got funded! As this was at least the second iteration of this proposal, it was not entirely surprising. In August 2020 we received notification of an award. By agency design, the first year of the project was meant as preparation and organization. So, in fall of 2020, we had regular virtual meetings and correspondence as we developed a seminar, evaluation tools, and all of the detailed procedural documents required to admit fully funded fellows and offer a concentration or minor for graduate students. Superficially, there were few conflicts and only a bit of vexation about the time commitments or details of procedures. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, electronic tools allowed for effective meetings, and, whatever the discomforts of online meetings, there was a net benefit of reduced commuting time both to and across campus, despite other inconveniences and draws on people’s time and attention.

During the spring semester 2021, a subcommittee (of which I was not a part) reviewed applications from potential students, for enrollment in fall 2021. The instructor for the fall seminar was identified by the executive team, and a basic fall semester course template, which now carries institutional precedence, was developed. The team designed the class with lectures on the scientific content (ecosystem science, genomics and metabolomics, and data sciences), plus presentations about interdisciplinarity and how it works, and professionalization activities such as science communication skills, résumé preparation, and mentoring/being mentored. An additional consulting social scientist planned to contribute information on the latest quantitative research about the risks and benefits of interdisciplinarity. The BFP ultimately admitted a cohort of thirteen students, seven funded.

In spring of 2021 we have our first, albeit minor, time frictions in implementation. In trying to schedule participation in the fall seminar, in mid-April I asked for some scheduling basics. These requests were pushed off into May and then again into June. Summer passes: it’s now late July and we still don’t have a seminar meeting time. Scheduling meetings instantiates the “N-body problem,” reflecting the increasing impossibility of getting any group of N>2 to a meeting.³ There are sometimes explicit disengagements: “don’t wait for me,” or “don’t let me hold up scheduling a meeting.” Passive disengagement (complete non-response to an invitation, for example) also permits the group to move on. Let us treat the non-responses of the social scientists to this rescheduling problem as a tacit self-recognition of our lack of centrality to the project. The first time slot selected for the seminar overlaps with a standing department seminar for one of the constituent life science disciplines and must be rescheduled. That this new seminar time interferes with one of the department seminars for the participating social scientists can’t be helped. It goes without saying that the most important participants need to attend, and scheduling works to accommodate them. Meeting times, here, reflect centrality and disciplinary hierarchies. The natural science PI’s schedules and their department seminars and activities are the constraints to scheduling, not the schedules of the social science PI or consultants.

Time passes, and it’s late August 2021. It’s officially the start of year two of the project, and the focal point is the cohort seminar for the admitted graduate students from seven different biological science departments. The Friday before classes I received an email: please send “worksheets” and “learning objectives” for my instructional activities on the “cultures of science.” This is extremely short notice and for someone who is not a last-minute kind of person, it was anxiety producing and felt disrespectful. More importantly, both the evaluation and social science PI were inadvertently left out of orientation. Late-summer vacations had been planned, air travel scheduled, and the last-minute implementation of orientation meant an accidental erasure of the social sciences and the external evaluator.

All of the seventeen associated faculty and six PIs have intermittent participation over the course of the 2021–22 academic year. Regular activities for the faculty include virtual steering committee meetings for the PIs. I schedule some interviews. COVID-19 prevents fieldwork outside of Zoom meetings. Over the course of the year in their hybrid seminar, students develop summer research plans and courses of study for their program—MS, PhD, or certificate. They produce deliverables such as lists of potential classes, tentative schedules for required examinations, a timeline for degree completion, and summer research proposals. My “fieldwork,” such that it was with a full teaching load, was extremely arduous. With roughly two dozen faculty participants in multiple fields, scheduling, conducting, and archiving meetings took significant time in excess of a regular research time allotment (40 percent of our time). Faculty focus groups were fundamentally impossible to schedule. I had a full slate of courses (two per semester with twenty to thirty students each course), no teaching assistance, no course releases, and, as is well known, the pivot to online instruction and stressors of COVID-19 meant far more intensive communications with students. A graduate student research assistant embedded in the course managed interviews and participant observation of students (exceptionally well, I might add), but had to abandon monthly focus groups (in the original research design) as infeasible and excessive in terms of participant time commitments.

