Paper short abstract:

Using an ethnographic lens I will reflect on the challenges and opportunities of participating in multi-disciplinary research teams in EU-funded research.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on my own participation as an anthropologist in two EU-funded projects on European identities. In both cases the teams were not only multi-disciplinary (linguists, geographers, social psychologists, anthropologists) but also combined multi-national academic cultures. Whilst inter- or multi-disciplinarity has become as much as a convention in the context of European funding, it would be limiting to consider such co-operations merely as cross-fertilisations between different branches of knowledge.

In my own experience, multi-disciplinarity meant negotiating boundaries of knowledge, just as much as those of different academic traditions, languages and ontologies. Using a retrospective ethnographic lens I will reflect on the challenges and opportunities of these collaborations, and particularly relate to methods issues which raised questions for shared working modes and the successful integration of an anthropological sensitivity. These revolve around three issues in particular: the emphasis on the interview as a research tool, the perception of research material as 'data' and the question of knowledge as co-production between researcher and researched.