Audio file
When Disciplines Meet - Episode 1 - Do We Need Disciplines.mp3
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00:00:00 Rachel Shanks
rather than calling it interdisciplinary.
00:00:02 Rachel Shanks
Because people from outside academia, I've had somebody come up to me in Aberdeen and complain, you know, why is it called the Interdisciplinary Institute?
00:00:09 Rachel Shanks
You know, that means nothing to people outside universities.
00:00:12 Rachel Shanks
And one way I've thought of, as well as calling it challenge-led research, is to talk about holistic research, you know, so that we're looking at the whole problem and we're trying to look at it in all the different possible ways that we can to come to a new way of understanding and solutions.
00:00:38 Laura Young
When Disciplines Meet is a series of podcasts from the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science, the UK's largest doctoral training partnership for social scientists.
00:00:48 Laura Young
With these podcasts, we aim to discuss the aims, nature and practical experiences of interdisciplinary approaches to research.
00:00:56 Laura Young
This episode is on the topic of do we need disciplines?
00:01:00 Laura Young
My name is Laura Young and I'm an interdisciplinary researcher and host of this podcast series.
00:01:05 Laura Young
On this episode I'm joined by three guests, Dr Lisa Bradley from the University of Glasgow, Professor John Holmwood from the University of Nottingham and Dr Rachel Shanks from the University of Aberdeen.
00:01:18 Laura Young
Welcome to the podcast.
00:01:20 Laura Young
Thanks.
00:01:20 Laura Young
Hi.
00:01:21 Laura Young
Now I think we should open with hopefully an easy question or maybe not.
00:01:25 Laura Young
Which discipline are you from?
00:01:27 Laura Young
Lisa, maybe you want to kick us off.
00:01:29 Lisa Bradley
Well, I wonder if you do want me to kick off.
00:01:31 Lisa Bradley
That's not an easy question for me, Laura.
00:01:35 Lisa Bradley
I've had a range of disciplines that I've situated myself in relation to, from physics and philosophy through to urban studies, criminology, and the list keeps growing rather than taking you through my whole history.
00:01:51 Lisa Bradley
I'll maybe let John and Rachel give their maybe more contained answer to that question.
00:01:59 John Holmwood
Well, my answer is very simple, sociology.
00:02:02 John Holmwood
And I was also one of the first people to be doing an undergraduate degree in sociology in Britain after the departments were set up in the late 1960s.
00:02:15 John Holmwood
So the people teaching me weren't
00:02:18 John Holmwood
typically sociologists.
00:02:20 John Holmwood
So I was a sociologist by undergraduate training, by postgraduate training and by all other connections.
00:02:28 John Holmwood
So I'm like a stick of rock with sociology all the way through.
00:02:34 Rachel Shanks
Oh, well, I've switched tracks.
00:02:35 Rachel Shanks
So my first two degrees were in law and I was a law lecturer for a few years.
00:02:40 Rachel Shanks
And then through a myriad of different jobs, I then ended up doing a PhD in education.
00:02:45 Rachel Shanks
So I'm now
00:02:47 Rachel Shanks
in education, but it's possibly not a discipline.
00:02:51 Rachel Shanks
But yes, if I was to answer, I'd say law and education.
00:02:55 Laura Young
And Lisa, you work as part of an interdisciplinary research group centre.
00:03:00 Laura Young
Could you tell us a bit more just about that?
00:03:01 Lisa Bradley
Sure, yeah.
00:03:02 Lisa Bradley
So I am based in the School of Education, actually, at the University of Glasgow.
00:03:07 Lisa Bradley
But I spend most of my time in the Advanced Research Centre, which is an interdisciplinary environment.
00:03:15 Lisa Bradley
It's a big building.
00:03:18 Lisa Bradley
on part of the new expanded Western campus in the University of Glasgow, still very much the centre of the West End.
00:03:25 Lisa Bradley
And that building co-locates researchers from across the entirety of academic disciplines and everything in between.
00:03:33 Lisa Bradley
So everything from people who are working in areas of technology touching life to sustainability, computing scientists, historians,
00:03:45 Lisa Bradley
designers and artists join us from Glasgow School of Art as well in different ways in the building.
00:03:50 Lisa Bradley
So it really is across the full spectrum of disciplinary possibilities with a vision and a mission to actually work in those spaces in between.
00:04:03 Lisa Bradley
So in a way we've got the ingredients and now it's a case of how do we support that to see what happens.
00:04:10 Laura Young
And I think it is a real melting pot of all of that coming together.
00:04:13 Laura Young
But
00:04:14 Laura Young
The thread that is going to go through all of these podcasts from SGSSS is disciplines and interdisciplinarity.
00:04:22 Laura Young
And I just wonder, do we have a shared understanding of what interdisciplinarity means?
00:04:29 Laura Young
Do we have a definition or do people have a consensus on what that actually means?
00:04:36 Rachel Shanks
I think interdisciplinarity has become the term that people use, but it's an umbrella term.
00:04:42 Rachel Shanks
So it means lots of different things, being multidisciplinary, you know, pluridisciplinary, or disciplines brushing each other gently.
00:04:57 Rachel Shanks
So I don't think it has an agreed meaning.
00:05:01 Rachel Shanks
I think it just means that there's more than one discipline involved.
00:05:06 Rachel Shanks
And maybe that's good that it's not too tight a definition.
00:05:10 Rachel Shanks
I think the difficulty is when, for me, I think anyway, is when people get too worked up about what exactly it means or doesn't mean.
00:05:19 Rachel Shanks
I think it's just an umbrella term that explains that it's not just a single discipline.
00:05:26 John Holmwood
Yeah, I was slightly more sceptical.
00:05:29 John Holmwood
So I would say there are probably two
00:05:33 John Holmwood
kinds of interdisciplinarity.
00:05:36 John Holmwood
One which is really interesting and which I would call as politically determined, that's for example, when you had something based within social movements, for example, like feminism, gender studies, you could say that was interdisciplinary.
00:05:53 John Holmwood
It had an impact upon disciplines, but partly it's
00:05:58 John Holmwood
its vision of itself was transforming things socially as well as having a criticism of problematic disciplinary foundations.
00:06:11 John Holmwood
And to some extent, that kind of tension between, let's call it politically driven activities or strong politically driven activities and disciplines, that I think is still an issue.
00:06:27 John Holmwood
But then I see another kind of interdisciplinarity which derives from the pressure towards applied social studies.
00:06:34 John Holmwood
That derives from government fundings.
00:06:37 John Holmwood
And there used to be a way that was described as something called mode 2 knowledge to differentiate it from mode 1 knowledge.
00:06:45 John Holmwood
Mode 2 knowledge applied, conducted together with users and so on.
00:06:51 John Holmwood
And I would say there's a clear distinct, I mean both forms that I've described are political in the sense,
00:06:57 John Holmwood
One derives from the politics of government funding, the other derives from a politics of social engagement.
00:07:05 John Holmwood
And they sit together a little uneasily.
00:07:09 John Holmwood
They're not the same.
00:07:10 John Holmwood
So you've got, I think, a tension with what you might call conventional self-understanding of disciplines as mode one knowledge.
00:07:19 John Holmwood
And of course, one is better than two.
00:07:21 John Holmwood
And then also then the concern about the politicisation of social science, which you may take as, I regard it as positive, but then the other is what I might call then the instrumentalisation of social science, which is also driven by interdisciplinarity.
00:07:40 John Holmwood
So it's very difficult to separate out those different elements.
00:07:45 Laura Young
And you, Lisa, have this centre.
00:07:49 Laura Young
How easy do you find it to describe to people what an interdisciplinary research group is all about?
00:07:56 Laura Young
Sure.
00:07:56 Lisa Bradley
Well, first of all, I would say it's not my centre, but I am an important part of the ARC and the interdisciplinary lead to the area, and it's very much a collaborative effort.
00:08:07 Lisa Bradley
across academics and professional services colleagues as well.
00:08:11 Lisa Bradley
And I think that collaborative nature of it means that it really is not taken forward by one individual, but a collective office, including all of the researchers in the building as well.
00:08:24 Lisa Bradley
We also have a group we call the architects.
00:08:27 Lisa Bradley
which are researchers and professional services colleagues who are open to thinking about how do you take that over.
00:08:35 Lisa Bradley
So collectivity, if you like, collaboration sits across all.
00:08:40 Lisa Bradley
But when we think about that in practice, I agree it's something that is really hard to define what exactly interdisciplinarity or all of the other terms we could use to describe that, what it actually is.
00:08:56 Lisa Bradley
as a thing.
00:08:58 Lisa Bradley
I've often found Moti Nassani's analogy of the fruit bowl quite useful.
00:09:05 Lisa Bradley
I don't know whether people are familiar with that, whether your listeners are familiar with that.
00:09:10 Lisa Bradley
But he describes a way of thinking about it that is, I think, Rachel, you talked about brushing up against one another.
00:09:17 Lisa Bradley
I think it kind of gets us towards that.
00:09:20 Lisa Bradley
So we can think of the
00:09:22 Lisa Bradley
traditional, if you like, the mode one configuration of a university as being like different fruits on a table.
00:09:29 Lisa Bradley
You've got your bananas, your apples, your oranges, maybe you've got some limes in there.
00:09:33 Lisa Bradley
And they're shading that space, but there's clear areas between them.
00:09:38 Lisa Bradley
You kind of move along the spectrum a little bit and suddenly you've got the fruit in a fruit bowl.
00:09:43 Lisa Bradley
They still retain their own individual discrete shapes.
00:09:47 Lisa Bradley
But all of a sudden, the kind of the proximity of the apples and the bananas are ripening the fruits a little bit more.
00:09:53 Lisa Bradley
There's contact there and it's changing the nature of the individual fruits that we might describe as a kind of multidisciplinary space.
00:10:03 Lisa Bradley
Beyond that, you can then think about a fruit salad where you've got the fruits in fruit bowl.
00:10:08 Lisa Bradley
You've got some serving spoons and again you can distinguish the apple from the banana, from the blueberry, from the strawberry, but it is possible to pick up your fork and take a scoop of that and all of a sudden you're tasting the blueberry with the apple and something new.
00:10:23 Lisa Bradley
has been made that may map onto, Nisani would argue, that kind of cross-disciplinary space where you have more than just single disciplines talking to one another, but actually there's a cross-fertilisation that's happening there.
00:10:39 Lisa Bradley
Beyond that, then we can actually get even more involved and decide that we're going to put all of those fruits in a blender and make a smoothie.
00:10:46 Lisa Bradley
And there's no going back.
00:10:48 Lisa Bradley
And that's really when we're starting to move into that properly interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary space where the individual identities of the fruits, sort of the disciplines, has transformed so much that we can no longer call them what they wear.
00:11:06 Lisa Bradley
And for me, that spectrum doesn't give us an easy answer to that kind of question.
00:11:10 Lisa Bradley
But what it does suggest is that it's not a fixed destination, but something which exists along a spectrum.
00:11:17 Lisa Bradley
And it can be interdisciplinary light, or it can be completely unrecognizable and start to create something new as a result.
00:11:28 Rachel Shanks
So I was just going to mention that, so at the University of Aberdeen, we've an interdisciplinary institute as well.
00:11:34 Rachel Shanks
And so it's been organised around, not exactly challenges, but close, close to that.
00:11:40 Rachel Shanks
So obviously with SGSSS has the challenge led pathways now.
00:11:45 Rachel Shanks
And so Aberdeen, we've, you know, 5 challenge areas and I'm director for social inclusion and cultural diversity.
00:11:53 Rachel Shanks
And I can see, you know, the arguments, you know, sometimes have with colleagues.
00:11:58 Rachel Shanks
from various disciplines and institutions about maybe they want to keep, within their own discipline.
00:12:06 Rachel Shanks
But I think a useful way of thinking that it's maybe not just the government-led politics with a small P research, it can also be, if you like, politics with a big P in terms of challenge-led research, is that actually it can be about
00:12:23 Rachel Shanks
the very big challenges that are facing us in terms of climate change.
00:12:27 Rachel Shanks
And actually, we do need disciplines to work together.
00:12:31 Rachel Shanks
And so I started to think maybe we should, rather than calling it interdisciplinary, because people from outside academia, I've had somebody come up to me in Aberdeen and complain, you know, why is it called the Interdisciplinary Institute?
