Working Group 4.4

Social and Natural Science Collaboration in the (Re)Making of the Rural: Problems, Practices and Cultures

Convenors:
Elizabeth Oughton, Newcastle University   e.a.oughton@ncl.ac.uk
Neil Ward

Knowledge in academic research has traditionally been produced in the context of scientific disciplines.  A discipline is essentially a named academic identity that is shared by holders of degrees in that discipline and is institutionally realized through a degree-granting body, such as a university department.  In recent years, there has been increasing emphasis on encouraging research that crosses disciplinary boundaries.  Research projects than span different disciplines may be called multi-disciplinary, pluri-disciplinary or interdisciplinary. The increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary working within strategic research can be understood as part of a wider shift from what Gibbons, Nowotny and colleagues call Mode-1 to Mode-2 knowledge production (Gibbons et al., 1994; Nowotny et al., 2001).  They argued that a new form of knowledge production emerged in the twentieth century in which the ‘context of application’ becomes crucial to the process.  Traditional research (or Mode 1 knowledge production) is internally-initiated by academic researchers and is based within disciplines.  In contrast, Mode 2 knowledge production is context-driven, and involves inter-disciplinary teams brought together to respond to real-world problems and challenges.  The rural context of Mode 2 knowledge production has highlighted the role of stakeholders and ways of widening the input from non-scientific knowledge and non-certified experts. Research on rural areas has reflected this shift as both national and international funding bodies have actively required a broadening of research practices including interdisciplinary working and working with wider publics.

In this working group, we want to explore the ways in which interdisciplinary working, especially between natural and social scientists, is ‘remaking’ the rural and we invite papers from researchers interested in the following sorts of questions exploring both the conceptual and the empirical:

1. How does allowing the agency of ‘the rural’ to come to the fore in interdisciplinary working reframe the nature of rural problems?  

• Are these framings more accountable?
• Do they enable innovation?  
• Do they force new ways of knowing and enacting / acting in the rural?

2. How do these reframings alter the practice of science?

• Do they unsettle accepted norms and practices in the natural sciences?  
• Do they allow the rural to ‘bite back’, to challenge the conventional disciplinary framings of rural problems?
• To what extent, and how, does the micro political context affect outcomes?

3. How can these new ways of working be achieved?

• What are the main sticking points and conflicts?
• How are they overcome – or not?
• What experiences do rural researchers have of methodological developments to deal with differences in epistemological habits?
• What roles might alternative knowledges, such as personal testimony, often deemed admissible in conventional ways of working, become a part of the reframing and reformulating of the practice of natural and social science in rural areas?

4. What can we learn from a comparative perspective on the local institutional cultures of empirical rural research? (We are interested in papers based in different national cultures as well as different groups working on similar problems in different geographical areas).

• Do the differing institutional positions and history of rural research promote or impede interdisciplinary working?
• Does rural sociology have a particular role to play (such as providing a ‘neutral space’ for social scientists) in interdisciplinary work or do rural sociologists need to become generalist social scientists to work in interdisciplinary teams?