Area (2009) 41.4, 371–373 doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2009.00914.

Interdisciplinarity within and beyond geography:

introduction to Special Section area_914 371..373

L J Bracken* and E A Oughton**

*Department of Geography, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE
Email: L.J.Bracken@Durham.ac.uk
**Centre for Rural Economy, School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, Newcastle University,
Newcastle NE1 7RU
Email: E.A.Oughton@ncl.ac.uk

This Special Section presents a selection of papers
given at the Institute of British Geographers conference
held in 2007 in a session titled ‘Interdisciplinarity
within and beyond geography’. There is a long debate
on working across disciplinary perspectives within
geography, taken up since 2003 in the ‘Conversations
across the divide’ sessions at the RGS-IBG confer-
ences. ‘Conversations across the divide’ have devel-
oped into ‘activity across the divide’, for example, in
the British-based Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU)
Programme, in which every project supported had to
be interdisciplinary across the social and natural sci-
ences. The aim of the conference session was, first, to
reflect on practices across the divide within, and
beyond, geography. Secondly, it aimed to examine
where these theoretical and empirically based activi-
ties are taking us. Five of the oral presentations have
been developed into papers presented in this Special
Section, four were from research conducted within
RELU-funded programmes.
We talk here about interdisciplinarity as a practice
associated with the development of systematic analy-
ses bringing together the natural and social world. It is
a practice that brings to the fore the emergent proper-
ties of complex systems and the need for methodologi-
cal pluralism as a way to understand multiply
determined situations in the world. The papers in this
Special Section explore aspects of interdisciplinary
practices more closely. We argue that the need for
justifying interdisciplinary research seems to have
passed and the benefits of, and problems associated
with doing, interdisciplinary research are widely rec-
ognised.1 Existing literatures cover definitions of
interdisciplinarity, reflections on experiences of inter-
disciplinary projects, reasons for undertaking interdis-
ciplinary research and on championing certain
subjects as examples of best practice. Two aspects of
interdisciplinary working stand out as needing further
work in the future. First, some attention has been given
to those cultural and social circumstances that make
interdisciplinary research difficult. The papers in this
Special Section go some way towards understanding
these effects, working through cultures of practice, but
nevertheless deeper understandings of the processes
involved still need to be explored. Second, earlier
criticisms of interdisciplinarity suggested that research
of this type lacked the theoretical and methodological
foundations that disciplines take for granted. And as a
consequence, the criteria for judgement – what is or is
not ‘good’ interdisciplinary knowledge – is still under-
developed. As the evidence accumulates, it is becom-
ing clear that the quality of interdisciplinary research
in general is being tested in a similar manner to disci-
plinary research; by rigour, good practice and peer
assessment. However, standard practices, particularly
in the more positivist sciences, tend to use replicability
as a measure of validation. In interdisciplinary research
projects it becomes more difficult to argue for the same
approach. One of the ways in which interdisciplinary
work can be more widely tested is through compara-
tive studies across networks of research and practice.
And there is room for more critical self reflection
through comparative work at different scales.
This collection of papers starts to identify key details
of the practices involved in successful integrative work.
Four papers in this Special Section look particularly at
the ways in which interdisciplinarity is performed in this
role: Harris et al. (pp 374–384) provide an overview of
ten teams looking at research motivations; Oughton and
Bracken (pp 385–394) examine the ways in which the

Area Vol. 41 No. 4, pp. 371–373, 2009

ISSN 0004-0894 © The Authors.
Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009

