(Un)settling differences: Re-conceptualisations of technologically-mediated interdisciplinary research in Higher Education

Increasing prominence continues to be given to interdisciplinary collaboration as a means of addressing challenges within academia, the private sector and government (Frodeman, Klein and Pacheco, 2017). In parallel, new and innovative technologies have been positioned as mediating artefacts in these endeavours (Mulcahy, 2013). Yet there is a need for enhanced understandings of these technologically-mediated interdisciplinary practices in order to acknowledge the depth and complexities of the phenomena, attending to the socio-materiality of humans and non-humans, to (un)settle the ‘grand narratives’ of interdisciplinarity and technology, and ‘to interrogate the unity of interdisciplinarity’ (Barry and Born, 2013: 5). This research focusses on generating deeper and more nuanced insights into how interdisciplinary research happens in projects building new technologies in Higher Education. The complexities inherent in studying interdisciplinary concepts, researchers and technologies necessitates a more critical approach which can account for the heterogeneity of practices, multiplicity of participants and ontologies, and constantly shifting relations (Mol, 2002; Barry, Born and Weszkalnys, 2008; Donaldson, Ward and Bradley, 2010). This study therefore adopts a qualitative design which conceptually, theoretically and methodologically draws from Science and Technology Studies (STS) (Sismondo, 2010), and more specifically, from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Law, 2004; Latour, 2005; Fenwick and Edwards, 2018). The core research question is: How are the socio-material practices of interdisciplinarity in research projects co-developing new technologies, in a US University, enacted? Through a praxiographic, collective case study of three interdisciplinary research projects (a Medical Robotics project, a Digital Humanities initiative and an Energy project) based at a University in the USA with a strong socio-historical culture of innovation, this study ‘follows the actors’ through the unfolding processes of interdisciplinary teams moving from research questions to emerging technological outcomes in order to investigate enactments of interdisciplinarity (Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Callon, 1986; Thompson and Rimpiläinen, 2012). Situated, distributed interdisciplinarities are found to be mediated and embodied by technologies-in-development, often irreducible to their antecedent parts, and ‘made of’ relational tensions. These findings bring forward the multiplicities of interdisciplinarity in practice, moving away from ‘conventional’ framings of interdisciplinarity as synthesis or boundary-crossing. This study also reflects upon how drawing from ANT has productively ‘opened up’ these multiplicities, moving from (inter)disciplinary perspectives to (inter)disciplinary realities, and illuminating how non-humans also participate in research practices in Higher Education. This research contributes rich empirical accounts of interdisciplinarity and technological development to the existing body of knowledge around the phenomena, and advances theoretical and methodological applications of ANT in Education (Sørensen, 2009; Fenwick and Edwards, 2010, 2018). The findings hold broad implications for substantive promotion of enhanced conceptual, socio-material understandings of technologically-mediated interdisciplinary practices.