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Paper short abstract

Combining literature review with ethnographic vignettes, this paper explores the affective labour of interdisciplinarity among early-career life scientists. It conceptualises “the middle” as a reflexive and methodological space for examining ambiguity, belonging, and everyday research practice.

Paper long abstract

Interdisciplinarity is routinely invoked as a solution to contemporary scientific and societal challenges, and increasingly framed as a prerequisite for building resilient futures. Within the life sciences, early-career researchers are frequently positioned as key agents of this work: expected to collaborate across epistemic boundaries, translate values and methods, and sustain productive research cultures under conditions of uncertainty, acceleration, and institutional pressure. Yet the affective and ethical labour required to inhabit these interdisciplinary spaces remains under-theorised in science and technology studies.

Drawing on an ongoing ethnographic study embedded within interdisciplinary cardiometabolic research environments in Denmark, this paper combines a critical review of STS and medical-humanities literatures on interdisciplinarity, research culture, and affect with a series of reflexive ethnographic vignettes. These vignettes emerge from what I conceptualise as the middle: the lived, often uncomfortable space of occupying an in-between position characteristic both of early-career researchers navigating interdisciplinary environments and of the researcher studying them. Working within this hyphenated position foregrounds experiences of “fuzziness”: frustration, ambivalence, partial belonging, and identity negotiation not as methodological obstacles but as analytically productive sites.

This paper suggests that interdisciplinarity is less a stable attribute than an ongoing, affectively charged process sustained through informal practices of care, narrative work, and value articulation often invisible within institutional accounts of collaboration. It proposes the ‘middle’ as both an empirical object and methodological stance for examining how resilient futures are imagined and sustained from within the systems they analyse.