Openness to social science knowledges? The politics of disciplinary collaboration within the field of UK food security research

This paper explores a form of knowledge politics played out within and between universities and research institutes as sites of certified disciplinary expertise in the agro-food domain. It investigates the ‘openness’ of this domain to the expertise of the agro-food social sciences particularly when challenge-led research programmes require collaboration across disciplines. A case study is provided by the multi-discipline field of food security research in the UK involving interviews with key stakeholders. The paper examines how this research field’s disciplinary diversity is understood by key stakeholders. Interview data are analysed thematically in terms of the current and potential contribution of social science disciplines, the different ways in which stakeholders imagine social science research, and whether social scientists themselves recognise and align with these different imaginaries. The paper concludes by arguing that the field of food security research in the UK is only ‘selectively open’ to agro-food social science knowledges and that this is likely to have negative implications for addressing the challenges of food security. Further, if the promise of collaborative working between disciplines in agro-food research fields is to be made good then the emphasis of agro-food knowledge politics scholarship and the governance of knowledge making needs to change