Abstract
‘Interdisciplinarity and its affiliates (‘cross-’, ‘multi-’ and ‘transdisciplinarity’) have become central preoccupations of researchers and academic managers worldwide. Interdisciplinary centres and programmes abound and focus on everything from anthropogenic climate change to human epigenetics; numerous publications now exist that seek to define, steer and learn from the practice of interdisciplinary inquiry in its many and evolving forms. Felicity Callard and Des Fitzgerald’s book is a distinctive and helpful intervention in the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity. Though Callard is a geographer, this book is not notably geographical in its approach. Indeed, the authors’ focus on the relations between neuroscience and the wider social sciences suggests that their’s is not a book most human geographers would find useful. But appearances deceive. In fact, this book contains many useful arguments and insights for anyone who works in interstitial spaces on any topic. Anglophone human geography, not to mention geography more broadly, is a highly heterodox discipline that allows willing travellers to move hither and thither as they seek to understand how space, place, landscape, scale, borders, networks and much else besides constitutes the metaphorical DNA of life past, present and future. Moreover, the long-standing debate over how human and physical geography can and should relate to one another is being revitalized by way of external imperatives (such as ocean acidification and ice sheet collapse aka ‘the global environmental crisis’) and novel interventions by some on either ‘side’ of the human-physical divide (such as Rebecca Lave and Stuart Lane). In this context, Rethinking Interdisciplinarity is likely to inspire helpful thoughts about current practice and future possibilities within and between the many threads that comprise academic geography’s rich fabric.
The book is short and comprises seven very readable chapters plus a brief epilogue, a useful reference section and a detailed index. It is also open access under a CC-BY licence and funded by The Wellcome Trust, whose monies also enabled the authors’ collaboration over a period of years (Fitzgerald is a sociologist at Cardiff University, Callard in Durham University’s Department of Geography). The book is the product of experience: it approaches interdisciplinarity neither philosophically-programmatically nor as a practice to be studied from the outside by interested analysts. The authors reflect upon their own involvement as social scientists in projects designed to understand how human brain functioning responds to non-biological elements of people’s everyday environments. This involvement has not only thrown up big questions about where the social ends and the biological begins, but also necessitated encounters with scientists trained to think, measure and interpret in ways very different to Callard and Fitzgerald’s own habits of mind and action. It is through such encounters, the authors argue, that possibilities arise for making interdisciplinarity something other than many of its champions and critics imagine it to be. This is framed in terms of ‘experimentation’, though in a looser and more organic sense than the familiar image of a pre-planned laboratory experiment.
After a scene-setting introductory chapter, the next chapter delimits forms of interdisciplinary engagement among researchers and challenges the form too often imagined by geographers to be the only one – that is, ‘additive interdisciplinarity’ where people come together like pieces of a pre-cut jigsaw. The next chapter shows how both traditional and novel forms can be enacted once a common object of concern preoccupies different researchers seeking to collaborate. The authors favour the latter.
Chapter 4 highlights the sort of patient, open-minded but often trying engagement that the authors have experienced as a positive thing, both intellectually and emotionally. This emerges directly from their Wellcome-funded explorations of neurology. The final three chapters then venture a set of more programmatic insights, based on the sorts of practices recounted earlier in the book. They comprise a set of guidelines offered humbly to anyone wanting to engage in interdisciplinary inquiry in ways that stand to change themselves and their objects of shared concern. These chapters, like the book as a whole, refrain from the confident ‘how to’ tone of voice used in too many publications about ‘successful’ interdisciplinary inquiry. Finally, the bibliography is a treasure trove of up-to-date publications about the theory and practice of working between the disciplines.
In sum, this is a stimulating book about a topic of wide relevance to geographers of all stripes. By focusing on practice it poses a challenge to the over-neat prescriptions offered in many programmatic publications about interdisciplinarity. While not all interdisciplinary practices are applauded, the authors show that through involvement, reflexivity, compromise, and occasional discomfort, all participants can follow paths scarcely anticipated when the research was initially conceived. At a time when the transformation of the planet is causing some to tout geography’s integrative credentials (not for the first time), Callard and Fitzgerald offer us alternative ideas about the means and ends of ‘integration’ and collaborative inquiry.