SUBJECT: RE: How will we know when the end is nigh?
AUTHOR: Sandra Bell
DATE: 15th April 2003

KEYWORDS: social scientists, ecologists, cooperation, workshop, interdisciplinary research.

SUMMARY: The author calls for mutidisciplinary workshops where social scientists and ecologists could understand each other's perspectives and goals better. She also suggests a pilot project where social and natural scientists devise and carry out a project with a special emphasis on their cooperation efforts. I believe that Allan Watt is right about the need for social scientists and ecologists to integrate their research - it is one thing to have mutlidisciplinary research and quite another to achieve interdisciplinary research. However, the ideal of integration cannot be achieved without clear and determined effort.

There is a crying need for mutlidisciplinary workshops, probably starting at a fairly basic level, where social and natural scientists get together and try really hard to understand one another's perspectives, methods, language and preoccupations. Talks or lectures are not enough. Social scientists may need to find themselves down in the mud doing some field ecology and ecologists may have to find themselves doing something like ethnographic fieldwork. That way we can find out what one another does, how it feels and what we want at the end of the day. The different disciplines will only reach the kind of co-operation that is required if their members set out a deliberate programme to create it.

I propose a pilot project that is founded on a valid piece of research, but which is actually a vehicle for the creation of this kind of co-operation. Here social and natural scientists would get together to devise and carry out a project. It would be understood that the primary aim of the project was to work on interdisciplinary understanding. To this end special workshops and other events would be dedicated. The project may or may not answer the academic questions it set out to answer, but the funders would understand that this outcome was of secondary importance. The project would also track down and investigate examples where interdisciplinarity had been achieved to varying degrees.

The participants would commit themselves to answering certain questions as in any research project, but blind alleys and methodological problems would be considered grist to the mill of self-reflexivity and interdisciplinarity. If some or all of the research questions did not get answered that would not matter providing that the participants provided an insightful and useful account of how their efforts at co-operation did or did not work.

Contributers to this conference appear convinced of the need for interdisciplinarity, but we have to devise and implement experiments and other means if willingness is to transform into actuality.

A contribution by:

Sandra Bell
Durham University
Department of Anthropology
43 Old Elvet
Durham DH1 3HN, UK