By May of 2022, I really understood why the prior social science PI chose to withdraw from the project. The things made visible by being late did not at the outset include the consequences of the intense and comprehensive research design developed by the prior PI, leading to very literal lateness as it turns out the social science component was not sustainable as designed. After a year of feeling like I couldn’t keep up—not without sacrificing teaching quality, family life, and a commitment to personal health—I had to re-examine the research expectations and structural processes that made me feel late, nearly all the time. I was slow on the uptake that this was an impossible project as envisioned as an immersive anthropological study.

Broader Context and Literatures

In this section I will turn, very briefly, to some of the intellectual challenges of the grant, for both the life scientists and social science participants, in the context of the social science literature. The BFP emerges in an agency and institutional emphasis on interdisciplinarity, including multiple iterations of interdisciplinary training programs. Since the Second World War, as Julie Thompson Klein (1990) recounts, various iterations of interdisciplinarity have been formulated to take on large complex societal problems.⁴ There are “grand challenges” and “wicked problems” that can’t be solved in the “silos” and other metaphors for disciplinary specialization, traditional academic departments, and intellectual isolation (see Kawa et al. 2020; Killion et al. 2018; Moon et al. 2021). Previous approaches of STS researchers included laboratory studies (Knorr Cetina 1995; Latour 1987; Latour and Woolgar 1979) and reimagining the collaborative process as a research method (Calvert 2013). And while interdisciplinarity and its counterparts are desirable, they are hard to achieve (Datta 2018; Frickel, Albert, and Prainsack 2017; Hadfield-Hill et al. 2020; Leahey 2018; MacLeod 2018).

The social scientists involved in the project repeatedly quip to each other about the biological scientists, “they’re all biologists” and in close proximity intellectually, despite diversity of methods and specializations.⁵ The BFP is concerned with bridging the scale of extremely “micro” measurements of genes or elements or metabolomic compounds, and what they might say about large-scale ecological processes of survival, adaptation, or selection.⁶ One of the featured research projects involves studying the bacterial and chemical composition of different zones in a rapidly melting Scandinavian permafrost, to understand the transition of the biotic communities species distributions and their carbon uptake or release characteristics under conditions of global climate change. Interdisciplinarity is partially mapped to questions of bridging scales. To demonstrate novelty for the granting agency, there is an advantage in maximizing their sense of themselves as intellectually far apart. Methodologically, rather than trying to decide whether they are “really, really” interdisciplinary, let us take at face value their own self-reported challenges in coordinating knowledge production across scales. These challenges include a distribution of agnoses (Gross 2010). Based on their home disciplines, participants express a lack of understanding of how to culture cells; how to do data analytics; the process of linking genomic data to metabolic pathways suggested by metabolomic measures; generating and validating genetic diversity measures. As a group of about forty participants there are a lot of known unknowns, and many points of integration suggested by the BFP’s overarching goals. Some people know how to extract and analyze DNA, others do not: these non-knowledges set up exchanges of capacities, providing an unspoken definition of collaboration and interdisciplinarity.

Karin Knorr Cetina’s Epistemic Cultures (1999) was the organizing framework for this project, as selected by the prior social science PI. However, there are issues: first of all, Epistemic Cultures, like so much of the field-defining scholarship in STS, took about a decade of work to bring to press as a book (Knorr Cetina 1991). It is comparative, not interdisciplinary. It is erudite, and the scholarly articles prefiguring the award-winning book are for specialists. My attempt to teach Knorr Cetina’s 1991 background article, “Epistemic Cultures: Forms of Science in Reason,” in the graduate seminar was disastrous.. The students were upset by being challenged with a work they did not understand. Only two students found the article a worthwhile challenge. Trying to teach this article illuminated the “hard limits” to interdisciplinarity for the group. It also revealed that they collectively knew little of the history and philosophy of their own fields: no students in the first cohort, for example, could identify the Nobel Prize–winning work of Barbara McClintock on corn gene transposons (Keller 1984).