00:12:44 Rachel Shanks
You know, that means nothing to people outside universities.
00:12:48 Rachel Shanks
And one way I've thought of
00:12:51 Rachel Shanks
as well as calling it challenge-led research, is to talk about holistic research, you know, so that we're looking at the whole problem and we're trying to look at it in all the different possible ways that we can to come to a new way of understanding and solutions which can cover both, you like maybe what the government is wanting, but also actually what society, you know, what should be happening for society.
00:13:16 John Holmwood
Yeah, again, I've got to be the sceptical one here.
00:13:20 John Holmwood
I think the problem with challenge-led research is who's determining the challenge.
00:13:25 John Holmwood
So if one said from a disciplinary basis, the idea of what is challenging comes out of the discipline itself and how it understands problems, how it researches them, and then how it configures those problems.
00:13:41 John Holmwood
So I think what we're
00:13:44 John Holmwood
describing loses that sense of autonomy within the disciplines, or at least problem-solving associated with intellectual problems associated with disciplines.
00:13:58 John Holmwood
So one of the things I used to say to colleagues and challenge-based
00:14:04 John Holmwood
is that can you find a university that doesn't do challenge-based, doesn't confront the big challenges, doesn't have five major themes, and can you find one that has a theme that isn't in all the other
00:14:22 John Holmwood
universities.
00:14:24 John Holmwood
So we often promote interdisciplinarity as the basis of innovation.
00:14:31 John Holmwood
And what you have is a framing of interdisciplinarity within something which is actually quite conformist across institutions.
00:14:41 John Holmwood
And then if I were to ask another question, one of the things that happens is a lot of funding is devoted to these challenges.
00:14:49 John Holmwood
So what is the basis of the evaluation of the success of those challenges?
00:14:56 John Holmwood
And what you will notice is the evaluation will be self-referential.
00:15:01 John Holmwood
That is, there won't be an independent basis of doing that.
00:15:05 John Holmwood
It will be in terms of the same kinds of sort of metrics.
00:15:11 John Holmwood
So the REF with the impact agenda kind of reinforces the idea of the same challenges
00:15:18 John Holmwood
that are outside.
00:15:20 John Holmwood
So I think we're at risk of having a system of investment in social science, conception of social science, management of social science, which is highly conformist in character and which involves
00:15:37 John Holmwood
pointing the finger at people like me and saying, well, you're somebody who is defending orthodox.
00:15:42 John Holmwood
I said, well, actually, what I'm doing is trying to show the orthodoxy of the new position rather than saying I'm sort of committed to old style disciplines.
00:15:55 Rachel Shanks
Well, I probably thought the same as you that, oh, well, because I thought I'd look at what Glasgow was doing and Edinburgh.
00:16:03 Rachel Shanks
And I think I thought, it will all be doing very similar things.
00:16:05 Rachel Shanks
So I was actually surprised recently.
00:16:07 Rachel Shanks
I just looked this summer and actually I think the institutions are playing to their strengths.
00:16:12 Rachel Shanks
So they are different in terms of the areas that they're concentrating on for focusing for interdisciplinary work.
00:16:20 Rachel Shanks
But I don't, I think with all universities, they're not going to prevent people from doing other interdisciplinary work outside the themes that they
00:16:30 Rachel Shanks
that they have set.
00:16:31 Rachel Shanks
And I think I'm probably closer to you than you realise I'm further from Lisa in terms of what do we think of disciplines, because I feel that my grounding in law has totally shaped all the different jobs I've done and how I look at education.
00:16:48 Rachel Shanks
So I feel that we have to start in a discipline.
00:16:51 Rachel Shanks
We have to have that discipline.
00:16:54 Rachel Shanks
disciplinary foundation to then be able to take on extra things and maybe add because we've got that previous disciplinary knowledge.
00:17:03 Rachel Shanks
My concern would be that if people are doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that at the beginning and they have no firm foundation to work from.
00:17:13 Lisa Bradley
Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting, I think, thing for me to think with actually.
00:17:19 Lisa Bradley
My undergraduate degree was in philosophy.
00:17:22 Lisa Bradley
And I can see an argument now where I'm still a philosopher, I'm doing research about research, I'm making knowledge about how we make knowledge.
00:17:31 Lisa Bradley
That's been the mainstay of philosophy in terms of reality and knowledge politics for the longest time.
00:17:39 Lisa Bradley
I didn't do much of that direct thinking towards the academy when I was doing my undergraduate degree.
00:17:45 Lisa Bradley
And very much the philosophy that I was studying was a kind of British kind of empirical tradition, philosophy, or analytic tradition.
00:17:55 Lisa Bradley
But it nonetheless gave me a foundation to think with and to think against.
00:18:00 Lisa Bradley
And so actually my undergraduate dissertation, if we go way back, was called One Hand Claps to the Sound of a New Logic.
00:18:09 Lisa Bradley
And it was thinking about formal logic as this way of being able to look at anything in the world and trying to kind of map out a certain range of relations that were either true or false.
00:18:22 Lisa Bradley
And there's no space within formal logic for contradiction.
00:18:25 Lisa Bradley
And I was really interested in that as to
00:18:29 Lisa Bradley
What about contradiction?
00:18:30 Lisa Bradley
How might that be the spark for something new?
00:18:33 Lisa Bradley
How might those differences and paradoxes that we encountered in the world, might those be at the root of consciousness or reality?
00:18:40 Lisa Bradley
So it was big questions that I was grappling with.
00:18:44 Lisa Bradley
And yet formal logic was just unquestioned and sits across so many of our disciplines as well of ideas of rationality, linearity.
00:18:53 Lisa Bradley
There's just so much of that infused of how we think about the world.
00:18:58 Lisa Bradley
So my question was, okay, so how might we shift those foundations to think differently?
00:19:05 Lisa Bradley
And at that time, there was a philosopher called Graham Priest, who I've lost track of, I don't know, where he is in the world, if he's still in the world, but he came up with this idea of para-consistent logic, which was a logic that allowed us the space to hold contradiction and paradox.
00:19:25 Lisa Bradley
And I loved that.
00:19:27 Lisa Bradley
But then I left philosophy behind for a really, really long time.
00:19:31 Lisa Bradley
And it wasn't actually until I got back into my PhD that I realised there was a whole range of philosophy that I hadn't even come across.
00:19:39 Lisa Bradley
Continental philosophy, science and technology studies, feminist philosophy, queer philosophy.
00:19:45 Lisa Bradley
And it just hadn't been part of my undergraduate degree, but certainly those are the type of thinkers who kind of Are companions for my work now, so people like.
00:19:55 Lisa Bradley
like Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, who are kind of sitting at those edges.
00:20:00 Lisa Bradley
So I really do take your point, Rachel, and maybe coming back to your first question, I can see a world where I sit here and I say, I'm a philosopher.
00:20:11 Laura Young
And I think there's
00:20:12 Laura Young
Already we've used so many different pieces of terminology here and actually often, I don't know how you feel, but as an academic, sometimes I try and not use jargon, but actually this podcast is exactly where we want to use it because this is what we are discussing.
00:20:26 Laura Young
But Lisa, one phrase or word or hyphenated word that you often use for yourself is anti-disciplinary.
00:20:34 Laura Young
I guess we've not actually said that out loud, this word, maybe you've discussed it, but why do you use that when describing the work that you do?
00:20:42 Lisa Bradley
So I have used anti-disciplinary in various ways to describe my work and I think it comes from thinking again, not of kind of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity or anti-disciplinarity as a thing, but as a practice.
00:21:00 Lisa Bradley
So quite often my work involves looking at the ways that we do make knowledge, recognising that the traditional model of a university is
00:21:12 Lisa Bradley
historically to separate knowledge into disciplines and to allow for that really deep, rigorous work that kind of builds method, builds theory and then builds answers that can become impactful in the world.
00:21:24 Lisa Bradley
Of course, we've moved into this kind of more challenge-led period of time and that is starting to shift.
00:21:32 Lisa Bradley
But I agree with John, it's shifted in a very orthodox way.
00:21:37 Lisa Bradley
It's using those original imaginations of what a university is to then think about what interdisciplinarity can be.
00:21:45 Lisa Bradley
And I think that's dangerous because I think then any possibilities that thinking across disciplines might give us for imagining beyond our current horizons
00:21:56 Lisa Bradley
are always teams, are always kind of pulled back to, but how does this fit within a university?
00:22:02 Lisa Bradley
How does this fit within our current knowledge politics?
00:22:05 Lisa Bradley
So I think of anti-disciplinarity as not so much of a thing, but as a practice, as a way of thinking beyond the orthodoxy.
00:22:13 Lisa Bradley
So it's something that I do.
00:22:15 Lisa Bradley
rather than it's something that I am.
00:22:17 Lisa Bradley
And there's so many other words that I could describe that as thinking beyond kind of our current horizons, thinking against orthodoxies, thinking with orthodoxies.
00:22:29 Lisa Bradley
So yeah, I think hopefully that answers your question.
00:22:33 John Holmwood
I think we're in a...
00:22:36 John Holmwood
dangerous space getting involved in a full-on academic.
00:22:40 John Holmwood
Because my sort of background in sociology was through the idea of contradiction as well.
00:22:47 John Holmwood
So I'm sort of very sympathetic to what you said, except I then thought, oh, wait, when you cited Pierce's arguments.
00:22:56 John Holmwood
Because I think the point about a contradiction is that it in a sense identifies a problem and a problem to be solved.
00:23:04 John Holmwood
and the solution of the problem requires the reconstruction of the categories within which the problem emerges.
00:23:12 John Holmwood
So I don't think of as a contradiction as a stable element and that what we have to do is in a sense accept contradictions, that what we need to do is solve contradictions and what they represent is at some point the limit of our current thinking within a discipline or even within an inter-discipline.
00:23:30 John Holmwood
Because if you say, well, the inter-discipline can tolerate
00:23:33 John Holmwood
contradictions, I'd say, well, what it's tolerating is unsolved problems and it shouldn't really tolerate them.
00:23:40 John Holmwood
So that I was interested as well in some of your sources because I share them sort of Donna Haraway feminist critiques.
00:23:49 John Holmwood
of science and so on.
00:23:50 John Holmwood
And part of what I think in that is, well, I wish a world in which sociology is reconstructed as a consequence of that intervention, rather than what we say was, let's create a separate new discipline or a separate new way of
00:24:11 John Holmwood
orienting ourselves away from the discipline, because that allows the discipline to get away with its orthodoxy, and it allows a new area to not, in a sense, deliver properly upon the challenge.
00:24:26 John Holmwood
So that's why I think it's important to keep the discipline and the interdisciplinary challenges together.
00:24:34 John Holmwood
Now, I'm going to do a segue to say I was actually in at the start of the formation of the doctoral programmes because I was on the ESRC Research Methods Committee and so on.
00:24:47 John Holmwood
And I was one of those who was critical of them.
00:24:50 John Holmwood
I was involved in the evaluation of the setting up of the Scottish Graduate School as well.
00:24:56 John Holmwood
And I think the Scottish Graduate School has been one of the most successful ones.
00:25:00 John Holmwood
But if you look at the development of the other doctoral programmes, they are de-disciplining themselves.
00:25:07 John Holmwood
And in a paradoxical way, because the doctoral programmes were intended in their first initiation to reinforce doctoral training and research methods training across the board, they've become silos
00:25:26 John Holmwood
in themselves, so that in a sense they're defined by the challenges.
00:25:31 John Holmwood
And then the students who are doing PhDs are not funded through the doctoral programmes, but are funded separately, are in a sense outside that.
00:25:42 John Holmwood
And the doctoral programmes, not necessarily the Scottish one, have de-disciplined themselves.
00:25:49 John Holmwood
And
00:25:50 John Holmwood
there is no longer the rigorous training of disciplinary social science, which is what the ESRC started out and began with.
00:26:01 John Holmwood
And so I suspect something interesting is going on in the politics of funding and social policy or government public policy towards
00:26:15 John Holmwood
the social sciences under a unified UKRI, which is in a sense squeezing out some of what was, what is necessary and distinctive about the social sciences.
00:26:32 John Holmwood
And I put very specifically the social sciences because I think there's a tendency to prefer the behavioural sciences.
00:26:41 John Holmwood
within that kind of modelling, that is economics, psychology and so on.
