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Short abstract:

Unveiling interdisciplinary dynamics in Greek agricultural science, my ethnography-inspired framework differentiating crop-specific (vertical) and supportive (horizontal) specialties, illuminates resource disparities, impacting legitimacy, funding and incentives for cross-disciplinary mobility.

Long abstract:

Agricultural science is a highly interdisciplinary endeavour requiring coordination between highly specialized subfields that often don't share common practices, language or worldview. So how is collaboration possible, and especially the kind needed to flexibly address urgent agroecological issues at a transnational scale?

Based on insights from my ethnographic observations of local agricultural research practices in Southern Greece, I propose a framework for thinking about interdisciplinarity in its situated and dynamic dimension as an ongoing process of finding complementarity, driven by a mutual understanding of lack of knowledge, skilfulness or resources. In my case study, a foundational scaffold that enables this multifaceted form of complementarity is the institutional lab organisation, which distinguishes between crops-specific and supportive specialties. Each of these functions perpendicular to each other with crop-specific specialties having a "vertical" single focus on specific plant organisms (olive, citrus, subtropical crops) while the supportive functioning "horizontally", cutting through various crops, bioecological systems and research methods.

Understanding this dynamic of cross-complementarity can help illuminate epistemic inequality in data-intensive crop science. "Horizontal" specialties, such as genomics, bioinformatics and remote sensing, tend to be more technologically equipped and attract more funding, while more traditional species-focused "vertical" specialities tend to have a harder time advocating for their legitimacy and their "attractiveness". In my presentation, I wish to explore the idea that there might be organizational/operational reasons why epistemic inequalities arise based on the cross-complementarity dynamic.