In contrast, a presentation by another social scientist in a consulting (rather than PI) role, which distilled quantitative research on the risks and benefits of interdisciplinarity, was well received. What became clear in the observations of that classroom session were two things. The first has to do with the differing expectations for defining interdisciplinarity as something that can be the property of a person (see Kawa et al. 2021) as opposed to the property of a team. For the latter, then, teamwork skills and communication skills, rather than actual internalized competency across disciplines, becomes the learning objective. This individual-team tension is not resolved in project goals and activities. The second observation from these presentations is the articulation of an extreme instrumentalization of social science work. Lessons on interdisciplinarity focused on atheoretical heuristics for interdisciplinary success and were reported as definitely useful in the terms of the BFP objectives. This instrumentalization, coupled with the activities of the external evaluator and numerous rubrics and toolkits and checklists available to facilitate interdisciplinarity, potentially reduces interdisciplinarity to a performative or attitudinal aspiration and a menu of social skills rather than epistemological integration (Hackett and Rhoten 2009).⁷ The definition of interdisciplinarity for the group has become instantiated in a form of exchange around instrumentalities—who brings what useful tools to scientific problem solving.

Considering the Registers of Time

A register, in linguistics, is language used in a particular “communicative situation.”⁸ I am using the term here to indicate the articulations of time, like the linguistic usage, are not discrete orderings of layers or levels, but interwoven and situational. The registers I identify are the idiosyncratic, disciplinary, epistemic, and institutional. This ordering does suggest scale, but these are mutually constitutive articulations, not discrete levels. How these registers intersect with and without friction is an unexamined issue in studies of interdisciplinarity. It is more than “time management,” although we should start there. Time management is a matter of work practices, which are individual but also organizational and disciplinary in habitus.

Research on interdisciplinarity makes note of the time complications of running multi-investigator and multidisciplinary projects.⁹ It takes more time to communicate, to negotiate, and to organize events, meetings, and to make deadlines. Individual or idiosyncratic time orientations are matters of habitus that emerge from personal attributes, training, and experience, as well as disciplinary and organizational patterns and tools. Someone who is a caregiver may have evolved specific time constraints and time management tools. Someone who has been in academic leadership may have a different appreciation for organizational time-keeping and deadlines, and managing staff. Some people need more or less sleep or time spent in self-care.

The time patterns of academic life are structured through the cycles of academic year. This second register of time is the institutional clock, embedded in an organizational field. We know that the academic year generates certain expectations for activity and availability. Funding applications and reporting, conference proposals, grades, department social calendars, public lecture series, annual reports and productivity measures, and so many activities are pinned to the academic calendar, whose origins are so long past as to seem unremarkable and inviolable. There is, for example, no sign of the four-day work-week or reduced Full Time Equivalence (FTE) (if you want to keep tenure) at most US universities. Nor should we forget the centrality of the calendar of the global north, which challenges international collaborations.

Students learn to manage the rhythm of the academic year, and very quickly absorb the lessons of the BFG program handbook, which is concerned with time-to-degree measures, semesters and credit attainment, continuity of enrollment, and meeting program benchmarks. Much of the cycle of student interests and research capabilities are shaped by the expectations of a four(ish)-year undergraduate curriculum. Graduate students, as well as contingent faculty, postdocs, and some staff, live as “tumbleweeds” (Pugh 2015) with a situational precarity subject to the cycles of the academic year (e.g., often no funding for the summer months) and grant cycles and the availability of “soft money” to sustain courses of study, research projects, and career trajectories. It should be noted that fewer than 20 percent of the students in the first cohort of the BFP expressed interest in full-time, conventional academic careers, preferring non-academic public and private sector employment after degree completion.¹⁰