00:26:48 John Holmwood
So what we're witnessing is a squeezing out of sociology, politics and so on, and anthropology to some degree as distinctive disciplines.
00:27:02 John Holmwood
Whilst the behavioural science disciplines retain their identity, psychology and economics, they become the least interdisciplinary of all disciplines.
00:27:15 John Holmwood
And the social disciplines that I've mentioned become
00:27:20 John Holmwood
are more dissipated.
00:27:22 John Holmwood
And so I think there is a possible crisis of knowledge production that the excitement of any individual student beginning a PhD and beginning in an interdisciplinary project is not necessarily aware of what the changing nature of the context and how that might deliver things in the future.
00:27:47 Lisa Bradley
I mean, you mentioned earlier, John, about the instrumentalisation of knowledge.
00:27:54 Lisa Bradley
And I wonder if that's something to kind of come back to here, because of course, we see that in the social sciences.
00:28:00 Lisa Bradley
We see that in ways where our traditional disciplines and those interdisciplinary scholarships or research projects now are having to show what they're for, how they relate to impact.
00:28:13 Lisa Bradley
There has to be that kind of
00:28:15 Lisa Bradley
direct line from the work to the outside world.
00:28:18 Lisa Bradley
And of course, we're seeing that in arts funding as well.
00:28:22 Lisa Bradley
That idea of arts for art's sake is something that in Scotland anyway, we've really tried to hold on to.
00:28:28 Lisa Bradley
And then of course, with shifts to the institutional landscape of kind of Creative Scotland coming into being, that itself has enacted this categorisation of the various art forms.
00:28:41 Lisa Bradley
And
00:28:42 Lisa Bradley
This is a tangent, but we also see within that landscape different forms of practice being assessed by non-practice specialists as well, very much with a kind of link to other policy agendas.
00:28:56 Lisa Bradley
But how will this help health?
00:28:57 Lisa Bradley
How will this help education?
00:28:59 Lisa Bradley
How will this transform social security?
00:29:02 Lisa Bradley
And I think it's that slippery slope, isn't it?
00:29:05 Lisa Bradley
First they come for the arts and then the social sciences.
00:29:08 Lisa Bradley
So I don't, I think perhaps that's underpinning some of what you're moving towards as well, John.
00:29:16 Lisa Bradley
And I think very rarely, and I don't know if this is within that shift or whether this is just the nature of doing a PhD.
00:29:25 Lisa Bradley
But there's, in my experience, not a lot of attention paid to that question of research about research or situating those practices of knowledge making within the academy, which of course itself is a particular construct, a particular machine.
00:29:43 Lisa Bradley
So for a student or for a researcher to become aware of the kind of the politics of all of that,
00:29:50 Lisa Bradley
is some of it you pick up, but a lot of it you're learning throughout your career as well.
00:29:57 Lisa Bradley
And that kind of brings me back.
00:29:59 Lisa Bradley
And I don't know if we're far apart in this or not, but that idea of instrumentalization and that point we're making a bit contradiction as well as I totally agree that is one way that you can handle contradiction.
00:30:15 Lisa Bradley
But there is these other ways of relating to contradiction and paradox.
00:30:19 Lisa Bradley
And my, I guess, curiosity isn't about ever having only one way to relate to a thing or how we might solve it, but actually pluralizing the ways in which we might relate to phenomena in the world.
00:30:34 Lisa Bradley
So
00:30:35 Lisa Bradley
with contradiction.
00:30:36 Lisa Bradley
What does it mean to kind of feel ourselves into that space?
00:30:39 Lisa Bradley
What methods might we use to resist some of that kind of recategorisation, which maybe sits easier in some disciplines rather than others?
00:30:47 Lisa Bradley
And what becomes possible as a result of doing that?
00:30:51 Lisa Bradley
And I don't have an answer to that, but what I'm really curious about is the range of possibilities of how we can relate.
00:30:59 Lisa Bradley
And that for me is a way to kind of resist a lot of that instrumentalisation of knowledge.
00:31:05 Lisa Bradley
where quite often we sit in this very particular linear temporality and trajectory from research that we do to impact or even just how we orient ourselves towards time and the world, which doesn't necessarily create the space for those kinds of loopings and questions and dead ends and what else may come of that.
00:31:29 Rachel Shanks
And I would just think that led me to think about the contradiction in a way of government policy towards research.
00:31:36 Rachel Shanks
So on the one hand, we have this push for challenge-led funding.
00:31:40 Rachel Shanks
And then on the other hand, we have the research excellence framework, which wants us to publish in our particular disciplines, you know, so we have that difficulty
00:31:51 Rachel Shanks
of, maybe we can see that our area of research lends itself to working with multiple disciplines.
00:32:00 Rachel Shanks
But then we have to also be aware that when we're writing up the research, we want to find journals that are in our disciplines so that they're in our unit of assessment and very much adhering
00:32:12 Rachel Shanks
to that discipline, so that it will be ranked highly if the output is being assessed, so there's also that tension within the disciplines.
00:32:23 John Holmwood
I'm sorry, I think the one of the of course the REF and main panel C, which is where you know our listeners are also going to be oriented to it, don't just say it ourselves, but half of the
00:32:42 John Holmwood
Half of the units of assessment are interdisciplinary units.
00:32:47 John Holmwood
So you have interdisciplines along with disciplines.
00:32:50 John Holmwood
So maybe we should talk about these new disciplines, say management studies is an interdiscipline rather than a discipline.
00:33:02 John Holmwood
And its status as an interdiscipline is not quite the same as saying that it's interdisciplinary.
00:33:08 John Holmwood
So there's that.
00:33:10 John Holmwood
aspects and that quite a lot of interdisciplines have their origins within applied studies.
00:33:19 John Holmwood
And I think one of the issues of origins is kind of interesting because I can think of my origins as a sociologist and, you've said,
00:33:30 John Holmwood
philosopher and law, but it's a bit like doing a survey on class.
00:33:36 John Holmwood
All of us can tell a story about the class we were, but class used to be a narrative about the future, not a narrative about our personal histories, but a narrative about how social structures were reproduced, transformed and so on.
00:33:53 John Holmwood
So I think we need to think, so that's why we need to think of what is happening
00:34:00 John Holmwood
to knowledge and how is knowledge being reproduced and what is the impact of the challenges?
00:34:09 John Holmwood
I think it is difficult to talk about, well, sociology is clearly a discipline.
00:34:14 John Holmwood
I think economics is clearly a discipline and psychology is.
00:34:18 John Holmwood
If sociology is a discipline, it's a pretty undisciplined discipline.
00:34:22 John Holmwood
But nonetheless, it's probably
00:34:26 John Holmwood
is a discipline, but the new REF arrangements are going to be kind of interesting, might actually think of some of these issues from the point of view of, new members of the profession coming in, graduates from the graduate school, as it were.
00:34:42 John Holmwood
And that is, each item for the REF can now be submitted to multiple
00:34:49 John Holmwood
U of A's.
00:34:50 John Holmwood
So we're no longer thinking of, well, what U of A does this go in?
00:34:54 John Holmwood
But what several U of A's might it go in?
00:34:58 John Holmwood
So I could imagine, for example, an economics paper could go into an economics U of A and in a management studies paper.
00:35:09 John Holmwood
A sociology paper could go in to a sociology U of A or a social policy
00:35:15 John Holmwood
or education and so on.
00:35:17 John Holmwood
And so what we're going to have is a situation where somebody's work is going to be seen as being potentially across U of A's and that will be a new kind of understanding of how interdisciplinarity functions.
00:35:37 John Holmwood
And it will be something that students coming through will have to think of.
00:35:42 John Holmwood
I've always, I always used to say to grad
00:35:45 John Holmwood
graduate students.
00:35:45 John Holmwood
Well, the great thing about interdisciplinarity and thinking of your subject as in interdisciplinary terms, so you're a sociologist and you're working on health, that's two places you can get a job.
00:35:59 John Holmwood
You can get a job in sociology or in health studies.
00:36:03 John Holmwood
If you're a sociologist and working on issues of crime, that's two places you can get a job.
00:36:08 John Holmwood
So think of your topic as providing
00:36:12 John Holmwood
you with access to a field, but also think of your discipline of giving you as an access to a field.
00:36:21 John Holmwood
And that's why I think, despite the emphasis on interdisciplinarity, it is necessary for people who are teaching and educating within graduate schools to also keep their eye
00:36:36 John Holmwood
on the discipline that students might be associated with, to think of are they, in a sense, meeting the requirements of that discipline as a future area of employment, not only as a future place to submit their work in a future REF, although the thought that, and since I mentioned the future, the thought that the REF might just go on and on.
00:37:01 Lisa Bradley
It points to, I think, I really, that point you were making around the fact that we can tell these stories, but of course the stories change the minute we tell them because we are living into the future.
00:37:13 Lisa Bradley
I think one of the things that I've been doing a lot in my work in the ARC and research that goes along with that is thinking towards the idea of the university of the future.
00:37:24 Lisa Bradley
So
00:37:25 Lisa Bradley
as academics, how do we kind of move towards the future with intent, but as an institution, structurally, how do we move towards that?
00:37:34 Lisa Bradley
And I think your point, Rachel, of that kind of contradiction between UKRI challenge-based agendas and REF is a really interesting one because academics feel it.
00:37:45 Lisa Bradley
We know that this is a tension that's not just in black and white on paper, but it really shapes how we go through our everyday work and our everyday practice.
00:37:54 Lisa Bradley
And I think we see a lot of that then kind of play out in the kind of the narratives that academics tell themselves around workload, been struggling to find funding, a lot of those kinds of internalised problems, if you like, that's quite easy to think of as weird at fault here.
00:38:16 Lisa Bradley
without necessarily also seeing structurally how is the institution enabling this or how is it acting as a barrier.
00:38:25 Lisa Bradley
So if we do move towards the new REF where papers can be submitted to multiple units of assessment, but where REF is organised at a college and a school level in my university, how do we have that more kind of zoomed out view?
00:38:40 Lisa Bradley
What structures do we need in place for that?
00:38:44 Lisa Bradley
But beyond REF, for me, a lot of the time, if I'm thinking about the university of the future, it's about what new structures and systems and policies and ways of relating to one another do we need to build in order to ensure that we maintain that disciplinary depth that has allowed so much knowledge to become impactful in the world, but also then actually provide those spaces for researchers who Maybe are.
00:39:14 Lisa Bradley
more of a sinking in the gaps in between type sensibility to thrive in those spaces without feeling that they either just need to pick one area or another.
00:39:24 Lisa Bradley
So part of it is how do you incentivize that or at very least, how do you not pose that barrier there, which then leads to academics, I think, having quite a hard time, relatively speaking, because actually we're all a very privileged bunch, aren't we?
00:39:39 Lisa Bradley
have a, for the most part, a very lovely job.
00:39:43 Lisa Bradley
Yeah.
00:39:45 Laura Young
And Rachel, how much of this comes down to that individual personality of a researcher, actually people who, very much did their undergraduate in one thing and think, this is it, I'm just going to stick with this because this is what I like, versus maybe someone who's got a personality for something different.
00:40:00 Laura Young
Does that play into it at all or is it a lot of the culture and the institutional shape?
00:40:06 Rachel Shanks
I was thinking about that because obviously I knew we were doing the podcast today and
00:40:11 Rachel Shanks
I think yesterday I was wondering, is it to do with the type of curiosity that you have?
00:40:17 Rachel Shanks
So that it might be that all your curiosity can be contained within your discipline, because there's just, there's more to find out, there's more to research, but it might be that sometimes you realise, actually I need to go outside my discipline to find out more about this topic.
00:40:37 Rachel Shanks
And so it is about the individual
00:40:40 Rachel Shanks
But it's also about what the topic they're researching.
00:40:44 Rachel Shanks
so something I'm researching now has brought together six different disciplines just because they all are relevant, to researching that issue.
00:40:56 Rachel Shanks
So I do think it depends, partly on the researcher and what their, how their interests are and also about what they're, that the topic, what they're what they're researching.
00:41:10 John Holmwood
This is a really fascinating question.
00:41:11 John Holmwood
So has it brought together six different disciplines or six different people?
00:41:17 Rachel Shanks
I'll say similar people.
00:41:19 Rachel Shanks
Well, or people who are, you know, who are...
