Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic research with an epigenetics research group, we consider collaboration as object of study and as method. We trace the styles of reasoning which allow for collaborative practice, and ask how this practice engenders or challenges engagement between the life and social sciences.

Paper long abstract:

Environmental epigenetics has attracted the attention of social scientists and challenged how sociologists, anthropologists, and historians conceptualize the relationships between social and material environments and bodies. Over the past decade, research from this burgeoning field has been described as the grounds for a renewed biosocial research agenda, or characterised as the basis for a more fundamental rethinking of collaborative work across the life and social sciences. In this paper, we consider collaboration both as object of study and as method, drawing on our ethnographic research with the McGill Group for Suicide Studies (MGSS), a multidisciplinary research group based at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in Montreal. We begin by tracing the distinct styles of reasoning, methodologies, and material infrastructures which allow for epigenetics research at the MGSS to be enacted as a fundamentally collaborative practice. We then ask how work across and between the life and social sciences is engendered or challenged by the collaborative character of epigenetics research itself. We are particularly interested in what kinds of epistemological and ethical commitments are suggested by different metaphors for inter- and trans-disciplinary collaboration ("trading zones," "entanglements," "co-laboration," etc.).