While institutional specifics vary, at ours, the tenure clock, or The Tenure Clock, and tenure and promotion policies are part of the hiring information for incoming faculty colleagues. A third-year review is summative and high-stakes feedback to pre-tenure colleagues. And while flexibility, particularly around the COVID-19 pandemic, is stated at an institutional level, what Mary Blair-Loy and Erin Cech (2022) identify as the “work devotion schema” means that exceptionally long hours and high levels of engagement are taken as measures of seriousness and quality. The work devotion schema is a factor inhibiting diversity. An “all-in” model of a scientific lifestyle is taken as an objective measure of merit and commitment when it is a specific cultural formation and not actually strongly correlated with productivity or innovation in STEM. Underrepresented minorities, LGBTQ+ faculty, and female faculty with families are seen as less than serious, despite comparable productivity. Evaluating the BFP for the productivity effects will take a longer time frame than allotted for the project, but participants have not disclosed negative messaging or behaviors based on their identities. Annual faculty performance reviews for continuing faculty and annual budget cycles also shape measures, and presumably some sense of strategy, for managing productivity. And while there is some variation in the policies and timelines, there is mostly convergence, as basic institutional isomorphic practices are in effect (Dimaggio and Powell 1983). Couple those institutional practices and their shaping of time with the time demands of grant activities and grant cycles, and the organizational environment produces practical and normative expectations for productivity, and presence.

Related to but not the same as institutional time, the third register of time is disciplinary. It has to do with specific disciplinary encounters with the institutional academic year clock. It is most clearly understood in the variability of the professional research, writing, and conferencing cycle. For example, some years ago I collaborated with an archaeology PhD student to think about how instruments did and did not move into archaeological practice. Early phases of our activities went well. But archaeologists dig in the summer, analyze and write in the fall, present and submit for publication in the spring. Sociologists present at the end of the summer, research in the fall, and write in the spring. I found it impossible to get away from campus to attend the archaeology conference cycle. Disciplinary grant, paper submission, and review cycles have become solidified and shape the research and writing practices of scholars, often so much a matter of routine as to be unremarkable until there are interdisciplinary frictions.

These disciplinary cycles are closely linked to but not the same as the fourth register of time: epistemic time. This register of time is deeply connected to the material practices of knowledge production and to issues of instrumentation and the ontology of research objects, reasoning, and causality. Is the unit of analysis a growing season, a semester, a weekend, a meeting, the life cycle of a microorganism? For a mycologist, a solid experiment might follow a fungus and its lifespan. Depending on the species that can be about a month.¹¹ That means researchers can conduct two or possibly three experiment cycles in a typical semester. A metabolomics analysis, which uses techniques such as gas chromatography or spectrometry, characterizes the outputs of cellular operations, such as fat, protein, or sugar compositions, and can take hours or perhaps a day or two. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analysis lays out the genetic information of a sample and can be done in mere hours. A single-item PCR screen, such as a COVID-19 test, can be done in fifteen to thirty minutes. Or consider the data science: a simulation or analytic protocol can be done at the processing speed of the computer system—in principle, fractions of a second. Digital tools accelerate time, or at least time expectations, for communications, exchange of data, and time spent on analysis. Sabina Leonelli (2018) describes how data science timescales shape how researchers interpret data as evidence and identify phenomena, and data practices can shape knowledge production and epistemological trust and the continuity of results. Finally, for an ecologist, the arc of the year or growing season is a pretty typical time frame for an experiment. However, a researcher in the group once said that decades would be great for the study of long-term adaptations to climate change, but you can’t generally get grants for that long. Of course, all of these examples require parsing when the experiments begin and end (Galison 1987). What are the set-up times? How much time does it take to gather experimental traces and turn them into meaningful inscriptions? How are samples handled and stored? How many trials need to be done to confirm results? Do these trials run in parallel or take greater time to run in sequences? When do we know we are done? Caitlin Donahue Wylie (2019) describes how different specialists within a field (paleontology) can have divergent definitions of these detailed practices, producing mistakes and misunderstandings and complicating the research process.

Epistemic time is particularly embodied in instruments, and time can be more or less scarce based on the time needed for any particular experimental component, or due to competition for access to instruments (Traweek 1988). Sharon Traweek’s analysis of the multiple temporalities of scientific work in high energy physics motivates this analysis. But here, there are multiple instruments that work on differing scales, in different departments, rather than the centralized large-scale instrument in high energy physics. The BFP as a project occupies more or less centrality for some of the participants, which may lead to relative de-prioritization of doing analyses for the project. There is a fairly large queue for PCR analysis and metabolomics analysis beyond the BFP. The researchers with those tools have prior research agendas and also provide research services to other groups. There are some tacit expectations for “on-demand” research results based on assumptions about the time to produce data: if PCR doesn’t take much time, an expected rapid turn-around is implied. The multiple disciplines have different epistemic cultures, here focusing on time, which are materialized in instruments and their research objects.