00:41:23 John Holmwood
Have similar attitudes to the problem to work on.
00:41:26 Rachel Shanks
So, oh well, I thought I might get through the podcast without mentioning school uniform, but obviously not.
00:41:31 Rachel Shanks
I've been teeing it off the whole way.
00:41:33 Rachel Shanks
We would love to hear about the school uniforms.
00:41:35 Rachel Shanks
So, yeah, so the grant application that we're still waiting, the final outcome on, brings together, you know, myself in education, a colleague at City University in social policy, colleagues at City University in London in economics,
00:41:50 Rachel Shanks
in law, in computing, and then colleagues in textiles at the University of Leeds.
00:41:58 Rachel Shanks
So it really is interdisciplinary in terms of looking at the quality of school uniforms.
00:42:05 Rachel Shanks
So that's where the textile research comes in, trying to capture the data across multiple websites and
00:42:17 Rachel Shanks
information sets, brings in the computing colleagues, and then looking at the legal regulation in terms of the monopolies that you could suggest that some school uniform suppliers have, and then the economic model, you know, that whether that is fit for purpose in the school uniform market.
00:42:39 Rachel Shanks
And then obviously the social policy and education side of it is to do with, and this is all to do with branded school uniforms.
00:42:45 Rachel Shanks
So
00:42:46 Rachel Shanks
It's to see, what actually is a branded school uniform?
00:42:50 Rachel Shanks
What's the difference between having a logo with the name of your school on it to having the same colour jumper without the logo on it?
00:42:58 Rachel Shanks
And, you know, that's what we're hoping to research.
00:43:00 Rachel Shanks
But it's that thing of where it's been about adding disciplines to be able to research the whole issue from all the different angles and sides.
00:43:12 Rachel Shanks
So, yes, so that's...
00:43:15 Rachel Shanks
Are they all different disciplines enough?
00:43:16 Rachel Shanks
Are they separate enough for you?
00:43:19 John Holmwood
But I think it's interesting, but it is in a sense, it's people converging on the problem.
00:43:25 John Holmwood
So it's, so I think it is person specific and I think it's important to keep that aspect of it as well, because I mean, in a sense, to encourage
00:43:41 John Holmwood
prospective graduates who are prospective future researchers and academics to recognise that it's about social relationships and personal relationships as well as academic relations.
00:43:55 John Holmwood
So it's not a lot of points in a sense of looking for an economist to work with, but in a sense
00:44:03 John Holmwood
in the course of your engagement with people, getting to know people in other disciplines to work out areas in which you.
00:44:13 John Holmwood
So.
00:44:14 Rachel Shanks
This all came from the colleague at City University, Matt Barnes, being disgusted at the cost of his daughter's skirt and looking, well, who researches school uniform and came across me, emailed me and said, oh, can we meet, you know, so we met online, we've met in person, you know, and so it's a
00:44:34 Rachel Shanks
But it was just that horror that he discovered that the same school skirt without the logo was three times cheaper by the same company making the same, well, supplying the same skirt.
00:44:46 Rachel Shanks
Yeah.
00:44:46 Rachel Shanks
So, yeah, so it is that, you know, personal connection, personal interest, and then finding colleagues who wanted, you know, who also were interested in looking at that issue.
00:44:56 Rachel Shanks
Yeah.
00:44:58 Laura Young
And I think something that bringing different people, personalities, perspectives and disciplines together does is it maybe unearths more of these social challenges and the issues there than just maybe looking at it from one individual perspective.
00:45:13 Laura Young
And I'm glad you brought it up because sometimes it's good to actually speak about a really specific example.
00:45:18 Laura Young
And I've been thrown back to when you were at school debating club and should we wear a school uniform was always a topic that came up.
00:45:25 Laura Young
And so I'm sure there's some children at school that will love to
00:45:28 Laura Young
look at your research to arm themselves for their debate.
00:45:31 Laura Young
And I feel we've had such a rich discussion.
00:45:33 Laura Young
And actually, I think part of what this podcast is hoping to do is provide that food for thought for all academics, but especially people who are in the graduate school to be thinking about the terms that we use every day.
00:45:45 Laura Young
What do they mean, whether it's by describing yourself as a researcher, the work that you're doing, or thinking about future, you know, opportunities.
00:45:53 Laura Young
And I think this has been such a rich discussion.
00:45:56 Laura Young
I would like to round up by asking you all the question that we're asking at the end of everyone, which is, do you think we need disciplines?
00:46:07 Rachel Shanks
So I think you'll know my answer is yes, because I think you need that foundation.
00:46:11 Rachel Shanks
And I also just wanted to say for people who aren't doing interdisciplinary research or listening,
00:46:16 Rachel Shanks
don't worry about that.
00:46:17 Rachel Shanks
I feel we have to say it's not that you have to do it, but just that we should make it as easy as possible if it makes sense for you.
00:46:24 Rachel Shanks
So yes, I definitely think we need disciplines.
00:46:28 John Holmwood
Yes, absolutely.
00:46:29 John Holmwood
I mean, I think you're absolutely right that somebody has to be excited by the research they're doing.
00:46:35 John Holmwood
They have to have a problem that is meaningful to them and one that they feel that other people would be interested
00:46:44 John Holmwood
in an answer being provided.
00:46:46 John Holmwood
Other people can be fellow academics or, people out in the world, as it were.
00:46:55 John Holmwood
But I don't like to put it this way, but I think of disciplines as the manure in which the research could grow.
00:47:03 John Holmwood
So you have to keep the ground well composted and well supplied with nutrients, because there is a risk that
00:47:14 John Holmwood
you can sort of, the ground can be overused in a sense, and you're not paying attention to what you need to put back in.
00:47:25 Lisa Bradley
Yep, I totally agree.
00:47:27 Lisa Bradley
I think we absolutely do need disciplines.
00:47:29 Lisa Bradley
We need to understand what disciplinary knowledge has allowed us to do as humankind, the kind of the changes it's allowed us to make in the world that
00:47:40 Lisa Bradley
If you are of a sensibility where you're moving between, you're looking in the cracks in between, you're not necessarily actually able to do that really deep, rigorous thinking that actually allows us to create something very, very specific.
00:47:54 Lisa Bradley
So I think it's the way our universities have been organised and the way our universities will continue to be organised.
00:48:01 Lisa Bradley
But more than that, we need them for the types of knowledge that they afford.
00:48:06 Lisa Bradley
For me, the question always comes back to how do you have the and how do you also then open spaces for knowledge making that isn't disciplinary in nature?
00:48:19 Lisa Bradley
And this for me ranges across all of our practices as academics, whether it's how we publish, whether it's how we write in our papers to a specific audience, whether it's how we approach grant funding, we select our
00:48:32 Lisa Bradley
PhD students that we want to work with, how we need to write ourselves into a promotion narrative, that disciplinary thinking has such a hold over how we orient ourselves towards knowledge making within the academy.
00:48:47 Lisa Bradley
So the question for me is, how do you also prize open potential for interdisciplinary sensibilities within that, to not call it in with the lines, but to kind of think outside the box, to use another
00:49:03 Lisa Bradley
cliche.
00:49:04 Lisa Bradley
But that for me is something that is necessary, but it's difficult to do within the academy.
00:49:11 Lisa Bradley
So for me, it's not getting rid of disciplines, but how do we create the space for that?
00:49:17 Lisa Bradley
And the ARC, the Advanced Research Centre,
00:49:21 Lisa Bradley
We took a look at how much of the kind of the knowledge output of the university that the ARC accounts for.
00:49:29 Lisa Bradley
And it's 10% by far.
00:49:31 Lisa Bradley
This is a kind of, it's a marginal space within the university.
00:49:35 Lisa Bradley
It's for all researchers in the University of Glasgow who want to think in that way, but certainly it is not something that actually will replace the schools or the colleges or the university or the centre.
00:49:49 Lisa Bradley
But in creating that marginal space, that space of possibility for those who either think differently in those ways, it hopefully catalyses some of what I'm talking about.
00:50:00 Lisa Bradley
And I think points us towards maybe some of those other structures that we might need to think beyond as well.
00:50:06 Lisa Bradley
So to come back to the fruit analogy that I spoke about, it's
00:50:12 Lisa Bradley
The focus is on the fruit, the kind of the fruit either being on a table or in a bowl or diced up or in a smoothie.
00:50:20 Lisa Bradley
But we also need to think about the tools and the apparatus that actually allow the fruit to persist in that state.
00:50:28 Lisa Bradley
So the table is 1 and our universities are more established as tables than bowls.
00:50:36 Lisa Bradley
You move into that kind of space where they're in the fruit bowl together and all of a sudden you need a bowl to contain them and bring together.
00:50:42 Lisa Bradley
So in a university, what are our structures, what are our policies, what are our ways of thinking and working together that might enable that?
00:50:49 Lisa Bradley
If you move into the kind of the fruit salad, all of a sudden you need a knife and you need a fork or you need a spoon and actually maybe need other bowls as well.
00:50:57 Lisa Bradley
So the structural conditions change.
00:50:59 Lisa Bradley
And of course, when you're at the smoothie, you all of a sudden need a blender and a glass and a straw.
00:51:04 Lisa Bradley
So
00:51:05 Lisa Bradley
For me, it's about that interdisciplinary sensibility, always with a question of structurally as well, what needs to shift to create that permissive environment for thinking in that way.
00:51:16 John Holmwood
Yeah, I mean, the idea of university managers with knives is I feel quite worried.
00:51:24 Lisa Bradley
Not a benign process.
00:51:27 John Holmwood
I meant to mention this earlier, but it was a very early ESRC meeting about the impact agenda.
00:51:36 John Holmwood
And they brought together a lot of people involved in different charities, NGOs, and so on.
00:51:42 John Holmwood
And they were asking them about what research had impact.
00:51:46 John Holmwood
And so the whole group of them were there, you know, as part of this discussion.
00:51:52 John Holmwood
And they asked these
00:51:55 John Holmwood
people in disability NGOs and very health-related NGOs, and they said, Well, what has been impactful from social science research?
00:52:04 John Holmwood
And they said, Oh, well, you know, the sociology of the body.
00:52:08 John Holmwood
And they said, Well, yeah, which particular sociology of the body?
00:52:13 John Holmwood
And they said, Well, you know, the sociology of the body.
00:52:16 John Holmwood
So they said, But yeah, but whose sociology of the body?
00:52:21 John Holmwood
And they said, Well,
00:52:22 John Holmwood
just actually the field of the sociology of the body.
00:52:26 John Holmwood
So actually I think that's an important thing to think about in terms of disciplines and even interdisciplinarity, that it's a collective thing and what we've allowed to happen and through the REF and so on is the individuation of it and that in some sense what is impactful is
00:52:47 John Holmwood
the academic project itself, the fact that the sociology of the body came into being, not that it was this particular version of it or that particular version of it, that is what excited people.
00:53:00 John Holmwood
What excited them was not being given
00:53:04 John Holmwood
answers, in a sense, by the expertise of people in the sociology of the body, but being given new questions for their practice.
00:53:13 John Holmwood
And I think that's how we should think of research as a process of questioning.
00:53:20 John Holmwood
And I think that would fit with your idea of interdisciplinarity and so on.
00:53:26 John Holmwood
Yeah.
00:53:28 Laura Young
What was maybe a simple question of do we need disciplines or what is interdisciplinarity?
00:53:34 Laura Young
We've had a wealth of conversation.
00:53:36 Laura Young
And so I want to thank you for being on this episode of the podcast, which I know will have been rich smoothies for thought or manure for growth or something to put on like your school uniform.
00:53:47 Laura Young
So thank you very much for being on this episode.
00:53:48 Laura Young
Thank you.
00:53:49 Rachel Shanks
Thank you very much.
00:53:58 Laura Young
When Disciplines Meet is hosted by me, Laura Young, recorded at the Podcast Studio Glasgow and edited by the operations team at the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science.
00:54:08 Laura Young
The podcast was conceived by SGSSS's Deputy Director for Training, Dr Katy Keenan, and Associate Director, Dr Roxanne Connelly.
00:54:18 Laura Young
SGSSS is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Scottish Funding Council and our 16 partner universities.
00:54:26 Laura Young
To find out more about the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science, you can visit our website at www.sgsss.ac.uk.
00:54:35 Laura Young
Thank you so much for listening.
