2015 Conference

Full Presentation Panel

Contribution and Collaboration: Shared Projects and Shared Values

Kenneth Shockley

In this presentation we will review results from our recent research project, funded by the SUNY Research Foundation, focused on understanding and overcoming barriers to interdisciplinary research in the environmental contexts. We will then outline a useful way of characterizing the distinction between what we will refer to as contributory and collaborative research.

Responding to pressing environmental problems requires meaningful engagement across academic disciplines as well as between researchers, policy-makers, and educators. However, effectively integrating the required range of disciplinary perspectives, and effectively translating research into policy and educational applications, requires navigating a set of epistemological, organizational, and linguistic barriers. This is due, in part, to a general pattern of interdisciplinary work wherein research teams look to what might be added to their research program by the individual contributions provided by others instead of promoting more robust collaboration. Where participants in contributory projects provide disciplinary or experiential insights into a previously established problem or research question, participants in collaborative projects use their disciplinary or experiential perspectives to shape the problem or research question being characterized. Although this distinction is clearly an idealization, as most real world projects involve some degree of both contribution and collaboration, it should clarify the point at which disciplinary perspectives are inserted in the process of problem formation, and so should help make clear the extent to which problems are shared across disciplines. This distinction also makes apparent certain benefits of interdisciplinary environmental research: not only are such projects more suitable to real world problems, they also make apparent values and perspectives shared across disciplinary languages, traditions, and methodologies. This latter point should impress upon us the importance of generating a culture of authentic collaborative interdisciplinary environmental research. While the contributory model has its place, the interdisciplinary nature of many of the problems motivating environmental research begs for a more integrative form of research

Navigating complexity and overcoming barriers to collaboration in Interdisciplinary research teams

Whitney Lash Marshall, Ph.D.

Responding to pressing social and environmental problems requires meaningful engagement across academic disciplines, as well as between researchers, policymakers, educators, and practitioners. In addition to the challenges associated with investigating such complex problems, communicating across disciplines and boundaries requires navigating additional complexities in the research process: a set of epistemological, organizational, and teamwork challenges that may stand in the way of productive, and creative, collaboration.

As part of a yearlong research initiative based in the State University of New York system we have identified the barriers to authentic collaboration experienced by researchers when engaging in interdisciplinary research endeavors. Based on the results of an online survey and series of interviews, and drawing from a diversity of disciplinary perspectives, we have begun to characterize authentic collaboration and identified strategies to overcome institutional, epistemological, and teamwork barriers,. As we conclude the first phase of this work, we have identified promising pathways for overcoming each type of barrier: the cultivation of institutional opportunities and space; the promotion of intellectual openness and engagement; and training in facilitative leadership techniques and approaches. These pathways include a set of skills and capacities of researchers working at and across the boundaries of disciplines and institutions, as well as between research and its application.

Protecting Wild Rice from Genetic Engineering: A Collaboration to Reconceive Scientific ResearchContribution and Collaboration: Shared Projects and Shared Values

Adam Kokotovich, PhD

A key issue within participatory and anticipatory governance efforts for science, technology, and the environment involves how to navigate conflicting worldviews.  To contribute to this area of research, I participated in and studied a collaborative committee that, in response to issues concerning wild rice and the potential for its genetic engineering, is pursuing an anticipatory process to influence scientific research policy at the University of Minnesota.  Wild rice is a plant of great cultural, spiritual and economic importance to the Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe) of North America.  In the late 1990s, scientists at the University of Minnesota mapped the wild rice genome to aid in its conventional breeding without informing or consulting Tribal Nations.  The development of a genomic map that could be used for pursuing an engineered variety raised a host of concerns about the ends of public research and the relationship between the University of Minnesota and the Ojibwe.  A collaborative committee comprised of Ojibwe elders and community members, and University of Minnesota faculty, staff, and students coalesced in response to these issues. 

Using participant observation, document analysis, and in-depth interviews, I examined the following questions:  What particular understandings of science and risk did the committee challenge and draw upon as it reconceived scientific research?  How can different worldviews inform anticipatory governance processes for public scientific research?  I found that the committee employed the theme of “bridging worldviews” to make explicit how scientific research is not universally beneficial but can negatively impact particular communities, in addition to being based on contestable assumptions about the desired state of the environment and the desired ends of science.  This research shows the potential of participatory and anticipatory governance efforts to foster less harmful and more inclusive scientific research when based on revealing and questioning the dominant assumptions informing scientific research.