What is important for this paper is the articulation of these multiple registers, and the hierarchicalization of disciplines and practices in ways that challenge effective interdisciplinarity and program goals. In general, what are the delimiting time factors for an interdisciplinary project? We find reporting expectations and the structure of the academic year clearly shape the scale and scope of student projects in most fields. With respect to the BFP, can ecological fieldwork be done in a summer, at least sufficient for a chapter if not an entire dissertation? Can experiments, plant or fungal growth, replications, data collection, and data analysis be done in a two-month swing of a semester or a summer? Access to different tools from constituent disciplines similarly shape the scales and scope of graduate work. The academic calendar becomes the organizing frame for research design. Do-ability is very much a matter of the calendar (Clarke and Fujumura 1992). Disciplinary and epistemic time constraints add another layer that has the primary tendency to narrow, not expand, research design and the scope of interdisciplinarity.¹²

Institutional expectations shape research design. A short and rigorously enforced time-to-degree is not conducive to the time needed for managing, experiencing, exploring, and designing complex interdisciplinary experiments. An upper-level administrator has made public the expectation that graduate students in all programs should be finished with their PhDs in six years, which will likely thwart both innovativeness and interdisciplinarity, and inclusivity. Faculty in the humanities and social sciences have responded negatively to this plan, but the administration’s complete neglect of the different funding structures (e.g., time spent in teaching appointments for graduate students) and different expectations for productivity and dissertation scope, and research methods, has put enormous strain on those departments.

Time both reveals and structures hierarchies. As mentioned before, there is an instrumentalization of the social sciences (see also Calvert 2013; Forsythe 1999; Kamath et al. 2022). Because the “cutting edge” is important to the scientists, students and faculty of the BFP are not particularly motivated to understand the longer history of their fields. Literature reviews and topic searches have shallow historical roots. It is the privilege of the senior-most faculty to want to take deep dives into the history and philosophy of their study areas. Outside of this prioritization of the most current work, field hierarchicalizations are orderings established by both tacit and explicit notions of “do-ability” (Clarke and Fujimura 1992). Student valuations of topic importance are centered on scientific and employment questions: Will this help me get a job? Will this help me graduate on time? These orderings also co-constitute assumptions about how difficult something is or should be, and the status of both the fields and their participants (Carrigan and Bardini 2021). Data science, for example, is considered a growth area and students were eager to improve their capacities and requested specialized short workshops outside of core seminars. According to evaluator surveys and social science interviews, students were moderately interested in and satisfied with the cultures of science and social science scholarship on interdisciplinarity as presented in classes but made no requests for additional workshops or training.

The perceived “rigor” of fields structures part of the validation, and those fields with high demands for reproducibility, multiple trials, and conforming to scientific ideas such as control groups, have greater prestige. These orderings are not new and have been noted previously as shaping the reception of the social sciences into scientific fields (Albert et al. 2008; Forsythe 1999) and the models of legitimate scientific practice that undergird differential power in the sciences (Albert et al. 2008; Albert and Kleinman 2011; Nelson et al. 2022). We also see a qualitative bimodal commitment pattern, between core and peripheral group participants, which produces a self-reinforcing pattern of engagement and leadership. Considering attention as allocation of time to things of interest or priority, the distribution of attention traces the time commitments of BFP participants. There are a few faculty from whom little is asked—due to prior commitments, leaves, perceived “fit” with the program—who currently have only a slim intersect with the intellectual trajectory of ecosystem genomics. There are core faculty with high degrees of formal responsibilities and interest, and others with high interest but few formal responsibilities. The BFP faces centrifugal and centripetal forces that pull faculty into or out of the project, which will affect the longevity and legacy—the stability and quality—of the program when the grant funding runs out. The lead PIs of the grant and its curriculum will need people to commit time to the BFP, to elevate its activities to sufficient levels of personal priority to conduct the work of maintaining the program. New people will need to care (Martin, Myers, and Viseu 2015).

