Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods

Celia Lury, Rachel Fensham, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Sybille Lammes, Angela Last, Mike Michael, Emma Uprichard, Celia Lury, Rachel Fensham, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Sybille Lammes, Angela Last, Mike Michael, Emma Uprichard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138886872
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317501251
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

The landscape of contemporary research is characterized by growing interdisciplinarity, and disciplinary boundaries are blurring faster than ever. Yet while interdisciplinary methods, and methodological innovation in general, are often presented as the 'holy grail' of research, there are few examples or discussions of their development and 'behaviour' in the field.

This Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research presents a bold intervention by showcasing a diversity of stimulating approaches. Over 50 experienced researchers illustrate the challenges, but also the rewards of doing and representing interdisciplinary research through their own methodological developments. Featured projects cover a variety of scales and topics, from small art-science collaborations to the 'big data' of mass observations.

Each section is dedicated to an aspect of data handling, from collection, classification, validation to communication to research audiences. Most importantly, Interdisciplinary Methods presents a distinctive approach through its focus on knowledge as process, defamiliarising and reworking familiar practices such as experimenting, archiving, observing, prototyping or translating.

Section 1
Making and assembling

1
Making and assembling

Towards a conjectural paradigm for interdisciplinary research

Rachel Fensham and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Making and assembling produce an odd pairing of terms. Making derives from the short vocalization ‘mek’ from an Anglo-Saxon word, and hearkens to the Germanic verb ‘machen’ meaning to do or to make. It has both a universal application, in the sense that everyone from children to adults makes sound, while on the other hand, it aligns with specialists who form unique or distinctive works, such as a fine machine or a beautiful painting. Making, or doing, also leads us directly to processes whereby materials become transformed by an action, such as a person making a cocktail or the weather making us feel hot. On the other hand, assembling is Latinate, as with the French verb ‘assembler’, in English also to assemble, as in the putting together or gathering of people, objects or things. Etymologically, this latter term relates then to the important notion of ‘assembly’ as a site of public cultural enactment, as well as to the assembly line of Fordist manufacturing. We might also have a more prosaic view of assembling in contemporary culture when we consume the plasticity of a robotics toy, a piece of IKEA furniture, or a Facebook page. Thus, we might conceive of a sharp contrast between making and assembling as methods, in the sense that making suggests creating, and something more primal, fashioned even from mud, whereas assembling tends towards order, and something more civilized, or institutional. We do not assert this dichotomy in any cultural hierarchy because we prefer to examine these terms operating in relation to one another, and as moving generatively between the social and linguistic, or human and non-human, in contemporary research.

It is possible to assemble a range of theorists – experimental thinkers – who become touchstones for different ways of making and assembling in interdisciplinary research, and scholars have become increasingly attuned to the ways in which theories of practice might differ from one discipline to another (Schatzki 2001: 11). Thomas Kuhn, for instance, acknowledges this when he writes about both the specificity of science as a knowledge practice and the generalizing power of a paradigm shaped by practice. In the process of narrating interdisciplinary research, and its potential admixture of norms equating to disciplines, alongside the entanglement of the practical, social and conceptual for this essay, we have arrived at Carlo Ginzburg’s notion of the conjectural paradigm – what he has called ‘the lightning recapitulation of rational processes’ (1989: 117). This is a concept that allows us to find a space in-between disciplines, as well as to do research work that makes and assembles the ethical, political, creative, socially engaged and fun.

Such research may also be productive of a distinctive ontology, one that embraces both the history and power of representations as well as embodied social relations. To return to our key terms by way of exemplifying this ontology, the tensions between the primal and the civil recall in part Elaine Scarry’s foundational book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985). Scarry’s privileging of the word ‘making’ and its antonym in her subtitle offer a fruitful starting place to rethink these opposing ideas and their impact on systems of thought more broadly. In her analysis of war and torture, for instance, Scarry notes that ‘physical pain . .. is language-destroying’ (1985: 19): thus invoking the political dimension inherent when pain is deliberately employed as an ideological tool designed to dehumanize. For Scarry there is ample evidence of how regimes seek to ‘unmake’ their victims and their experience of the world. The act of making, then – specifically through the act of creative expression (song, literature, film) – also has a concrete ideological function of re-making, or re-assembling, of putting together and creating anew that which has previously been unmade. Making, in Scarry’s terms, involves both imaginative work, as well as an ‘activity extended into the external world, and has as its outcome a verbal or material artefact’ (1985: 177). Whether the making of a political structure, encompassing legal texts and border police, or the making of structural or sensory objects, this complex proposition includes ‘obligations’:

For made things do incur large responsibilities to their human makers (and their continued existence depends on their abilities to fulfil those responsibilities: a useless artefact whether a failed god or a failed table, will be discarded); just as, of course, human makers also incur very large obligations to the objects they have made.