When Disciplines Meet - Episode 1 - Do We Need Disciplines.mp3
Transcript
00:00:00 Rachel Shanks
rather than calling it interdisciplinary.
00:00:02 Rachel Shanks
Because people from outside academia, I've had somebody come up to me in Aberdeen and complain, you know, why is it called the Interdisciplinary Institute?
00:00:09 Rachel Shanks
You know, that means nothing to people outside universities.
00:00:12 Rachel Shanks
And one way I've thought of, as well as calling it challenge-led research, is to talk about holistic research, you know, so that we're looking at the whole problem and we're trying to look at it in all the different possible ways that we can to come to a new way of understanding and solutions.
00:00:38 Laura Young
When Disciplines Meet is a series of podcasts from the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science, the UK's largest doctoral training partnership for social scientists.
00:00:48 Laura Young
With these podcasts, we aim to discuss the aims, nature and practical experiences of interdisciplinary approaches to research.
00:00:56 Laura Young
This episode is on the topic of do we need disciplines?
00:01:00 Laura Young
My name is Laura Young and I'm an interdisciplinary researcher and host of this podcast series.
00:01:05 Laura Young
On this episode I'm joined by three guests, Dr Lisa Bradley from the University of Glasgow, Professor John Holmwood from the University of Nottingham and Dr Rachel Shanks from the University of Aberdeen.
00:01:18 Laura Young
Welcome to the podcast.
00:01:20 Laura Young
Thanks.
00:01:20 Laura Young
Hi.
00:01:21 Laura Young
Now I think we should open with hopefully an easy question or maybe not.
00:01:25 Laura Young
Which discipline are you from?
00:01:27 Laura Young
Lisa, maybe you want to kick us off.
00:01:29 Lisa Bradley
Well, I wonder if you do want me to kick off.
00:01:31 Lisa Bradley
That's not an easy question for me, Laura.
00:01:35 Lisa Bradley
I've had a range of disciplines that I've situated myself in relation to, from physics and philosophy through to urban studies, criminology, and the list keeps growing rather than taking you through my whole history.
00:01:51 Lisa Bradley
I'll maybe let John and Rachel give their maybe more contained answer to that question.
00:01:59 John Holmwood
Well, my answer is very simple, sociology.
00:02:02 John Holmwood
And I was also one of the first people to be doing an undergraduate degree in sociology in Britain after the departments were set up in the late 1960s.
00:02:15 John Holmwood
So the people teaching me weren't
00:02:18 John Holmwood
typically sociologists.
00:02:20 John Holmwood
So I was a sociologist by undergraduate training, by postgraduate training and by all other connections.
00:02:28 John Holmwood
So I'm like a stick of rock with sociology all the way through.
00:02:34 Rachel Shanks
Oh, well, I've switched tracks.
00:02:35 Rachel Shanks
So my first two degrees were in law and I was a law lecturer for a few years.
00:02:40 Rachel Shanks
And then through a myriad of different jobs, I then ended up doing a PhD in education.
00:02:45 Rachel Shanks
So I'm now
00:02:47 Rachel Shanks
in education, but it's possibly not a discipline.
00:02:51 Rachel Shanks
But yes, if I was to answer, I'd say law and education.
00:02:55 Laura Young
And Lisa, you work as part of an interdisciplinary research group centre.
00:03:00 Laura Young
Could you tell us a bit more just about that?
00:03:01 Lisa Bradley
Sure, yeah.
00:03:02 Lisa Bradley
So I am based in the School of Education, actually, at the University of Glasgow.
00:03:07 Lisa Bradley
But I spend most of my time in the Advanced Research Centre, which is an interdisciplinary environment.
00:03:15 Lisa Bradley
It's a big building.
00:03:18 Lisa Bradley
on part of the new expanded Western campus in the University of Glasgow, still very much the centre of the West End.
00:03:25 Lisa Bradley
And that building co-locates researchers from across the entirety of academic disciplines and everything in between.
00:03:33 Lisa Bradley
So everything from people who are working in areas of technology touching life to sustainability, computing scientists, historians,
00:03:45 Lisa Bradley
designers and artists join us from Glasgow School of Art as well in different ways in the building.
00:03:50 Lisa Bradley
So it really is across the full spectrum of disciplinary possibilities with a vision and a mission to actually work in those spaces in between.
00:04:03 Lisa Bradley
So in a way we've got the ingredients and now it's a case of how do we support that to see what happens.
00:04:10 Laura Young
And I think it is a real melting pot of all of that coming together.
00:04:13 Laura Young
But
00:04:14 Laura Young
The thread that is going to go through all of these podcasts from SGSSS is disciplines and interdisciplinarity.
00:04:22 Laura Young
And I just wonder, do we have a shared understanding of what interdisciplinarity means?
00:04:29 Laura Young
Do we have a definition or do people have a consensus on what that actually means?
00:04:36 Rachel Shanks
I think interdisciplinarity has become the term that people use, but it's an umbrella term.
00:04:42 Rachel Shanks
So it means lots of different things, being multidisciplinary, you know, pluridisciplinary, or disciplines brushing each other gently.
00:04:57 Rachel Shanks
So I don't think it has an agreed meaning.
00:05:01 Rachel Shanks
I think it just means that there's more than one discipline involved.
00:05:06 Rachel Shanks
And maybe that's good that it's not too tight a definition.
00:05:10 Rachel Shanks
I think the difficulty is when, for me, I think anyway, is when people get too worked up about what exactly it means or doesn't mean.
00:05:19 Rachel Shanks
I think it's just an umbrella term that explains that it's not just a single discipline.
00:05:26 John Holmwood
Yeah, I was slightly more sceptical.
00:05:29 John Holmwood
So I would say there are probably two
00:05:33 John Holmwood
kinds of interdisciplinarity.
00:05:36 John Holmwood
One which is really interesting and which I would call as politically determined, that's for example, when you had something based within social movements, for example, like feminism, gender studies, you could say that was interdisciplinary.
00:05:53 John Holmwood
It had an impact upon disciplines, but partly it's
00:05:58 John Holmwood
its vision of itself was transforming things socially as well as having a criticism of problematic disciplinary foundations.
00:06:11 John Holmwood
And to some extent, that kind of tension between, let's call it politically driven activities or strong politically driven activities and disciplines, that I think is still an issue.
00:06:27 John Holmwood
But then I see another kind of interdisciplinarity which derives from the pressure towards applied social studies.
00:06:34 John Holmwood
That derives from government fundings.
00:06:37 John Holmwood
And there used to be a way that was described as something called mode 2 knowledge to differentiate it from mode 1 knowledge.
00:06:45 John Holmwood
Mode 2 knowledge applied, conducted together with users and so on.
00:06:51 John Holmwood
And I would say there's a clear distinct, I mean both forms that I've described are political in the sense,
00:06:57 John Holmwood
One derives from the politics of government funding, the other derives from a politics of social engagement.
00:07:05 John Holmwood
And they sit together a little uneasily.
00:07:09 John Holmwood
They're not the same.
00:07:10 John Holmwood
So you've got, I think, a tension with what you might call conventional self-understanding of disciplines as mode one knowledge.
00:07:19 John Holmwood
And of course, one is better than two.
00:07:21 John Holmwood
And then also then the concern about the politicisation of social science, which you may take as, I regard it as positive, but then the other is what I might call then the instrumentalisation of social science, which is also driven by interdisciplinarity.
00:07:40 John Holmwood
So it's very difficult to separate out those different elements.
00:07:45 Laura Young
And you, Lisa, have this centre.
00:07:49 Laura Young
How easy do you find it to describe to people what an interdisciplinary research group is all about?
00:07:56 Laura Young
Sure.
00:07:56 Lisa Bradley
Well, first of all, I would say it's not my centre, but I am an important part of the ARC and the interdisciplinary lead to the area, and it's very much a collaborative effort.
00:08:07 Lisa Bradley
across academics and professional services colleagues as well.
00:08:11 Lisa Bradley
And I think that collaborative nature of it means that it really is not taken forward by one individual, but a collective office, including all of the researchers in the building as well.
00:08:24 Lisa Bradley
We also have a group we call the architects.
00:08:27 Lisa Bradley
which are researchers and professional services colleagues who are open to thinking about how do you take that over.
00:08:35 Lisa Bradley
So collectivity, if you like, collaboration sits across all.
00:08:40 Lisa Bradley
But when we think about that in practice, I agree it's something that is really hard to define what exactly interdisciplinarity or all of the other terms we could use to describe that, what it actually is.
00:08:56 Lisa Bradley
as a thing.
00:08:58 Lisa Bradley
I've often found Moti Nassani's analogy of the fruit bowl quite useful.
00:09:05 Lisa Bradley
I don't know whether people are familiar with that, whether your listeners are familiar with that.
00:09:10 Lisa Bradley
But he describes a way of thinking about it that is, I think, Rachel, you talked about brushing up against one another.
00:09:17 Lisa Bradley
I think it kind of gets us towards that.
00:09:20 Lisa Bradley
So we can think of the
00:09:22 Lisa Bradley
traditional, if you like, the mode one configuration of a university as being like different fruits on a table.
00:09:29 Lisa Bradley
You've got your bananas, your apples, your oranges, maybe you've got some limes in there.
00:09:33 Lisa Bradley
And they're shading that space, but there's clear areas between them.
00:09:38 Lisa Bradley
You kind of move along the spectrum a little bit and suddenly you've got the fruit in a fruit bowl.
00:09:43 Lisa Bradley
They still retain their own individual discrete shapes.
00:09:47 Lisa Bradley
But all of a sudden, the kind of the proximity of the apples and the bananas are ripening the fruits a little bit more.
00:09:53 Lisa Bradley
There's contact there and it's changing the nature of the individual fruits that we might describe as a kind of multidisciplinary space.
00:10:03 Lisa Bradley
Beyond that, you can then think about a fruit salad where you've got the fruits in fruit bowl.
00:10:08 Lisa Bradley
You've got some serving spoons and again you can distinguish the apple from the banana, from the blueberry, from the strawberry, but it is possible to pick up your fork and take a scoop of that and all of a sudden you're tasting the blueberry with the apple and something new.
00:10:23 Lisa Bradley
has been made that may map onto, Nisani would argue, that kind of cross-disciplinary space where you have more than just single disciplines talking to one another, but actually there's a cross-fertilisation that's happening there.
00:10:39 Lisa Bradley
Beyond that, then we can actually get even more involved and decide that we're going to put all of those fruits in a blender and make a smoothie.
00:10:46 Lisa Bradley
And there's no going back.
00:10:48 Lisa Bradley
And that's really when we're starting to move into that properly interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary space where the individual identities of the fruits, sort of the disciplines, has transformed so much that we can no longer call them what they wear.
00:11:06 Lisa Bradley
And for me, that spectrum doesn't give us an easy answer to that kind of question.
00:11:10 Lisa Bradley
But what it does suggest is that it's not a fixed destination, but something which exists along a spectrum.
00:11:17 Lisa Bradley
And it can be interdisciplinary light, or it can be completely unrecognizable and start to create something new as a result.
00:11:28 Rachel Shanks
So I was just going to mention that, so at the University of Aberdeen, we've an interdisciplinary institute as well.
00:11:34 Rachel Shanks
And so it's been organised around, not exactly challenges, but close, close to that.
00:11:40 Rachel Shanks
So obviously with SGSSS has the challenge led pathways now.
00:11:45 Rachel Shanks
And so Aberdeen, we've, you know, 5 challenge areas and I'm director for social inclusion and cultural diversity.
00:11:53 Rachel Shanks
And I can see, you know, the arguments, you know, sometimes have with colleagues.
00:11:58 Rachel Shanks
from various disciplines and institutions about maybe they want to keep, within their own discipline.
00:12:06 Rachel Shanks
But I think a useful way of thinking that it's maybe not just the government-led politics with a small P research, it can also be, if you like, politics with a big P in terms of challenge-led research, is that actually it can be about
00:12:23 Rachel Shanks
the very big challenges that are facing us in terms of climate change.
00:12:27 Rachel Shanks
And actually, we do need disciplines to work together.
00:12:31 Rachel Shanks
And so I started to think maybe we should, rather than calling it interdisciplinary, because people from outside academia, I've had somebody come up to me in Aberdeen and complain, you know, why is it called the Interdisciplinary Institute?
