by Liz Clarke and Rebecca Freeth
Republished from Integration and Implementation Insights (I2S) blog
Tensions inevitably arise in inter- and transdisciplinary research. Dealing with these tensions and resulting conflicts is one of the hardest things to do. We are meant to avoid or get rid of conflict and tension, right? Wrong!
Tension and conflict are not only inevitable; they can be a source of positivity, emergence, creativity and deep learning. By tension we mean the pull between the seemingly contradictory parts of a paradox, such as parts and wholes, stability and chaos, and rationality and creativity. These tensions can foster interpersonal conflict, particularly when team members treat the apparent contradictions as if only one was ‘right’.
The growth of collaborative interdisciplinary research (tackling increasingly complex challenges) requires that researchers are able to collaborate across greater levels of complexity and diversity in teams, including broader disciplinary, social, political, institutional and personal backgrounds.
This challenges the boundaries of traditional modes of research, where researchers are guided and bound by the socially constructed knowledge of a community of practice of like-minded scholars. In this more traditional mode, shared understanding and coherence are relatively easy to achieve. In contrast, in collaborative interdisciplinary research, researchers find themselves in highly heterogeneous teams, where coherence becomes more challenging. These two examples are the extremes in a continuum, shown on the x-axis in the figure below.
Figure 1: Navigating the tensions between individual scholarship and collaboration and collective coherence (Clarke, Freeth and Fam, 2019)