1985: 182

When we make – whatever we make – the ‘responsibility’ we take for the act itself is, from Scarry’s perspective therefore, intrinsically ideological.

Going beyond this humanistic concept of creation, the notion of assemblage is regarded as central to the ontology of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (2004). The use of the term assemblage, as Ian Buchanan points out, has however been derived from the (mis)translation by Brian Massumi of their term, agencement from French and he proposes a more suitable term might be arrangement (Buchanan 2015: 383). In this sense, an assemblage might involve reorganizing diverse elements from across disciplines to create something unpredictable or with new valorizations. Emphasizing the dynamic process rather than the final product itself, for Deleuze and Guattari, all assemblages are historicized through combination, and as such they also have agency: for instance, any given political formation authorizes the circulation of bodies, the expression or repression of affects, and the production or reproduction of collectives and institutions. An assemblage, such as a research problem or task, can therefore be driven both by processes of territorialization and deterritorialization, and in its analysis, by coding and decoding such arrangements. An assemblage functions then through the deliberative fusion of multiple aspects of a situation. For Deleuze and Guattari: ‘An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously (independently of any recapitulation that may be made of it in a scientific or theoretical corpus)’ (2004: 25).

Guattari’s experiments in the psychiatric clinic, for instance, ‘used the grid as a tool to transversalise’ and to lead all staff, residents and visitors ‘towards the apprehension of the singular scenes composed and modified by each participant in relation to the relevant collective constraints and institutional matters that emerged in the process’ (Genosko 2009: 61). For the ethico-political development of how we conceive methodologies to be ‘made’ in this introduction, Deleuze and Guattari vitally consider an assemblage to involve re-conceptualizing the components of a research project by allowing for a critical heterogeneity, both of logic and aesthetics, to emerge.

The movement of interdisciplinarity

In comparison with these radical deconstructive methods of making and assembling, the conventional heuristics of academic knowledge claim the actualization of fields of knowledge, constituted by historically defined sets of relationalities, positions, or lines of argument. Scholars of disciplinary modes of researching mostly occupy a discursive space, an institutional or subject position in relation to other thinkers via established patterns of citational linking. Within a discipline, these arguments are supported by evidence, which in turn develop lines of argument. In interdisciplinary discourse, however, these elements that make spatial sense of theory-making are sometimes characterized by an in-between-ness, and a not-quite-belonging. So, rather than making a space of knowledge for ourselves from a centralized location of discursive action, or in terms of unidirectional lines and stable shapes that serve as basic elements of a rather geometric way of modelling an argument, the interdisciplinary turn leads, we would suggest, towards a more dynamic, spatialized understanding of what a field of knowledge is and, by extension, who the specialists in the field might be, such as the authors assembled here, some well known and others less so.

If in response to new conditions, the research processes of interdisciplinarity foster the particular space of ideation as limen, as threshold, or as interstice, then they also function like nodes in a network, as spaces inter or in-between. Movement, as Nicolas Salazar-Sutil argues, might be about the physical locatedness of human movement, but it might also be conceived ‘in terms of electronic location within global networks’ (2015: 211). In this shifting of positions beyond the linear accumulation of ideas, our argument goes further: interdisciplinarity implies more than space, it implies movement, what we might define as the multi-dimensional properties of images, objects or thought changing in time and space. As such, this alternative paradigm involves a spatial and temporal realization of any movement that precedes or follows it, as well as a recognition of mobility as a process of sensitizing research to a particular situation within discourse, within art, within the social.¹ We are not alone in mounting this argument for movement, and experience, as critical to the new formations of interdisciplinary research in cultural studies, science studies, social and political theory. For Bruno Latour:

In my view, ecology is only very rarely a politicized form. Usually the questions I am interested in – about sensitizing, about an Anthropocenic recognition of mobility, of process – these questions are sealed off by politics, and, surrounded by well-meaning self-righteousness . . . [as a] metaphor for complete control, the puppet actually makes its puppeteer carry it somewhere else. It gets modified, mobilized, or moved – and you are then moved by the thing you move, which is the most interesting relation we have with the world.

2016: 321

This realization of academic thinking as movement in terms of interdisciplinary research is dependent, then, upon acts of making or assembling (or, likewise, unmaking and disassembling).

