Episode 1: Navigating the Complex World of Interdisciplinary Research
In this episode we're diving into the exciting journey of interdisciplinary research—what it means, the challenges it poses, and how it can be a catalyst for transformative change.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the SOSC 730 podcast series. This is your host, Dr. Siomonn Pulla. I hope you're enjoying some good weather wherever you are in the world today. Today we're going to dive into the exciting journey of interdisciplinary research. What it means, the challenges it poses, and how it can be a catalyst for transformative change. I'm excited to see where our interdisciplinary journey together goes over the next few months, so let's get started.
First off, I want to highlight the importance of relationship management as a key element of a successful research journey. This is so important. Once you transition from the course work portion of the program into your self-directed research, managing the dynamics and expectations of your committee becomes very important. This includes the importance of contingency planning and adaptive management. Flexibility is crucial and this also speaks to the issue of participant recruitment. If you face challenges with participant recruitment, sometimes this is a signal for you to consider pivoting the research or even using the challenges of participant recruitment as data. Sometimes our best ideas don't necessarily work out the way we think they will.
As interdisciplinary scholar practitioners, we must navigate many complex situations due to the nature of our work and the intersections between our academic and professional selves. Having a conscious awareness of these complexities is the first step to addressing and embracing this potential. As interdisciplinary scholar practitioners, we have a very unique and amazing opportunity to design and conduct research in ways that may defy conventional and disciplinary boundaries, and that support us in addressing the complex intersections between our scholarly and practitioner work and selves. This may mean developing new theoretical and methodological approaches to explore issues from new perspectives and combining methodologies and methods in new ways to develop new knowledge and mobilizing our research in ways that can contribute to transformative possibilities for ourselves, our families, our communities, our nations, and even outward to the cosmos. I feel like the possibilities really are endless for all of your emerging research projects. But, and here's the but, you need the right team to support your vision and the right practical elements to support the journey. So, together, in SOSC 730 we're going to all work together to explore some of these opportunities and possibilities and challenges and see what emerges.
I feel like researcher self-care is an often overlooked aspect of the deep work we do as researchers. Working on challenging research requires us to have a deep self-care approach so we can ensure that we can continue to show up in the best way to honor the research, the participants and ourselves through the process. One of my students who successfully defended her dissertation a few years ago, developed and piloted a land based mental health program with and four indigenous peoples in northern Saskatchewan. One of the big takeaways from the research was the importance of researcher and team self-care. In this case, it was the crucial role of ceremony, such as sweat lodges, smudging and prayer, as a support for research or self-care. The role of self-care, and its many different forms is something I will really encourage all of you to reflect on as you begin to lay the groundwork for your work.
I'm hoping that after this unit, Unit 1, we can all celebrate the idea that knowledge derived from practice and lived experience is not only valid but crucial in designing and mobilizing tangible research that is applicable to real world issues and useful to communities, organizations and society. Interestingly, this epistemological distinction between practice and academic research has increasingly been shrinking over the past decades, especially in social science disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and history. And this is really in response to the rise and proliferation of critical theories and the links between power, knowledge and lasting issues of social inequalities related to colonization, globalization and the rise of the military industrial complex in the 20th century.
Being trained as an anthropologist and with a background working with indigenous communities, I'm amazed how it has now become pretty much mainstream for an academic researcher to design, conduct, and mobilize research that is inclusive and of use for the community or organization or whoever is involved with the research. I've been asking—rhetorically mostly, in response to the increasing polarization of difference that we see and this race to adopt diversity and inclusion initiatives by organizations—I've been asking this question how can we really celebrate our differences instead of using them as a line in the sand or even as a check box to mitigate risk?
The authors of Chapter 3 challenge us to view our research as a catalyst for transformative change. Gone are the days of helicopter research. We're now in an era where research benefits, not just the researcher but the community at large. To support this epistemological shift, methodologies and their associated methods—how the data are collected and analyzed— have also had to shif. I find it interesting that participatory, collaborative, reflective, and relational methodologies now lean way more towards the practice side of the spectrum, or what Maxwell calls mode 2 knowledge production. In fact, it is increasingly challenging to conduct social science research within a purely mode 1 framework, which used to be the gold standard of academia.
In SOSC 720, you became familiar with the ideas of research paradigms—more generally known as the post-positivist, post-structural, constructionists, critical, indigenous and pragmatic paradigms. Well over the next 11 units, we're going to explore how qualitative research methodologies are marked by a diversity of theoretical paradigms, methodologies and methods. We will begin to narrow the field to help you better understand which paradigm informs your study design, who or what will be studied, which research methodology will be used and which research methods you can use to collect and analyze your data.
This week we start to focus the discussion a bit and begin to explore some of the practical aspects of your research design. I also want you to begin to consider how the dissertation format fits into your overall research design. Consider that the research to support a portfolio dissertation can look and feel very different than the research designed for a traditional dissertation by monograph. Also, your reflections from the Unit 1 forum will most likely find their way into your Assignment 1, so remember, with this assignment— assignment 1— that it's a, it's a reflexive exercise. So don't worry too much about adhering to a scholarly format. What's really important is that you begin to allow yourself to be open to possibilities. Don't shy away from asking those hard “What is it” questions and jumping into those complex rabbit holes that emerge.
Well, thanks everyone. I'm looking forward to some lively discussions in the unit forum. If you're interested in having a chance to meet virtually once a month, please join our upcoming conversation and check the Moodle page for time, date and login details. For those conversations—and remember these virtual discussion circles are totally voluntary, I understand you all have complex schedules and multiple demands on your time and energy—these discussion circles are an opportunity for us to come together and support each other in our learning. Remember, we're co-creating this learning community and figuring out what best fits for all of us. And also remember, I'm always just a phone call away or an e-mail away if you have any questions or would like to connect to chat.
Well, that's all for today's episode, folks. Thanks for joining me on this deep dive into interdisciplinary research. Remember, this journey is as much about asking the hard questions as it is about finding the answers. Until next time: stay curious, take care, and happy researching!
