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Interdisciplinary frontlines

Interdisciplinary frontlines. Harriet Bulkeley Department of Geography Durham University. Outline. Interdisciplinary attractions Cities and climate change Renewable energy systems Interdisciplinarity and urban environments Outlooks. Hope over experience?.

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Interdisciplinary frontlines

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  1. Interdisciplinary frontlines Harriet Bulkeley Department of Geography Durham University

  2. Outline • Interdisciplinary attractions • Cities and climate change • Renewable energy systems • Interdisciplinarity and urban environments • Outlooks

  3. Hope over experience? • Calls for interdisciplinarity over the past decade – limited success and renewed rhetoric • In this context, why be interdisciplinary? Curiosity Use Relevance

  4. Cities and climate change • Bulkeley (Geography) and Betsill (IR) • Transnational municipal network: CCP • Role of local government in mitigating climate change (planning, transport, housing, energy efficiency programmes) • Interdisciplinary approach driven by ‘need’

  5. SCALE DISCIPLINE International regime International relations, geography National politics Political science, policy studies, geography Local government and planning; interest groups Local government studies, planning, urban studies, geography Urban form and development; transport, energy and housing practices Planning, urban studies, transport studies, housing, sociology, geography Disciplinary relations

  6. Engaging audiences • Challenges of moving the finished product (a book) between disciplinary audiences • Attempts at publication in conceptual IR journal (Millennium) frustrated • Limited audiences for interdisciplinary work?

  7. Renewable energy • Development of a research proposal • Whole systems thinking • Socio-technical systems • Add earth system science and stir? • Time, trust, humour as extra ingredients • Half-baked and over-cooked? • Back to the social science recipe book…

  8. Interdisciplinarity in urban environments • ESRC Transdisciplinary seminar series • Judith Petts (Birmingham) Susan Owens (Cambridge) • Knowledge and Power: Exploring the Science/ Society Interface in the Urban Environments Context • Six seminars, 100 participants, including academics and policy makers • Paper forthcoming in Geoforum

  9. Disciplinary cultures ‘disciplines have survived for so long in the academic world because they serve a very useful function of constraining what the academic has to think about’ Bruce et al. 2004: 467 disciplines become deeply structured and such structuring is too deep to be overcome by ‘good intentions, snappy commonsense thinking or some optimum design fix’ Degelings1995: 295

  10. Border troubles • The linking of interdisciplinary work with applied research, and mutual downgrading • Problems are not self-evident, but are defined by disciplines, and hence issues of agenda setting • Appropriate academic divisions of labour • The ‘hard wiring’ of academic research

  11. Pure knowledge ‘We prided ourselves that the science we were doing could not, in any conceivable circumstances, have any practical use. The more firmly one could make that claim, the more superior one felt’ C. P. Snow (1964: 32)

  12. Outlooks • Continual work on frontlines • Increasing recognition of need to create capacities for interdisciplinary working • Is interdisciplinary work necessarily well received and used? • Rather than grand projects, small victories offer potential route to interdisciplinarity

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