In this essay, the notion of movement as a pre-eminent paradigm and method also serves as an invitation to adopt a kinetic way of ‘doing’ ideas in the academy that will allow scholars to build new and specific models for interdisciplinary research that are appropriate to the challenges of our time. In the movement from one field to another, such research will test and corroborate theory, enable comparison of different forms of evidence, and require the construction of new kinds of research artefact, instance or residue. The contributions assembled in this section argue and exemplify a range of approaches to interdisciplinarity that have been encouraged by a fundamental change in the way they make theory and assemble alliances through research: they are conjecturing projects and processes within a spatiality of communication, and a horizon of social transformation, that sees knowledge production happen in electronically and increasingly mediated ways with, however, an ongoing sense of the unevenness of distributions of power, wealth and access. They therefore practise research through making and unmaking, assembling and disassembling.

All the authors here stake a claim on interdisciplinarity, flagged by backgrounds that link and diverge. In spite of the interdisciplinary framework, these people are also located within disciplines – even if and when the focus is to work beyond ‘just’ finding something new or different. Their methods include the attempt to interrogate/interrupt/interpolate the restrictions of disciplines to work towards remaining open to new practices, ideas and methodologies, by embracing the conjectural paradigm over the restrictions implied by any traditional privileging of the general. We know this not only based on the entries themselves, but because we asked some of these authors by email to articulate their relationships to interdisciplinarity and how it helps to model their identity as researchers and we found their answers most illuminating.

For Catherine Ayres:

Being an interdisciplinary researcher to me requires an ethos of generous critique. I try as hard as I can to appreciate the contributions various disciplines are trying to make to our intellectual world, even when this means directly challenging the core tenets of my ‘home’ discipline.

Thomas Jellis offers a different approach in terms of how he moves beyond disciplinarity in his professional practice. ‘I’m inclined to think in terms of disciplinary matters of concern – or refrains – and how these might also speak to other fields; the task is to work out how to enable temporarily shared trajectories between them.’ Harmony Bench reflects upon how this process changes her academic identity:

My understanding and framing of myself as within a discipline or as adhering to a methodology has shifted over the past several years. Since all of my training has been interdisciplinary (with the exception of a degree in ballet), disciplinarity was not a concern of mine until going on the job market, at which point I described myself as a generalist in the field of dance.

In contrast, Margaret Wertheim has spent a career outside of academia, peripatetically challenging the disciplines of science and mathematics to rethink its models, calculations and designs as hand-made, collective formations. And yet she notes:

[W]e all benefit in our daily lives from the knowledges produced and acquired by these specialists, and we should all applaud the dedication and commitment it takes to achieve this kind of work. Every academic discipline has been subject to such diversification and subdivision, which seems to be one of the characteristics of our intellectual age.

Matthew Reason, on the other hand, acknowledges an important subjectivity in the very term discipline, noting that it ‘looks very different according to where you are standing’. He continues, ‘I have found the real challenge of cross-disciplinary work is when the methodologies don’t align, when there are not only different discourses or points of reference but different understandings of what knowledge is.’ So, whether a researcher works in the physical or social sciences, the arts or the humanities, there are paradigms that constrain and constitute a disciplinary subjectivity and methodologies of practice. Ramon Lobato positions his own research as being based in one discipline, while reaching out productively to others: ‘I work between media and cultural studies, and also draw a lot on economic and geographic modes of analysis and thinking.’ Moving from cultural texts to hard data, Lobato continues,

I feel my core disciplines provide a useful home-space that can be moved through and pushed back at when needed, so I have a fairly comfortable and pragmatic relationship with those – and tend to view other disciplines as providing useful ideas to be ransacked and raided as needed.

We concur with Lobato, because it is how we ourselves ‘do’ ideas. While many of our research interests and practices overlap, notably around bodies, feminism and mediated genres, we have found that we make and assemble in strikingly different ways. The field of performance studies, for Rachel, straddles forms of analysis that read historicized alignments between embodiment and culture, text and agency, nature and representation, while on the other hand, she is concerned with the messiness of experience, akin to what Jane Bennett has called ‘vibrant matter’: the ‘earthy, not-quite-human capaciousness’ of things (2010: 3). As such, contemporary performance research maps relations...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: activating the present of interdisciplinary methods
• SECTION 1 Making and assembling
• SECTION 2 Capturing and composing
• SECTION 3 Engaging and distributing
• SECTION 4 Of interdisciplinarity
• SECTION 5 Valuing and validating
• Index