00:12:44 Rachel Shanks
You know, that means nothing to people outside universities.
00:12:48 Rachel Shanks
And one way I've thought of
00:12:51 Rachel Shanks
as well as calling it challenge-led research, is to talk about holistic research, you know, so that we're looking at the whole problem and we're trying to look at it in all the different possible ways that we can to come to a new way of understanding and solutions which can cover both, you like maybe what the government is wanting, but also actually what society, you know, what should be happening for society.
00:13:16 John Holmwood
Yeah, again, I've got to be the sceptical one here.
00:13:20 John Holmwood
I think the problem with challenge-led research is who's determining the challenge.
00:13:25 John Holmwood
So if one said from a disciplinary basis, the idea of what is challenging comes out of the discipline itself and how it understands problems, how it researches them, and then how it configures those problems.
00:13:41 John Holmwood
So I think what we're
00:13:44 John Holmwood
describing loses that sense of autonomy within the disciplines, or at least problem-solving associated with intellectual problems associated with disciplines.
00:13:58 John Holmwood
So one of the things I used to say to colleagues and challenge-based
00:14:04 John Holmwood
is that can you find a university that doesn't do challenge-based, doesn't confront the big challenges, doesn't have five major themes, and can you find one that has a theme that isn't in all the other
00:14:22 John Holmwood
universities.
00:14:24 John Holmwood
So we often promote interdisciplinarity as the basis of innovation.
00:14:31 John Holmwood
And what you have is a framing of interdisciplinarity within something which is actually quite conformist across institutions.
00:14:41 John Holmwood
And then if I were to ask another question, one of the things that happens is a lot of funding is devoted to these challenges.
00:14:49 John Holmwood
So what is the basis of the evaluation of the success of those challenges?
00:14:56 John Holmwood
And what you will notice is the evaluation will be self-referential.
00:15:01 John Holmwood
That is, there won't be an independent basis of doing that.
00:15:05 John Holmwood
It will be in terms of the same kinds of sort of metrics.
00:15:11 John Holmwood
So the REF with the impact agenda kind of reinforces the idea of the same challenges
00:15:18 John Holmwood
that are outside.
00:15:20 John Holmwood
So I think we're at risk of having a system of investment in social science, conception of social science, management of social science, which is highly conformist in character and which involves
00:15:37 John Holmwood
pointing the finger at people like me and saying, well, you're somebody who is defending orthodox.
00:15:42 John Holmwood
I said, well, actually, what I'm doing is trying to show the orthodoxy of the new position rather than saying I'm sort of committed to old style disciplines.
00:15:55 Rachel Shanks
Well, I probably thought the same as you that, oh, well, because I thought I'd look at what Glasgow was doing and Edinburgh.
00:16:03 Rachel Shanks
And I think I thought, it will all be doing very similar things.
00:16:05 Rachel Shanks
So I was actually surprised recently.
00:16:07 Rachel Shanks
I just looked this summer and actually I think the institutions are playing to their strengths.
00:16:12 Rachel Shanks
So they are different in terms of the areas that they're concentrating on for focusing for interdisciplinary work.
00:16:20 Rachel Shanks
But I don't, I think with all universities, they're not going to prevent people from doing other interdisciplinary work outside the themes that they
00:16:30 Rachel Shanks
that they have set.
00:16:31 Rachel Shanks
And I think I'm probably closer to you than you realise I'm further from Lisa in terms of what do we think of disciplines, because I feel that my grounding in law has totally shaped all the different jobs I've done and how I look at education.
00:16:48 Rachel Shanks
So I feel that we have to start in a discipline.
00:16:51 Rachel Shanks
We have to have that discipline.
00:16:54 Rachel Shanks
disciplinary foundation to then be able to take on extra things and maybe add because we've got that previous disciplinary knowledge.
00:17:03 Rachel Shanks
My concern would be that if people are doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that at the beginning and they have no firm foundation to work from.
00:17:13 Lisa Bradley
Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting, I think, thing for me to think with actually.
00:17:19 Lisa Bradley
My undergraduate degree was in philosophy.
00:17:22 Lisa Bradley
And I can see an argument now where I'm still a philosopher, I'm doing research about research, I'm making knowledge about how we make knowledge.
00:17:31 Lisa Bradley
That's been the mainstay of philosophy in terms of reality and knowledge politics for the longest time.
00:17:39 Lisa Bradley
I didn't do much of that direct thinking towards the academy when I was doing my undergraduate degree.
00:17:45 Lisa Bradley
And very much the philosophy that I was studying was a kind of British kind of empirical tradition, philosophy, or analytic tradition.
00:17:55 Lisa Bradley
But it nonetheless gave me a foundation to think with and to think against.
00:18:00 Lisa Bradley
And so actually my undergraduate dissertation, if we go way back, was called One Hand Claps to the Sound of a New Logic.
00:18:09 Lisa Bradley
And it was thinking about formal logic as this way of being able to look at anything in the world and trying to kind of map out a certain range of relations that were either true or false.
00:18:22 Lisa Bradley
And there's no space within formal logic for contradiction.
00:18:25 Lisa Bradley
And I was really interested in that as to
00:18:29 Lisa Bradley
What about contradiction?
00:18:30 Lisa Bradley
How might that be the spark for something new?
00:18:33 Lisa Bradley
How might those differences and paradoxes that we encountered in the world, might those be at the root of consciousness or reality?
00:18:40 Lisa Bradley
So it was big questions that I was grappling with.
00:18:44 Lisa Bradley
And yet formal logic was just unquestioned and sits across so many of our disciplines as well of ideas of rationality, linearity.
00:18:53 Lisa Bradley
There's just so much of that infused of how we think about the world.
00:18:58 Lisa Bradley
So my question was, okay, so how might we shift those foundations to think differently?
00:19:05 Lisa Bradley
And at that time, there was a philosopher called Graham Priest, who I've lost track of, I don't know, where he is in the world, if he's still in the world, but he came up with this idea of para-consistent logic, which was a logic that allowed us the space to hold contradiction and paradox.
00:19:25 Lisa Bradley
And I loved that.
00:19:27 Lisa Bradley
But then I left philosophy behind for a really, really long time.
00:19:31 Lisa Bradley
And it wasn't actually until I got back into my PhD that I realised there was a whole range of philosophy that I hadn't even come across.
00:19:39 Lisa Bradley
Continental philosophy, science and technology studies, feminist philosophy, queer philosophy.
00:19:45 Lisa Bradley
And it just hadn't been part of my undergraduate degree, but certainly those are the type of thinkers who kind of Are companions for my work now, so people like.
00:19:55 Lisa Bradley
like Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, who are kind of sitting at those edges.
00:20:00 Lisa Bradley
So I really do take your point, Rachel, and maybe coming back to your first question, I can see a world where I sit here and I say, I'm a philosopher.
00:20:11 Laura Young
And I think there's
00:20:12 Laura Young
Already we've used so many different pieces of terminology here and actually often, I don't know how you feel, but as an academic, sometimes I try and not use jargon, but actually this podcast is exactly where we want to use it because this is what we are discussing.
00:20:26 Laura Young
But Lisa, one phrase or word or hyphenated word that you often use for yourself is anti-disciplinary.
00:20:34 Laura Young
I guess we've not actually said that out loud, this word, maybe you've discussed it, but why do you use that when describing the work that you do?
00:20:42 Lisa Bradley
So I have used anti-disciplinary in various ways to describe my work and I think it comes from thinking again, not of kind of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity or anti-disciplinarity as a thing, but as a practice.
00:21:00 Lisa Bradley
So quite often my work involves looking at the ways that we do make knowledge, recognising that the traditional model of a university is
00:21:12 Lisa Bradley
historically to separate knowledge into disciplines and to allow for that really deep, rigorous work that kind of builds method, builds theory and then builds answers that can become impactful in the world.
00:21:24 Lisa Bradley
Of course, we've moved into this kind of more challenge-led period of time and that is starting to shift.
00:21:32 Lisa Bradley
But I agree with John, it's shifted in a very orthodox way.
00:21:37 Lisa Bradley
It's using those original imaginations of what a university is to then think about what interdisciplinarity can be.
00:21:45 Lisa Bradley
And I think that's dangerous because I think then any possibilities that thinking across disciplines might give us for imagining beyond our current horizons
00:21:56 Lisa Bradley
are always teams, are always kind of pulled back to, but how does this fit within a university?
00:22:02 Lisa Bradley
How does this fit within our current knowledge politics?
00:22:05 Lisa Bradley
So I think of anti-disciplinarity as not so much of a thing, but as a practice, as a way of thinking beyond the orthodoxy.
00:22:13 Lisa Bradley
So it's something that I do.
00:22:15 Lisa Bradley
rather than it's something that I am.
00:22:17 Lisa Bradley
And there's so many other words that I could describe that as thinking beyond kind of our current horizons, thinking against orthodoxies, thinking with orthodoxies.
00:22:29 Lisa Bradley
So yeah, I think hopefully that answers your question.
00:22:33 John Holmwood
I think we're in a...
00:22:36 John Holmwood
dangerous space getting involved in a full-on academic.
00:22:40 John Holmwood
Because my sort of background in sociology was through the idea of contradiction as well.
00:22:47 John Holmwood
So I'm sort of very sympathetic to what you said, except I then thought, oh, wait, when you cited Pierce's arguments.
00:22:56 John Holmwood
Because I think the point about a contradiction is that it in a sense identifies a problem and a problem to be solved.
00:23:04 John Holmwood
and the solution of the problem requires the reconstruction of the categories within which the problem emerges.
00:23:12 John Holmwood
So I don't think of as a contradiction as a stable element and that what we have to do is in a sense accept contradictions, that what we need to do is solve contradictions and what they represent is at some point the limit of our current thinking within a discipline or even within an inter-discipline.
00:23:30 John Holmwood
Because if you say, well, the inter-discipline can tolerate
00:23:33 John Holmwood
contradictions, I'd say, well, what it's tolerating is unsolved problems and it shouldn't really tolerate them.
00:23:40 John Holmwood
So that I was interested as well in some of your sources because I share them sort of Donna Haraway feminist critiques.
00:23:49 John Holmwood
of science and so on.
00:23:50 John Holmwood
And part of what I think in that is, well, I wish a world in which sociology is reconstructed as a consequence of that intervention, rather than what we say was, let's create a separate new discipline or a separate new way of
00:24:11 John Holmwood
orienting ourselves away from the discipline, because that allows the discipline to get away with its orthodoxy, and it allows a new area to not, in a sense, deliver properly upon the challenge.
00:24:26 John Holmwood
So that's why I think it's important to keep the discipline and the interdisciplinary challenges together.
00:24:34 John Holmwood
Now, I'm going to do a segue to say I was actually in at the start of the formation of the doctoral programmes because I was on the ESRC Research Methods Committee and so on.
00:24:47 John Holmwood
And I was one of those who was critical of them.
00:24:50 John Holmwood
I was involved in the evaluation of the setting up of the Scottish Graduate School as well.
00:24:56 John Holmwood
And I think the Scottish Graduate School has been one of the most successful ones.
00:25:00 John Holmwood
But if you look at the development of the other doctoral programmes, they are de-disciplining themselves.
00:25:07 John Holmwood
And in a paradoxical way, because the doctoral programmes were intended in their first initiation to reinforce doctoral training and research methods training across the board, they've become silos
00:25:26 John Holmwood
in themselves, so that in a sense they're defined by the challenges.
00:25:31 John Holmwood
And then the students who are doing PhDs are not funded through the doctoral programmes, but are funded separately, are in a sense outside that.
00:25:42 John Holmwood
And the doctoral programmes, not necessarily the Scottish one, have de-disciplined themselves.
00:25:49 John Holmwood
And
00:25:50 John Holmwood
there is no longer the rigorous training of disciplinary social science, which is what the ESRC started out and began with.
00:26:01 John Holmwood
And so I suspect something interesting is going on in the politics of funding and social policy or government public policy towards
00:26:15 John Holmwood
the social sciences under a unified UKRI, which is in a sense squeezing out some of what was, what is necessary and distinctive about the social sciences.
00:26:32 John Holmwood
And I put very specifically the social sciences because I think there's a tendency to prefer the behavioural sciences.
00:26:41 John Holmwood
within that kind of modelling, that is economics, psychology and so on.
