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Interdisciplinary collaboration in action: tracking the signal, tracing the noise

Callard, F.; Fitzgerald, D.; Woods, A.

Interdisciplinary collaboration in action: tracking the signal, tracing the noise Thumbnail


Authors

F. Callard

D. Fitzgerald



Abstract

Interdisciplinarity is often framed as an unquestioned good within and beyond the academy, one to be encouraged by funders and research institutions alike. And yet there is little research on how interdisciplinary projects actually work—and do not work—in practice, particularly within and across the social sciences and humanities. This article centres on “Hubbub”, the first interdisciplinary 2-year research residency of The Hub at Wellcome Collection, which is investigating rest and its opposites in neuroscience, mental health, the arts and the everyday. The article describes how Hubbub is tracing, capturing and reflecting on practices of interdisciplinarity across its large, dispersed team of collaborators, who work across the social sciences, humanities, arts, mind and brain sciences, and public engagement. We first describe the distinctiveness of Hubbub (a project designed for a particular space, and one in which the arts are not positioned as simply illustrating or disseminating the research of the scientists), and then outline three techniques Hubbub has developed to map interdisciplinary collaboration in the making: (1) ethnographic analysis; (2) “In the Diary Room”, an aesthetics of collaboration designed to harness and capture affective dynamics within a large, complex project; and (3) the Hubbub Collaboration Questionnaire, which yields quantitative and qualitative data, as well as a social network analysis of collaborators. We conclude by considering some themes that other interdisciplinary projects might draw on for their own logics of tracking and tracing. This article forms part of an ongoing thematic collection dedicated to interdisciplinary research.

Citation

Callard, F., Fitzgerald, D., & Woods, A. (2015). Interdisciplinary collaboration in action: tracking the signal, tracing the noise. Palgrave communications, 1, https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2015.19

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jun 12, 2015
Publication Date Jul 21, 2015
Deposit Date Dec 4, 2015
Publicly Available Date Dec 4, 2015
Journal Palgrave communications.
Electronic ISSN 2055-1045
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 1
DOI https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2015.19
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1396828

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Copyright Statement
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/






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