372 Bracken and Oughton
external and internal environments of research affect
the framing of an interdisciplinary research project;
Buller and Wesselink (pp 395–403, 404–413) focus
upon the role and use of boundary objects.
In their paper Harris et al. concentrate on the moti-
vations of people doing interdisciplinary research, the
process of the research teams coming together and the
relationships that were built up during the work. The ten
teams examined are composed of academics from dif-
ferent disciplines, representatives from commercial
agricultural-based businesses and scientists working in
the third sector. The paper highlights that in six out of the
ten case studies funding bodies had determined the
need for interdisciplinary research. Specific challenges
that interviewees raised included the ‘high emotions’
that emerged during negotiation of project aims, the
difficulties in terms of career progression of doing inter-
disciplinary research, problems of deciding how, when
and where to publish results, debates concerning meth-
odologies to be employed, and finally, how to build
trust between researchers involved in such projects.
Oughton and Bracken, using projects that look at a
wider range of landscape issues, investigate the
framing of interdisciplinary research by analysing 15
semi-structured interviews with the academics leading
these projects. Framing was found to be complex,
influenced by factors both exogenous and endogenous
to the process, especially the negotiation between
researchers from different disciplines, and involved
finding different ways of being interdisciplinary. One
key factor that Oughton and Bracken highlight is the
continued re-framing that takes place during the life-
time of the research, not just the initial framing at the
outset of a project. Their paper highlights the fuzziness
and dynamic nature of the research boundary and the
stimulus that this provides for negotiation.
Buller, drawing from a backdrop of food chain
research, considers the practice and performance of
interdisciplinarity as a lively process of knowledge
creation that operates within ‘forums of articulation’
through which ‘epistemologically mobile socio-natural
entities’ are defined and explored. He notes the impor-
tance of ‘boundary objects’ or ‘relata’, which were used
as the agents of interdisciplinarity, circulating in differ-
ent forms and commanding different understandings.
Buller proposes that discussion of these key materials
acts as fora for the articulation of different knowledges.
Important points in the process of interdisciplinarity are
the identification of objects for discussion and how
these are bounded by different disciplines, how the
objects are translated during on-going discussions, and
then how the ‘quality’ of an object to the research is
Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
14754762, 2009, 4, Downloaded from https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2009.00914.x, Wiley Online Library on [22/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
mediated. Wesselink develops similar ideas to Buller by
exploring the new knowledge produced by both inter-
and transdisciplinary research. Initially Wesselink
explores the types of knowledge produced by different
classifications of interdisciplinary research. She then
teases out how knowledge produced by interdiscipli-
nary research may be different from that produced by
disciplinary research by examining her own study on
the Meuse flood management study. Wesselink con-
cludes that interdisciplinary knowledge production
implies the need for integration of facts and values into
a new emergent property or synthesis. This is not nec-
essarily different from disciplinary research, but
because there is no prevalent set of values in interdis-
ciplinary knowledge production, it is much more
important to negotiate boundary objects. In a similar
vein to Buller, Wesselink sees these boundary objects as
the starting point for interdisciplinary collaboration.
The final paper in this collection, by White et al.,
(pp 414–424) changes direction to focus on examining
the effectiveness of policy-relevant interdisciplinary
research. An important measure of the quality of inter-
disciplinary practice is developing/having the oppor-
tunity to compare work in different sites, exploring the
relative success of projects and identifying what we
can learn from the comparison. The paper is based on
a questionnaire survey of international integrative
(inter- and transdisciplinary) projects focused on envi-
ronmental issues in rural areas and personal reflections
from the team’s own research. White et al. highlight
several factors for success of integrative projects: the
need for a clear conceptual framework, use of appro-
priate scales, effective language and communication,
time and commitment, and trust and respect. An
enhanced opportunity to engage with policymakers
and stakeholders at all stages of the research was seen
to bring improved understandings of the context of
research and how it can be applied to inform policy. At
the same time this can help to frame new policy-
relevant research questions.
Interdisciplinary ways of working have become
much more widely accepted practices over the past
five years and recognised as fundamental to dealing
with many of the large issues facing society in the early
twenty-first century. These ways of working have
unsettled habits of scientific practice; aspects of this
unsettling have been explored in the papers here and
in the wider literature reflecting on interdisciplinarity.
We suggest that we’ve now reached the point where
further research should focus on critical reflection
linked more firmly with theoretical understandings of
interdisciplinarity.
Area Vol. 41 No. 4, pp. 371–373, 2009
ISSN 0004-0894 © The Authors.

Note
1 We have not referenced the many articles that have been
produced, but the growing body of work in interdisciplinar-
ity has led to special issues or emphases in a number of
journals in geography and beyond. For example, see Area,
Ecology and Society, Geoforum, Journal of Agricultural
Economics and Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers.
References
Buller H 2008 The lively process of interdisciplinarity Area
doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2008.00856
Area Vol. 41 No. 4, pp. 371–373, 2009
ISSN 0004-0894 © The Authors.
Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
14754762, 2009, 4, Downloaded from https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2009.00914.x, Wiley Online Library on [22/02/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Interdisciplinarity within and beyond geography 373
Harris F, Lyon F and Clarke S 2008 Doing interdisciplinarity:
motivation and collaboration in research for sustainable
agriculture in the UK Area doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.
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Oughton E and Bracken L 2009 Interdisciplinary research:
framing and reframing Area doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.
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Wesselink A 2009 The emergence of interdisciplinary
knowledge in problem-focused research Area doi: 10.1111/
j.1475-4762.2009.00882.x
White P C L, Cinderby S, Raffaelli D, de Bruin A, Holt A and
Huby M 2008 Enhancing the effectiveness of policy-
relevant integrative research in rural areas Area doi:
10.1111/j.1475-4762.2008.00871.x