00:26:48 John Holmwood
So what we're witnessing is a squeezing out of sociology, politics and so on, and anthropology to some degree as distinctive disciplines.
00:27:02 John Holmwood
Whilst the behavioural science disciplines retain their identity, psychology and economics, they become the least interdisciplinary of all disciplines.
00:27:15 John Holmwood
And the social disciplines that I've mentioned become
00:27:20 John Holmwood
are more dissipated.
00:27:22 John Holmwood
And so I think there is a possible crisis of knowledge production that the excitement of any individual student beginning a PhD and beginning in an interdisciplinary project is not necessarily aware of what the changing nature of the context and how that might deliver things in the future.
00:27:47 Lisa Bradley
I mean, you mentioned earlier, John, about the instrumentalisation of knowledge.
00:27:54 Lisa Bradley
And I wonder if that's something to kind of come back to here, because of course, we see that in the social sciences.
00:28:00 Lisa Bradley
We see that in ways where our traditional disciplines and those interdisciplinary scholarships or research projects now are having to show what they're for, how they relate to impact.
00:28:13 Lisa Bradley
There has to be that kind of
00:28:15 Lisa Bradley
direct line from the work to the outside world.
00:28:18 Lisa Bradley
And of course, we're seeing that in arts funding as well.
00:28:22 Lisa Bradley
That idea of arts for art's sake is something that in Scotland anyway, we've really tried to hold on to.
00:28:28 Lisa Bradley
And then of course, with shifts to the institutional landscape of kind of Creative Scotland coming into being, that itself has enacted this categorisation of the various art forms.
00:28:41 Lisa Bradley
And
00:28:42 Lisa Bradley
This is a tangent, but we also see within that landscape different forms of practice being assessed by non-practice specialists as well, very much with a kind of link to other policy agendas.
00:28:56 Lisa Bradley
But how will this help health?
00:28:57 Lisa Bradley
How will this help education?
00:28:59 Lisa Bradley
How will this transform social security?
00:29:02 Lisa Bradley
And I think it's that slippery slope, isn't it?
00:29:05 Lisa Bradley
First they come for the arts and then the social sciences.
00:29:08 Lisa Bradley
So I don't, I think perhaps that's underpinning some of what you're moving towards as well, John.
00:29:16 Lisa Bradley
And I think very rarely, and I don't know if this is within that shift or whether this is just the nature of doing a PhD.
00:29:25 Lisa Bradley
But there's, in my experience, not a lot of attention paid to that question of research about research or situating those practices of knowledge making within the academy, which of course itself is a particular construct, a particular machine.
00:29:43 Lisa Bradley
So for a student or for a researcher to become aware of the kind of the politics of all of that,
00:29:50 Lisa Bradley
is some of it you pick up, but a lot of it you're learning throughout your career as well.
00:29:57 Lisa Bradley
And that kind of brings me back.
00:29:59 Lisa Bradley
And I don't know if we're far apart in this or not, but that idea of instrumentalization and that point we're making a bit contradiction as well as I totally agree that is one way that you can handle contradiction.
00:30:15 Lisa Bradley
But there is these other ways of relating to contradiction and paradox.
00:30:19 Lisa Bradley
And my, I guess, curiosity isn't about ever having only one way to relate to a thing or how we might solve it, but actually pluralizing the ways in which we might relate to phenomena in the world.
00:30:34 Lisa Bradley
So
00:30:35 Lisa Bradley
with contradiction.
00:30:36 Lisa Bradley
What does it mean to kind of feel ourselves into that space?
00:30:39 Lisa Bradley
What methods might we use to resist some of that kind of recategorisation, which maybe sits easier in some disciplines rather than others?
00:30:47 Lisa Bradley
And what becomes possible as a result of doing that?
00:30:51 Lisa Bradley
And I don't have an answer to that, but what I'm really curious about is the range of possibilities of how we can relate.
00:30:59 Lisa Bradley
And that for me is a way to kind of resist a lot of that instrumentalisation of knowledge.
00:31:05 Lisa Bradley
where quite often we sit in this very particular linear temporality and trajectory from research that we do to impact or even just how we orient ourselves towards time and the world, which doesn't necessarily create the space for those kinds of loopings and questions and dead ends and what else may come of that.
00:31:29 Rachel Shanks
And I would just think that led me to think about the contradiction in a way of government policy towards research.
00:31:36 Rachel Shanks
So on the one hand, we have this push for challenge-led funding.
00:31:40 Rachel Shanks
And then on the other hand, we have the research excellence framework, which wants us to publish in our particular disciplines, you know, so we have that difficulty
00:31:51 Rachel Shanks
of, maybe we can see that our area of research lends itself to working with multiple disciplines.
00:32:00 Rachel Shanks
But then we have to also be aware that when we're writing up the research, we want to find journals that are in our disciplines so that they're in our unit of assessment and very much adhering
00:32:12 Rachel Shanks
to that discipline, so that it will be ranked highly if the output is being assessed, so there's also that tension within the disciplines.
00:32:23 John Holmwood
I'm sorry, I think the one of the of course the REF and main panel C, which is where you know our listeners are also going to be oriented to it, don't just say it ourselves, but half of the
00:32:42 John Holmwood
Half of the units of assessment are interdisciplinary units.
00:32:47 John Holmwood
So you have interdisciplines along with disciplines.
00:32:50 John Holmwood
So maybe we should talk about these new disciplines, say management studies is an interdiscipline rather than a discipline.
00:33:02 John Holmwood
And its status as an interdiscipline is not quite the same as saying that it's interdisciplinary.
00:33:08 John Holmwood
So there's that.
00:33:10 John Holmwood
aspects and that quite a lot of interdisciplines have their origins within applied studies.
00:33:19 John Holmwood
And I think one of the issues of origins is kind of interesting because I can think of my origins as a sociologist and, you've said,
00:33:30 John Holmwood
philosopher and law, but it's a bit like doing a survey on class.
00:33:36 John Holmwood
All of us can tell a story about the class we were, but class used to be a narrative about the future, not a narrative about our personal histories, but a narrative about how social structures were reproduced, transformed and so on.
00:33:53 John Holmwood
So I think we need to think, so that's why we need to think of what is happening
00:34:00 John Holmwood
to knowledge and how is knowledge being reproduced and what is the impact of the challenges?
00:34:09 John Holmwood
I think it is difficult to talk about, well, sociology is clearly a discipline.
00:34:14 John Holmwood
I think economics is clearly a discipline and psychology is.
00:34:18 John Holmwood
If sociology is a discipline, it's a pretty undisciplined discipline.
00:34:22 John Holmwood
But nonetheless, it's probably
00:34:26 John Holmwood
is a discipline, but the new REF arrangements are going to be kind of interesting, might actually think of some of these issues from the point of view of, new members of the profession coming in, graduates from the graduate school, as it were.
00:34:42 John Holmwood
And that is, each item for the REF can now be submitted to multiple
00:34:49 John Holmwood
U of A's.
00:34:50 John Holmwood
So we're no longer thinking of, well, what U of A does this go in?
00:34:54 John Holmwood
But what several U of A's might it go in?
00:34:58 John Holmwood
So I could imagine, for example, an economics paper could go into an economics U of A and in a management studies paper.
00:35:09 John Holmwood
A sociology paper could go in to a sociology U of A or a social policy
00:35:15 John Holmwood
or education and so on.
00:35:17 John Holmwood
And so what we're going to have is a situation where somebody's work is going to be seen as being potentially across U of A's and that will be a new kind of understanding of how interdisciplinarity functions.
00:35:37 John Holmwood
And it will be something that students coming through will have to think of.
00:35:42 John Holmwood
I've always, I always used to say to grad
00:35:45 John Holmwood
graduate students.
00:35:45 John Holmwood
Well, the great thing about interdisciplinarity and thinking of your subject as in interdisciplinary terms, so you're a sociologist and you're working on health, that's two places you can get a job.
00:35:59 John Holmwood
You can get a job in sociology or in health studies.
00:36:03 John Holmwood
If you're a sociologist and working on issues of crime, that's two places you can get a job.
00:36:08 John Holmwood
So think of your topic as providing
00:36:12 John Holmwood
you with access to a field, but also think of your discipline of giving you as an access to a field.
00:36:21 John Holmwood
And that's why I think, despite the emphasis on interdisciplinarity, it is necessary for people who are teaching and educating within graduate schools to also keep their eye
00:36:36 John Holmwood
on the discipline that students might be associated with, to think of are they, in a sense, meeting the requirements of that discipline as a future area of employment, not only as a future place to submit their work in a future REF, although the thought that, and since I mentioned the future, the thought that the REF might just go on and on.
00:37:01 Lisa Bradley
It points to, I think, I really, that point you were making around the fact that we can tell these stories, but of course the stories change the minute we tell them because we are living into the future.
00:37:13 Lisa Bradley
I think one of the things that I've been doing a lot in my work in the ARC and research that goes along with that is thinking towards the idea of the university of the future.
00:37:24 Lisa Bradley
So
00:37:25 Lisa Bradley
as academics, how do we kind of move towards the future with intent, but as an institution, structurally, how do we move towards that?
00:37:34 Lisa Bradley
And I think your point, Rachel, of that kind of contradiction between UKRI challenge-based agendas and REF is a really interesting one because academics feel it.
00:37:45 Lisa Bradley
We know that this is a tension that's not just in black and white on paper, but it really shapes how we go through our everyday work and our everyday practice.
00:37:54 Lisa Bradley
And I think we see a lot of that then kind of play out in the kind of the narratives that academics tell themselves around workload, been struggling to find funding, a lot of those kinds of internalised problems, if you like, that's quite easy to think of as weird at fault here.
00:38:16 Lisa Bradley
without necessarily also seeing structurally how is the institution enabling this or how is it acting as a barrier.
00:38:25 Lisa Bradley
So if we do move towards the new REF where papers can be submitted to multiple units of assessment, but where REF is organised at a college and a school level in my university, how do we have that more kind of zoomed out view?
00:38:40 Lisa Bradley
What structures do we need in place for that?
00:38:44 Lisa Bradley
But beyond REF, for me, a lot of the time, if I'm thinking about the university of the future, it's about what new structures and systems and policies and ways of relating to one another do we need to build in order to ensure that we maintain that disciplinary depth that has allowed so much knowledge to become impactful in the world, but also then actually provide those spaces for researchers who Maybe are.
00:39:14 Lisa Bradley
more of a sinking in the gaps in between type sensibility to thrive in those spaces without feeling that they either just need to pick one area or another.
00:39:24 Lisa Bradley
So part of it is how do you incentivize that or at very least, how do you not pose that barrier there, which then leads to academics, I think, having quite a hard time, relatively speaking, because actually we're all a very privileged bunch, aren't we?
00:39:39 Lisa Bradley
have a, for the most part, a very lovely job.
00:39:43 Lisa Bradley
Yeah.
00:39:45 Laura Young
And Rachel, how much of this comes down to that individual personality of a researcher, actually people who, very much did their undergraduate in one thing and think, this is it, I'm just going to stick with this because this is what I like, versus maybe someone who's got a personality for something different.
00:40:00 Laura Young
Does that play into it at all or is it a lot of the culture and the institutional shape?
00:40:06 Rachel Shanks
I was thinking about that because obviously I knew we were doing the podcast today and
00:40:11 Rachel Shanks
I think yesterday I was wondering, is it to do with the type of curiosity that you have?
00:40:17 Rachel Shanks
So that it might be that all your curiosity can be contained within your discipline, because there's just, there's more to find out, there's more to research, but it might be that sometimes you realise, actually I need to go outside my discipline to find out more about this topic.
00:40:37 Rachel Shanks
And so it is about the individual
00:40:40 Rachel Shanks
But it's also about what the topic they're researching.
00:40:44 Rachel Shanks
so something I'm researching now has brought together six different disciplines just because they all are relevant, to researching that issue.
00:40:56 Rachel Shanks
So I do think it depends, partly on the researcher and what their, how their interests are and also about what they're, that the topic, what they're what they're researching.
00:41:10 John Holmwood
This is a really fascinating question.
00:41:11 John Holmwood
So has it brought together six different disciplines or six different people?
00:41:17 Rachel Shanks
I'll say similar people.
00:41:19 Rachel Shanks
Well, or people who are, you know, who are...