Conclusions in the Context of Care

Udo Krautwurst argues that “academic anthropologists’ conditions of employment shape anthropologists’ practice” (2013, 261), as lives, scholarship, and identity are increasingly imbricated in the neoliberal university. Fieldwork becomes a very privileged practice after graduate school, or at least, the expectations of highly immersive fieldwork can only be sustained with generous course release policies, travel, research support, time away from the office, and family support. Reflexively, making the time to conduct this work under the constraints of my idiosyncratic time needs lead me to consider the question of just how much self-care I was prepared to abandon to not be continually “late to the party.” (Answer: none.) “Patchwork” ethnography (Günel, Varma, and Watanabe, 2020) is one alternative, as it is a critique of the traditional immersive ethnography, and a recognition of the dissolution of firm boundaries between “home” and “field.” Patchwork ethnography also asks for rethinking the temporalization of research, in particular the collapse of a “fieldwork-then-analysis” distinction.

There are two other temporal interventions in ethnographies of interdisciplinarity, particularly in the BFP, that might be relevant moving forward: the first is the extension of meeting ethnography to science studies from its origins in studying governments and community organizing to specifically knowledge-production domains (Sandler and Thedvall 2017). Due to COVID, the methodological design for the social science research of the BFP shifted to a meeting focus, via steering committee meetings and hybrid classes, which both provided interactional context and transcripts. Retroactively understanding components of my BFP work to date as a meeting ethnography lets me interrogate how discipline, time, and hierarchy structure meeting events, shape participation and nonparticipation. Online meetings allow for an interrogation of what BFP meetings “do” or “produce” and question whether or not everyone shares recognition of the outcomes. For example, during a regular steering committee meeting, entirely noncontroversial decisions about assessment and reporting become “sticky” and institutionalize a model of progress through the program, a pathway one can easily fall from but not recover to. The other temporal recognition is a kind of “ethnography by appointment.”¹³ In the sense that the social scientists are often studying up, these local institutional elites have very little time for sustained conversations and are sometimes only grudgingly available. Between the concrete complexity of scheduling, the epistemic privilege of the hard sciences and the implied status that large grants confer, elite scientists can be very difficult to engage.¹⁴

If my institutional experience (Campbell 1998) demonstrates that traditional ethnographic practice is privileged and largely unsustainable in neoliberal interdisciplinary contexts, the other insight from the BFP that has become clear as the fall of 2022 has unfolded is that the inertia of the individual-investigator-laboratory system remains an impediment to interdisciplinarity. PIs who are PhD supervisors remain situated in and evaluated by departments, and so student participants with an interest in interdisciplinarity experience time structurations that reproduce disciplines because they are accountable to their supervisors. The cycle of the academic year shapes the do-ability of projects, which in turn sets a constraint for the epistemic time allowed to conduct an experiment. These factors are structural and hard to mitigate. They are institutional, and doxological (Albert and Kleinman 2011) in the sense that these are things that go without saying, or at least until a nosey social scientist asks why things might not be otherwise. Several times I have tried to spur interest in the idea of a cohort dissertation, but my suggestions largely fall on deaf ears. Cohort theses and dissertations are more prevalent fields like educational studies, counseling, and social work (see Burnett 2011; Holmes et al. 2010), where a cohort of enrollees takes on a single problem or site (such as a school) and applies different methodologies and foci (parent relations, funding, school leadership, demographics, student health). Students develop topical and methodological expertise within the context of the single project, gaining individual publications, but perhaps also publishing collectively. Educational studies and social work are not, however, considered high-status fields, and the disruption of individual investigator power and of the funding and evaluation mechanisms for individual faculty makes cohort dissertations in the sciences fundamentally unimaginable.

