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Short abstract:

Working in an extravagantly multi-sited biodiversity project, post pandemic-crisis, has exposed some shortcoming of 'embedded STS'. We reflect on ongoing methodological bricolage while investigating – and practicing – inter+transdisciplinary collaboration with collective STS and oral history work.

Long abstract:

In this paper, we reflect upon ongoing methodological bricolage as we investigate – and practice – inter and transdisciplinary collaboration in a large scale, multi-sited, post pandemic-crisis, project investigating people’s involvement in biodiversity renewal (RENEW). The project breaks new transdisciplinary ground in its positioning of NGO professionals as co-investigators, alongside the breadth and depth of non-academic partnerships with multiple research strands. Significantly for STS studies of interdisciplinarity, RENEW has pushed back against ‘subordination-service’ modes of working by involving social science and humanities scholars to build a shared research agenda, including an embedded STS team of social scientists and historians investigating interdisciplinarity in past and present. RENEW is extravagantly ‘multi-sited’, taking place across multiple university campuses, partner offices, field sites, and, via distance working, the homes of at least 60 people, creating a multiplicity of physical, virtual, placed, and unplaced ‘fieldwork’ research sites. We have therefore combined virtual and in-person participant observation, diary-ing, semi-structured interviewing and creative workshops (STS), with oral history interviews conducted by National Life Stories (British Library). This approach is enabling us to document - as participants – existing and emerging research practices, while also convening spaces enabling active reflections on collaboration and interdisciplinarity. In this paper, we reflect upon the logistical, relational, and data challenges of this work, alongside insights this approach is creating - into our own research practices, for RENEW itself, for wider science-policy landscapes, and for long-term trajectories of ‘reinventing the interdisciplinary wheel’ over the past half century of environmental research.