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Paper short abstract:

Medical anthropologists are well versed in presenting ethnographic ways of working to either anthropological or health audiences and their writing styles. Further transdisciplinary partnerships are less familiar but can challenge us to step out of narrow academic conventions.

Paper long abstract:

Inter- or transdisciplinary research is increasingly valued - from funding calls to university strategies. Yet transgressing siloed disciplinary standards and structures invokes many challenges familiar to medical anthropologists. Our own project aimed to assemble transdisciplinary data of Caribbean foodscapes in partnership between health researchers, historians and anthropologists. While as medical anthropologists we are well versed in translating our ethnographic ways of working into the language of health sciences’ research protocols or methods reporting, working with historians and their more implicit ways of undertaking research required a new set of translational efforts and sensibilities in all directions. Although transdisciplinary knowledge-making can be an iterative and fluid process of co-learning -- for us this meant working with media archives of advertisement, historical accounts of sugar economies, current and past health data and conducting interviews and collating oral food histories -- the act of writing up these insights resurrected challenges and boundaries. Trying to negotiate how our transdisciplinary knowledge could be returned to disciplinary methodological boundaries of journals, challenged us to consider what is gained or lost by adhering to such reporting standards and telling our joint stories within narrow academic constraints. The common solution found by those of us working across disciplinary boundaries tends to be to write for different audiences in separate publications, but by doing so, we fragment and restrict our insights and assume that audiences would not want to engage with one another. More creative solutions and venues are needed to continue dialogue across disciplinary boundaries.