School of Social and Political Science

Description

Research that crosses disciplines and sectors is seen as a key component of efforts to reduce, for example, the greenhouse gas emissions associated with agriculture and rising rates of chronic disease related to poor diets.  UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has invested several million pounds in Transforming the UK Food System (TUKFS) a five-year research programme that aims to provide a range of solutions to improve the health of the population and the environment. Inter-, multi-and transdisciplinary research is central to this programme as many of the TUKFS projects and consortia describe themselves as conducting some form collaborative research.

This presentation describes a piece of small-scale exploratory research investigating the different kinds of collaborative research that have been undertaken within some of the 27 TUKFS projects. It draws on an ongoing series of qualitative interviews that I have been conducting with researchers and research professionals working on these projects.  I will present a preliminary analysis of this data making use of approaches from science and technology studies, the scholarship on inter- and transdisciplinary research and feminist studies of academic labour. Using this framework, I describe some of the skills and attributes required by researchers and research managers when researching complex social problems in this manner, as well highlighting what kinds of unacknowledged labour are important to this work.