And in relation to the unimaginable: imagine a university without deadlines. Immediately the mind freezes. How would we know when a course starts or stop? How do we account for our labor? Scientists themselves occasionally articulate a plea for slow science (Lutz 2012; Stengers 2017), arguing that speed pressures and the demand for productivity generates incremental, not transformative knowledge (Park, Leahey, and Funk 2023). Ulrike Felt’s (2017a, 2017b) description of the way that academic accounting regimes, which shift science from discovery to delivery, produces a chronopolitics for the governance of academic work. There is no time for non-work. And here is a conundrum: How do we manage the urgency of many issues, and yet move toward slow science? I am arguing that the time pressures and manufactured urgency of academic work are so condensed and foreshortened that these time parameters will inhibit solution of the “wicked problems.” And thus time frames of epistemology and ontology, the reality of things shaped by their accessibility in the overdetermined time systems, and the time to produce knowledge are similarly co-constituted. Through studying the workings of the BFP, we have some examples of how institutional time constraints become epistemological constraints as registers become entangled and shape question formulation and research trajectories.

The time orientations, such as the “work devotion schema” (Blair-Loy and Cech 2022), are part of an intrinsic able-ism built into academe. Consider the ways that the expectation of full-time participation in schooling limits the participation of people who need or demand more time for other things. Nearly all student aid is premised on full-time enrollment. The demand for continual at-work presence and the belief that if a person is not “all in” for science there is no place for them becomes an implicit, discouraging message to young people considering careers in science. BFP senior faculty, who have clearly made continual presence central to their work and identities, are disappointed in student lack of interest in continuing in the academy. The demand for the good-old-bad-old immersive ethnography—fieldwork presence—could also be argued to be ableist. As Ashley Shew argues, “clocks should bend to our bodies, not the other way around” (2020, 9). COVID-19 highlighted the need for what she calls “disability-led hacks,” where the tricks, management, and work and workplace modifications often needed for persons with disabilities moved into view as resources for all people needing to accommodate challenges emerging from the pandemic. Similarly, the academic career track is tuned to a very specific model of the life course and daily time practices, for which crip time and queer time may be nearly incompatible (see Samuels 2017; Jaffe 2018). Time orientations and systems shape accessibility, for caregivers, people who need more time for their own care, for different kinds of community and civic engagement, for people juggling multiple responsibilities. Time regimes are an underexamined form of gatekeeping into higher education.

Like Calvert (2013), I value the collegiality and emergent friendships from participating in the BFP. And like Calvert, this experience has had me facing frustrations related to hierarchies and assumptions about social science disciplines and the general state of science in the context of academia (see Felt 2017a, 2017b; Nelson et al. 2022; Stengers 2017). And while the investigators in the BFP are explicitly committed to an inclusive model of science, engaging US underrepresented minorities, promoting sensitivity and inclusion for gender, sexuality, and multiple identity registers, nonetheless the multiple registers of time and their obduracy reproduce hierarchicalizations and privileges that have pragmatic and epistemic impacts on who can participate, what questions are ask-able, and what counts as evidence. I face a quandary to respect my needs for self-care and care commitments external to the project, to feel always late to the party and perpetually feel slow. Yet ethically and as a matter of care and regard for my colleagues, I also wish to not inhibit the goals of the BFP, particularly not to intensify the vulnerability of the more precarious faculty and students or the larger continuity of the program by not manifesting the normative productivity of the investigative group. I hope that this study encourages conversation on the registers of time and how they function organizationally and epistemologically, with an eye toward encouraging conversations about time that are inclusive and generate capacities for knowledge and care.

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DGE-2022055. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

This paper was first presented in a panel organized by Caitlyn Wyle and Coleen Carrigan, 4S (the Society for the Social Study of Science) in fall 2021. We followed up with an editing roundtable workshop in summer 2022, which was immensely useful. The generosity of the co-panelists and editors has been inspiring and has immeasurably enhanced the quality of this paper. Megan McKendry, sociology PhD candidate, has masterfully engaged the graduate students in interviews and with sustained interactions and supported this work with bibliographic assistance and being a very smart sounding board. I also want to thank my interlocutors. They are, across the board, an exceptionally generous group, with their time and enthusiasm.

We respectfully acknowledge the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of Indigenous Peoples. Today, Arizona is home to twenty-two federally recognized tribes, with Tucson being home to the O’odham and the Yaqui. Committed to diversity and inclusion, the university strives to build sustainable relationships with sovereign Native Nations and Indigenous communities through education offerings, partnerships, and community service.

