Centering: Proposals for an Interdisciplinary Research center

Governmental organizations funding science m several nations are creating large research centers that draw on several disciplines and that focus research on an area of immediate use to industrial concerns. I analyze eight proposals for a U.K. center devoted to human communication. I argue that the boundaries that such a center seeks to cross— between areas of knowledge, between disciplines, between academic and nonacademic research—are constructed in the proposals for strategic purposes m the immediate situations. The study supports other recent work on the crucial role of texts as interme-diaries in the science policy processes, and on the need to recognize the unexpected contingencies and unintended consequences of textual circulation. I have collected nine proposals written in 1989 and submitted to the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in response to the announcement of an interdisciplinary research center (IRC) on the topic of human communication. The aim of an IRC is, as the name suggests, to break down disciplinary boundaries and to centralize research geographically, institutionally, and intellectually. The plans for IRCs suggest that suc