Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses differences in group perceptions amongst a large international and multi-disciplinary research community with the explicit aim of bringing natural sciences and humanities together in joint experiments. Who wins, when disciplinary borders fall?

Paper long abstract:

A large German based "interdisciplinary laboratory" involving about three hundred researchers at one research site and over thirty disciplines from the natural and social sciences to the humanities and arts is the object of study for this paper.

The ambitious aim of this interdisciplinary community, funded by the scheme "Cluster of Excellence" by the German Research Foundation since 2012 is to produce knowledge and applicable technology "by other means: through experiments in which science and humanities interact, while the cluster understands itself as an experiment which comprises self-reflexive feed-back structures.

This empirical study of the forms of knowledge, practices and behaviors that intersect with differences of cultures, disciplines and gender in this community is part of these self-reflexive structures.

The results show that this new form of structure of 'big interdisciplinarity' offers the formation of new (collaborative) identities to those involved. It changes, how people are "recruited into categories" who still make surprising "choices in the subject positions" (Choo & Ferree 2010, 134).

What becomes relevant in this interdisciplinary structure is, that there are "myriad ways that disciplinary members maintain other - and sometimes competing - memberships in other cultural groups and subgroups, which include but are not limited to ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, region, age, marital status, or even additional professional training or experience" (Reich & Reich 2006, 54).

New forms of group minority and majority understandings emerge, which, in contrast to the expectation of the Cluster at the beginning don't seem to advantage usually disadvantaged identities in science.