00:41:23 John Holmwood
Have similar attitudes to the problem to work on.
00:41:26 Rachel Shanks
So, oh well, I thought I might get through the podcast without mentioning school uniform, but obviously not.
00:41:31 Rachel Shanks
I've been teeing it off the whole way.
00:41:33 Rachel Shanks
We would love to hear about the school uniforms.
00:41:35 Rachel Shanks
So, yeah, so the grant application that we're still waiting, the final outcome on, brings together, you know, myself in education, a colleague at City University in social policy, colleagues at City University in London in economics,
00:41:50 Rachel Shanks
in law, in computing, and then colleagues in textiles at the University of Leeds.
00:41:58 Rachel Shanks
So it really is interdisciplinary in terms of looking at the quality of school uniforms.
00:42:05 Rachel Shanks
So that's where the textile research comes in, trying to capture the data across multiple websites and
00:42:17 Rachel Shanks
information sets, brings in the computing colleagues, and then looking at the legal regulation in terms of the monopolies that you could suggest that some school uniform suppliers have, and then the economic model, you know, that whether that is fit for purpose in the school uniform market.
00:42:39 Rachel Shanks
And then obviously the social policy and education side of it is to do with, and this is all to do with branded school uniforms.
00:42:45 Rachel Shanks
So
00:42:46 Rachel Shanks
It's to see, what actually is a branded school uniform?
00:42:50 Rachel Shanks
What's the difference between having a logo with the name of your school on it to having the same colour jumper without the logo on it?
00:42:58 Rachel Shanks
And, you know, that's what we're hoping to research.
00:43:00 Rachel Shanks
But it's that thing of where it's been about adding disciplines to be able to research the whole issue from all the different angles and sides.
00:43:12 Rachel Shanks
So, yes, so that's...
00:43:15 Rachel Shanks
Are they all different disciplines enough?
00:43:16 Rachel Shanks
Are they separate enough for you?
00:43:19 John Holmwood
But I think it's interesting, but it is in a sense, it's people converging on the problem.
00:43:25 John Holmwood
So it's, so I think it is person specific and I think it's important to keep that aspect of it as well, because I mean, in a sense, to encourage
00:43:41 John Holmwood
prospective graduates who are prospective future researchers and academics to recognise that it's about social relationships and personal relationships as well as academic relations.
00:43:55 John Holmwood
So it's not a lot of points in a sense of looking for an economist to work with, but in a sense
00:44:03 John Holmwood
in the course of your engagement with people, getting to know people in other disciplines to work out areas in which you.
00:44:13 John Holmwood
So.
00:44:14 Rachel Shanks
This all came from the colleague at City University, Matt Barnes, being disgusted at the cost of his daughter's skirt and looking, well, who researches school uniform and came across me, emailed me and said, oh, can we meet, you know, so we met online, we've met in person, you know, and so it's a
00:44:34 Rachel Shanks
But it was just that horror that he discovered that the same school skirt without the logo was three times cheaper by the same company making the same, well, supplying the same skirt.
00:44:46 Rachel Shanks
Yeah.
00:44:46 Rachel Shanks
So, yeah, so it is that, you know, personal connection, personal interest, and then finding colleagues who wanted, you know, who also were interested in looking at that issue.
00:44:56 Rachel Shanks
Yeah.
00:44:58 Laura Young
And I think something that bringing different people, personalities, perspectives and disciplines together does is it maybe unearths more of these social challenges and the issues there than just maybe looking at it from one individual perspective.
00:45:13 Laura Young
And I'm glad you brought it up because sometimes it's good to actually speak about a really specific example.
00:45:18 Laura Young
And I've been thrown back to when you were at school debating club and should we wear a school uniform was always a topic that came up.
00:45:25 Laura Young
And so I'm sure there's some children at school that will love to
00:45:28 Laura Young
look at your research to arm themselves for their debate.
00:45:31 Laura Young
And I feel we've had such a rich discussion.
00:45:33 Laura Young
And actually, I think part of what this podcast is hoping to do is provide that food for thought for all academics, but especially people who are in the graduate school to be thinking about the terms that we use every day.
00:45:45 Laura Young
What do they mean, whether it's by describing yourself as a researcher, the work that you're doing, or thinking about future, you know, opportunities.
00:45:53 Laura Young
And I think this has been such a rich discussion.
00:45:56 Laura Young
I would like to round up by asking you all the question that we're asking at the end of everyone, which is, do you think we need disciplines?
00:46:07 Rachel Shanks
So I think you'll know my answer is yes, because I think you need that foundation.
00:46:11 Rachel Shanks
And I also just wanted to say for people who aren't doing interdisciplinary research or listening,
00:46:16 Rachel Shanks
don't worry about that.
00:46:17 Rachel Shanks
I feel we have to say it's not that you have to do it, but just that we should make it as easy as possible if it makes sense for you.
00:46:24 Rachel Shanks
So yes, I definitely think we need disciplines.
00:46:28 John Holmwood
Yes, absolutely.
00:46:29 John Holmwood
I mean, I think you're absolutely right that somebody has to be excited by the research they're doing.
00:46:35 John Holmwood
They have to have a problem that is meaningful to them and one that they feel that other people would be interested
00:46:44 John Holmwood
in an answer being provided.
00:46:46 John Holmwood
Other people can be fellow academics or, people out in the world, as it were.
00:46:55 John Holmwood
But I don't like to put it this way, but I think of disciplines as the manure in which the research could grow.
00:47:03 John Holmwood
So you have to keep the ground well composted and well supplied with nutrients, because there is a risk that
00:47:14 John Holmwood
you can sort of, the ground can be overused in a sense, and you're not paying attention to what you need to put back in.
00:47:25 Lisa Bradley
Yep, I totally agree.
00:47:27 Lisa Bradley
I think we absolutely do need disciplines.
00:47:29 Lisa Bradley
We need to understand what disciplinary knowledge has allowed us to do as humankind, the kind of the changes it's allowed us to make in the world that
00:47:40 Lisa Bradley
If you are of a sensibility where you're moving between, you're looking in the cracks in between, you're not necessarily actually able to do that really deep, rigorous thinking that actually allows us to create something very, very specific.
00:47:54 Lisa Bradley
So I think it's the way our universities have been organised and the way our universities will continue to be organised.
00:48:01 Lisa Bradley
But more than that, we need them for the types of knowledge that they afford.
00:48:06 Lisa Bradley
For me, the question always comes back to how do you have the and how do you also then open spaces for knowledge making that isn't disciplinary in nature?
00:48:19 Lisa Bradley
And this for me ranges across all of our practices as academics, whether it's how we publish, whether it's how we write in our papers to a specific audience, whether it's how we approach grant funding, we select our
00:48:32 Lisa Bradley
PhD students that we want to work with, how we need to write ourselves into a promotion narrative, that disciplinary thinking has such a hold over how we orient ourselves towards knowledge making within the academy.
00:48:47 Lisa Bradley
So the question for me is, how do you also prize open potential for interdisciplinary sensibilities within that, to not call it in with the lines, but to kind of think outside the box, to use another
00:49:03 Lisa Bradley
cliche.
00:49:04 Lisa Bradley
But that for me is something that is necessary, but it's difficult to do within the academy.
00:49:11 Lisa Bradley
So for me, it's not getting rid of disciplines, but how do we create the space for that?
00:49:17 Lisa Bradley
And the ARC, the Advanced Research Centre,
00:49:21 Lisa Bradley
We took a look at how much of the kind of the knowledge output of the university that the ARC accounts for.
00:49:29 Lisa Bradley
And it's 10% by far.
00:49:31 Lisa Bradley
This is a kind of, it's a marginal space within the university.
00:49:35 Lisa Bradley
It's for all researchers in the University of Glasgow who want to think in that way, but certainly it is not something that actually will replace the schools or the colleges or the university or the centre.
00:49:49 Lisa Bradley
But in creating that marginal space, that space of possibility for those who either think differently in those ways, it hopefully catalyses some of what I'm talking about.
00:50:00 Lisa Bradley
And I think points us towards maybe some of those other structures that we might need to think beyond as well.
00:50:06 Lisa Bradley
So to come back to the fruit analogy that I spoke about, it's
00:50:12 Lisa Bradley
The focus is on the fruit, the kind of the fruit either being on a table or in a bowl or diced up or in a smoothie.
00:50:20 Lisa Bradley
But we also need to think about the tools and the apparatus that actually allow the fruit to persist in that state.
00:50:28 Lisa Bradley
So the table is 1 and our universities are more established as tables than bowls.
00:50:36 Lisa Bradley
You move into that kind of space where they're in the fruit bowl together and all of a sudden you need a bowl to contain them and bring together.
00:50:42 Lisa Bradley
So in a university, what are our structures, what are our policies, what are our ways of thinking and working together that might enable that?
00:50:49 Lisa Bradley
If you move into the kind of the fruit salad, all of a sudden you need a knife and you need a fork or you need a spoon and actually maybe need other bowls as well.
00:50:57 Lisa Bradley
So the structural conditions change.
00:50:59 Lisa Bradley
And of course, when you're at the smoothie, you all of a sudden need a blender and a glass and a straw.
00:51:04 Lisa Bradley
So
00:51:05 Lisa Bradley
For me, it's about that interdisciplinary sensibility, always with a question of structurally as well, what needs to shift to create that permissive environment for thinking in that way.
00:51:16 John Holmwood
Yeah, I mean, the idea of university managers with knives is I feel quite worried.
00:51:24 Lisa Bradley
Not a benign process.
00:51:27 John Holmwood
I meant to mention this earlier, but it was a very early ESRC meeting about the impact agenda.
00:51:36 John Holmwood
And they brought together a lot of people involved in different charities, NGOs, and so on.
00:51:42 John Holmwood
And they were asking them about what research had impact.
00:51:46 John Holmwood
And so the whole group of them were there, you know, as part of this discussion.
00:51:52 John Holmwood
And they asked these
00:51:55 John Holmwood
people in disability NGOs and very health-related NGOs, and they said, Well, what has been impactful from social science research?
00:52:04 John Holmwood
And they said, Oh, well, you know, the sociology of the body.
00:52:08 John Holmwood
And they said, Well, yeah, which particular sociology of the body?
00:52:13 John Holmwood
And they said, Well, you know, the sociology of the body.
00:52:16 John Holmwood
So they said, But yeah, but whose sociology of the body?
00:52:21 John Holmwood
And they said, Well,
00:52:22 John Holmwood
just actually the field of the sociology of the body.
00:52:26 John Holmwood
So actually I think that's an important thing to think about in terms of disciplines and even interdisciplinarity, that it's a collective thing and what we've allowed to happen and through the REF and so on is the individuation of it and that in some sense what is impactful is
00:52:47 John Holmwood
the academic project itself, the fact that the sociology of the body came into being, not that it was this particular version of it or that particular version of it, that is what excited people.
00:53:00 John Holmwood
What excited them was not being given
00:53:04 John Holmwood
answers, in a sense, by the expertise of people in the sociology of the body, but being given new questions for their practice.
00:53:13 John Holmwood
And I think that's how we should think of research as a process of questioning.
00:53:20 John Holmwood
And I think that would fit with your idea of interdisciplinarity and so on.
00:53:26 John Holmwood
Yeah.
00:53:28 Laura Young
What was maybe a simple question of do we need disciplines or what is interdisciplinarity?
00:53:34 Laura Young
We've had a wealth of conversation.
00:53:36 Laura Young
And so I want to thank you for being on this episode of the podcast, which I know will have been rich smoothies for thought or manure for growth or something to put on like your school uniform.
00:53:47 Laura Young
So thank you very much for being on this episode.
00:53:48 Laura Young
Thank you.
00:53:49 Rachel Shanks
Thank you very much.
00:53:58 Laura Young
When Disciplines Meet is hosted by me, Laura Young, recorded at the Podcast Studio Glasgow and edited by the operations team at the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science.
00:54:08 Laura Young
The podcast was conceived by SGSSS's Deputy Director for Training, Dr Katy Keenan, and Associate Director, Dr Roxanne Connelly.
00:54:18 Laura Young
SGSSS is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Scottish Funding Council and our 16 partner universities.
00:54:26 Laura Young
To find out more about the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science, you can visit our website at www.sgsss.ac.uk.
00:54:35 Laura Young
Thank you so much for listening.
