Planting and nurturing interdisciplinary collaborations: a high-stakes, high-reward endeavour. (original) (raw)

Responding to a case study, 4 questions pertaining to the development and sustaining of interdisciplinary collaborations are addessed:a 1. Should we start with topics or with people? The author describes how their plant science colleagues have already gathered some experience in collaborations with colleagues from the social sciences and humanities (SSH). Yet these collaborations are apparently discontinued and the director tells they are ‘challenged in finding topics and experts’ in the SSH. 2. How to get the collaboration started and deliver some returns? The director reports that their colleagues needed special tools and workshop formats to get this collaboration off the ground – even though these are time consuming. In addition, for early career researchers such collaborations are also riskier as they still need to establish themselves within a particular discipline. 3. Is experience in interdisciplinary research sufficient, or do you need special preparation? The author writes that they ‘did not consider training the Principal Investigators’. Nonetheless, the director shares how most plant scientists ask them how to find SSH experts, implying that they do have difficulties in identifying potential collaborators elsewhere. 4. Can scientists who are performing fundamental research also engage in interdisciplinary collaborations? Since such collaborations would probably include value-laden contributions, benefit from the expertise of indigenous peoples and are more geared towards applications, according to the current case, they seem to distract far from this fundamental science level. Or should this opposition between fundamental and interdisciplinary research be reconsidered?

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