Patrick Devine-Wright | Crossing disciplinary boundaries: Concepts, confidence and courage

I gave a seminar a few weeks ago at the invitation of Prof. Tim Mays, a hydrogen engineer from the University of Bath. The audience was public and varied, with a large smattering of natural science students. Putting my slides together, I asked myself, what have I, as a social scientist interested in sustainable energy transitions, got to say to an audience of engineers and natural scientists? What would they find useful and interesting? To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure of the answer to that question. The experience reminded me that when we step outside of our disciplinary bubbles, we put ourselves in a risky position, requiring a bit of confidence and courage, something that we, as social scientists, don’t always possess.

It took me back to my first postdoctoral position, some 25 years ago. I worked in a research institute dominated by engineers (I was the only social scientist) and wanted to be accepted, to fit in and be useful. I was committed to using my social science skills to address energy challenges, and knew that that would require working across disciplinary boundaries, but lacked any training in how to do so. I found myself using the language given to me by my engineering colleagues to describe my research. This was language that I could understand – public perceptions, public acceptance, NIMBYism – but did not come from my disciplinary training. There was little, if any theoretical grounding to these concepts, even if they did provide a basis for communication and collaboration. I was young, inexperienced and lacking the skills to operate in a multi or interdisciplinary environment – nothing in my PhD had trained me for that. So I rolled up my sleeves, inputted my methodological training – designing surveys for example – and spent a few meandering years searching for a coherent and credible theoretical position to my work on energy transitions.

25 years later, as I put my slides together for this seminar, I took a different approach, deciding to ground my talk to the engineers and natural scientists in the human geography concept of ‘spatial imaginaries’, a term which has informed my work across several recent research projects. I knew that it would be an unfamiliar term to them, posing a challenge. I would need to simplify the concept enough to communicate it across disciplinary boundaries, yet provide sufficient complexity to make clear its value to understand controversies over the siting of large-scale energy infrastructures. Indeed, my basic proposition was that spatial imaginaries are a far more useful way of understanding arguments over where energy infrastructures should be sited than the NIMBY term.

This is because I have always subscribed to Kurt Lewin’s notion that ‘there is nothing as practical as good theory’. But what does this mean when we try to solve societal challenges, such as sustainable energy transitions, by crossing disciplinary boundaries? If disciplinary experts hang onto their own languages, is fertile collaboration even possible? That’s still a question that fascinates me. But I am also convinced that if social science is to play a strong role in interdisciplinary research, then abandoning our conceptual language to be accepted by STEM experts is not the way forward.

These are pressing issues for those of us in the ACCESS network who are charged with empowering early career researchers and enabling interdisciplinary collaborations. Our Leadership College, led by Saffron O’Neill, is made up of 20 early career social scientists drawn from academic, government and third sector organisations. It has shown how confidence can emerge from building a strong network over time through annual retreats and exposure to inspiring social science leaders such as Gemma Harper. And our co-Director, Birgitta Gatersleben is collaborating with the Institute of Environmental Sciences to enable better collaborations across social science/STEM disciplinary boundaries.

What impacts these activities have will unfold over time. But in choosing to communicate an unfamiliar term in my talk last week, I was staying true to my disciplinary expertise and expressing public confidence in the value of social science.

Our goal in ACCESS is to instil enough courage and conviction in early career social scientists that they can not only participate in interdisciplinary conversations from a secure position, but lead research teams, projects and institutions, something that very rarely happens right now. And to scope interdisciplinary approaches that both allow the retention of disciplinary concepts and enable a shared language to emerge within social science/STEM collaborations. Now that’s an exciting prospect!

Watch Patrick’s I-SEE (Institute for Sustainable Energy and the Environment) webinar: From ‘Not in my back yard’ to an ‘industrial village’: Understanding the crucial ‘where’ dimension of energy infrastructure deployment