Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

We draw upon our experiences as STS researchers embedded in a large interdisciplinary project on biodiversity renewal to explore why accounts of collaboration continue to tell stories of struggle. We analyse and expand the idea of 'social infrastructures' to show ways forward

Paper long abstract

We draw upon experiences as STS researchers embedded in a large-scale, interdisciplinary research project on biodiversity renewal, to explore why accounts of collaboration continue to tell stories of struggle, distance and peripherality. Given the decades of policies and institutional imperatives for interdisciplinarity, such STS accounts raise important questions around the difficulty of changes to research practice. Strains have manifested in our project between what interdisciplinarity is supposed to 'look like' and the messy, intriguing, frustrating business of doing this work, while any practices directly supporting collaboration remain sidelined and patchily implemented.

In this paper we explore how to make visible some of the critical, but neglected and unvalued, activities and thus we expand on the concept of 'social infrastructures'. This approach gives a way to better understand the challenges of interdisciplinarity while enabling practices that scaffold collaboration to be re-evaluated into ‘what counts’ for effective research.

We make the case for social infrastructures in three ways. First, we show how research ‘support’ staff extend their formal roles as ‘infrastructure’. Second, we examine the balance across hybrid, ‘placed’ and ‘unplaced’ working that enables ‘distributed project work’ while concurrently shifting the places of collaborative knowledge production. Third, we ask who benefits from available materials and infrastructures, in and beyond the project.

We argue that the promise of ‘genuine’ inter-/trans-disciplinary collaboration to respond to multifaceted environmental crises cannot be met unless institutions, funders and researchers recognise the centrality of social infrastructures in co-constituting research collaborations.