Notes

¹ A note on anonymity: With a relatively small sample size and a very specific field-in-formation, demographic data is not provided for the pool of interlocutors and direct attributions are avoided, which limits intersectional analysis. Also, because we have not explicitly worked out authorship/co-authorship expectations, and to protect anonymity, this is a sole-authored paper, unlike other collaborative projects that include the scientists as co-authors: see Hadfield-Hill et al. 2020; Klein et al. 2022; and Moon et al. 2021 for a few of many examples.

² A detailed methodological analysis is beyond the scope of this work. See Fine 2003 or Fine and Schulman 2009 on the so-called naïve observer. We could also include an analysis of the participants’ assumptions about the warrants for social science work (see Forsythe 1999).

³ This heuristic emerges from the supposed impossibility of solving the equations of motion for a multibody planetary system (see Diacu 1996).

⁴ On different kinds of discipline-spanning research, see Choi and Pak 2006 and sepower2 2020.

⁵ Sorting out the various indices that measure interdisciplinarity and the span of disciplines is beyond the scope of this paper; see Ávila-Robinson, Mejia, and Sengoku et al. 2021.

⁶ I should note here that unlike other collaborations (Hadfield-Hill et al. 2020; Klein et al. 2022; Moon et al. 2021), the BFP does not engage stakeholders, such as local communities that are facing a problem or share a practical interest in the outcome of scientific work. Incorporating non-academic time registers and how they shape knowledge production would be interesting on pragmatic and epistemological senses.

⁷ See also Goodhart’s law that any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a useful measure (Elton 2004; Fire and Guestrin 2019) as well as the issue of socially desirable responses (Van de Mortel 2008). The participants in the BFG are smart, and know what the right answers are in terms of expressing the value of interdisciplinarity. See also Reich and Reich 2006.

⁸ It is beyond the scope of this paper to do a detailed sociology of knowledge of the concept of the register in linguistics. For background, see Agha 2005.

⁹ There are so, so many checklists that emerge from project narratives that go something like this: we spent a lot of time talking to one another with an open mind and (wave hands) achieved interdisciplinary integration. See Boland 2022; Henson et al. 2020; Nancarrow et al. 2013; and Reich and Reich 2006, among many.

¹⁰ For the PhD placement crisis in the humanities, see Rogers 2013. Pretty much every discipline has a recent article on “alt ac” or alternative academic careers for the “surplus” of PhDs in relation to academic positions. For ecology, see Hansen et al. 2018.

¹¹ Although a noted exception is the giant Armillaria ostoyae, which is more than 2,300 acres in size and possibly 2,400 years old. It may not in fact be a single organism, per se, but a genetically homogeneous collective. See Casselman 2007.

¹² A reviewer has asked if the social science epistemological frame matters to the BFP, generating conflict or friction. In an anthropological mode, fieldwork is generally expected to track the cycle of an activity: here the academic year, with the “writing up” to occur after completion of fieldwork. This publication practice does not match the productivity expectations for the natural scientists in the grant, but, in perhaps the most telling indicator of hierarchicalization, it doesn’t matter. As there is no second round or continuation for the BFP in terms of external funding, whether or not I publish is of no consequence to the evaluation of the BFP. It would be nice and it will certainly be good for me. For a couple of the pre-tenure faculty in one rather competitive department, should they ever co-publish with me, it may be seen as detracting from serious disciplinary science. Students from this department expressed concern about the devaluation of their interdisciplinary experience in interviews with the graduate research assistant. So my social science epistemological frame produces friction for me, continually being late, but for the BFP writ large, not so much.

¹³ Thank you to the participants in a 2022 summer editing workshop for this formulation. Unfortunately, I cannot quite reconstruct who individually should get credit. The term anthropology by appointment appears in passing in Hannerz 2010.

¹⁴I don’t have an answer for the way that patchwork, meeting, or appointment ethnography can slide over into “helicopter” ethnography, the disparaged extractive model of minimal interaction and accountability in fieldwork relations. Developing ethics and methodologies for studying empowered populations and social elites is still an open problem (Nader 1972). The presumed dualism between researcher/researched and the power dynamics of research are of course built into human subjects protections (Stark 2011), and for calls for decolonizing methodologies (Datta 2018).

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Author Bios

Jennifer L. Croissant is (still) an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona.