IPORA - Transdisciplinary international research network

General Assembly

Interdisciplinarity is a practical necessity of research in cases of complex aggregation. This is particularly true when adopting a public policy perspective. One of the defining characteristics of public policies is that they often combine different dimensions of the natural (or environmental) and the social worlds, making it impossible to analyse the situations they address—or to design mechanisms to mitigate or prevent their adverse effects—without mobilising multiple fields of knowledge. These fields must therefore necessarily engage in dialogue.

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Such dialogue cannot be fruitful simply by adopting a so-called “practical stance,” because it is far from certain that such a stance can be easily adopted. Our practical attitudes are, in fact, first and foremost deployed within our disciplinary traditions. Take an object such as the Great Green Wall: an economist may well demonstrate that for every dollar invested, it generates an increase of approximately 1.2 dollars in the resources of the affected populations. Yet this response in no way validates its relevance in terms of reforestation. To assess this, one must be able to measure the increase in green biomass (using satellite data). However, to determine whether this increase is attributable to reforestation, it is also necessary to consult rainfall data over a given period. Indeed, an increase in rainfall may concurrently account for the rise in green biomass. The phenomenon of interest thus appears to articulate different sectors of socio-environmental reality, none of which is, in isolation, conclusive.

The multidimensional nature of such phenomena calls for an interdisciplinary approach. Yet, as a first step, it is necessary to provide an adequate description of what an interdisciplinary approach or process entails. Such adequacy necessarily involves an epistemological understanding of our own disciplines, which operate according to methodologies that we have become accustomed to using without questioning how they relate to and process reality. It is likely at the level of this processing of reality—rather than at the level of conclusions—that interdisciplinarity must be situated.

A second step consists in developing a shared language, a koinè. How does this occur? If we start from the premise that scientific communities are first and foremost professional epistemic communities, we must understand how these communities function internally and, subsequently, how exchanges occur—situationally and contextually—between members of different communities. This entails both a conceptual inquiry (into the logic of language games in context) and a sociological inquiry into the interactions between the professionals involved.

Contexts of epistemic deployment and situated interactions are therefore central. Interdisciplinarity cannot be addressed outside its concrete cases of application, as it is fundamentally a practice. Generalisations or abstract discourses on complexity do not allow us to understand “how things actually work,” since discourse about practice is not the same as the practice itself. It is therefore necessary to observe both intra-disciplinary epistemic practices and interdisciplinary epistemic practices.

Given IPORA’s specific objectives, we propose to add a third epistemic dimension, which also falls under interdisciplinarity: transactions between different professional epistemic communities and public policy decision-makers. As with interdisciplinarity, this again involves a koinè, that is, the search for a shared language between two categories of actors—scientists and public actors—who are likely to be interested in the practical benefits of interdisciplinarity. From their perspective, public policy involves empirical findings (linked to scientific disciplines), a priori solutions (also discipline-based), normative production (through law), prospective analysis (statistical modelling), anticipation of social acceptability (anthropology and sociology), and political risk assessment (political science).

Objectives

To produce concrete analyses of interdisciplinarity as a set of practices articulating epistemic communities, and to understand the conditions under which such articulations are successful.
To understand how these articulations produce an “object” (standardised characteristics, procedures, etc.) that can be appropriated by public actors—in other words, how they generate public policy prescriptions.
To open the way for a praxeological analysis of how scientific statements are received by the public, an area too often limited to cognitivist approaches focused on biases and scientific illiteracy among ordinary members of society.
To communicate with stakeholders about the mechanisms that enable effective interdisciplinarity and the articulation between scientific work and public policies, which cannot be reduced to mere implementation measures. This communication will aim to disseminate “good practices.”

Main methods

Several methods will be employed: ethnographic methods (observation of communities), preparatory interviews (to collect information on activities), semi-structured interviews (to position actors with respect to activities), and bibliometrics (necessary to assess interdisciplinary publications).

Our work is primarily grounded in an ethnomethodological approach linked to conversation analysis, for which the meaning of statements is inseparable from their contextualisation and their structuring into “turns of talk”—that is, the fact that they are necessarily addressed to individuals or collectives, present or represented, and interact with them. This dynamic can extend— as is the case here—beyond face-to-face conversational situations and verbal exchanges to encompass mediated and remote dialogues, such as “dialogical networks.” These networks…

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These networks are structured through thematised and mediated exchanges between multiple individuals at a distance. For example, A states “p” in a press release; B takes up “p(A)” in a speech (modifying, criticising, endorsing, or downplaying it); C cites p(B) with reference to p(A) in an interview, and so forth, with the number of participants potentially increasing. The dynamic of “p” is central to the analysis, as it delineates both (a) the semantic field of “p” and the terms used to construct it, and (b) a negative community based on the non-consensual sharing of “p” and its constitutive terms.

The dialogical networks approach has been reformulated to analyse parliamentary debates, which involve controversial reiterations of the same statements and absent audiences, as parliamentarians often address their speeches not to those present in the chamber but to different segments of the population (Dupret & Ferrié, 2014). In the present project, we will focus on discourses exchanged between members of distinct disciplinary epistemic communities interacting in order to constitute an interdisciplinary epistemic community. Particular attention will therefore be paid to the methods used not only to present one’s discipline, but also to persuade—entailing both rhetoric and pedagogy.

The ethnographic method at the core of our approach will involve following interactions, with particular attention to their linguistic content. Ethnomethodology draws a clear distinction between interviews and verbal exchanges among interactants, with only the latter constituting field data, insofar as they are not elicited by an investigative relationship and therefore not oriented toward responding to an interviewer. Scientific meetings, conferences, seminars, and IPORA team workshops will thus constitute the primary field of investigation. Whenever possible, and with participants’ consent, exchanges will be recorded and transcribed. Attendance—understood as participant observation—at public and working meetings will be one of the main field activities.

We will also examine the methodological sections of articles adopting an interdisciplinary approach. This analysis will not be bibliometric but ethnomethodological, as this approach can also be applied to written corpora. A scientific article can indeed be understood as establishing a dialogical relationship with two distinct audiences: (a) the authors cited, and (b) the disciplinary audience represented by peer reviewers. This relationship is both retrospective and prospective, involving references to previous authors while positioning oneself as a future reference in scientific debates. From this perspective, the justification of interdisciplinarity in the methodological section of an article is of particular interest, as it involves selecting reasons deemed admissible within one discipline to incorporate another or others. These reasons must technically convince a disciplinary audience. Unlike interactions within an interdisciplinary community—where acceptance of interdisciplinarity is a condition of participation—technical justification in anonymous evaluation contexts presupposes disagreement that must be overcome. While interpretive charity may prevail within interdisciplinary communities, it does not apply in disciplinary peer review contexts. Ideally, negative reviewers’ reports should also be examined.

Semi-structured interviews play only a preparatory role in our approach: they provide access to technical information and general ideas or principles concerning interdisciplinarity. These ideas do not pertain to practices but to conceptions and perceptions of interdisciplinarity abstracted from specific applications. As such, they serve as a complementary perspective—a consultation of the “mental library” of community members. Interviews will be exhaustive and conducted with all researchers directly involved in IPORA activities. However, semi-structured interviews may be more heavily relied upon when examining relationships between researchers and public policy promoters, as these interactions are more difficult to observe directly. Project reports and evaluations may provide complementary observational material, as may mediated political statements responding to scientific recommendations or risk assessments. In such cases, dialogical networks will be used to analyse sequences of mediated exchanges.

Bibliometrics will be used to objectify the difficulties of interdisciplinary approaches by focusing on academic journals. Publication opportunities and journal evaluation criteria are powerful drivers of epistemological disciplinarisation. Journals in which IPORA team members might publish will be selected for quantitative analysis.