‘Jack of all trades’? The negotiation of interdisciplinarity within geography

Defining Terms for Integrated (Multi-Inter-Trans-Disciplinary) Sustainability Research

“…While these are important concerns there is perhaps a more fundamental issue that needs to be addressed. Robinson [27] suggests that integrated research has for many years been "bedeviled ... by an ongoing and unresolved discussion about terminology"-an issue that is observed by practically any researcher who cares to investigate researchers' understandings of integrated research terminologies [5,[27][28][29][30].…”

A Masterclass in interdisciplinarity: Research into practice in training the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers

“…Nevertheless, we share many common challenges when supporting interdisciplinary research capacity (see for example [9]) and US funders are also finding non curriculum-based approaches to supporting early stage interdisciplinary researchers such as the Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF), offered by the US Social Science Research Council. 1 Many commentators, from both sides of the Atlantic (for example [17,30]), have called for radical changes in the ways in which interdisciplinary scholars of the future are trained. One such approach is the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) scheme of the US National Science Foundation.…”

“…Lau and Pasquini [30] speak for many when they describe the practical obstacles facing interdisciplinary scholars and the 'common struggle to find a disciplinary niche' or negotiate an identity, not least because the boundaries of interdisciplinary research are under constant negotiation. These authors discuss how 'the expectations, attitudes, and approaches of researchers, and their very conceptualising of interdisciplinarity, are all influenced by their personal backgrounds to a considerable degree, although the extent of this influence may be neither noticed nor acknowledged', an aspect they term 'positionality'.…”

“…debate, may be in large part due to the myriad 'positionalities' of spectators of, and actors in, interdisciplinary research. Even committed interdisciplinary scholars fail to recognise the degree to which their academic positionalities (including in the case of the geographers they studied: specialism, age, training and possibly gender and seniority) affect their stances to, and understandings of, interdisciplinary research [30].…”

Ethnography, Ethnographers and Hospitality Research: Communities, Tensions and Affiliations

“…Beyond a psychological experience, displacement may also emerge as a real inability to access social networks, institutions, funding, jobs and academic forums, including publication outlets. It may also be evident in the devaluing or marginalisation of work in institutional performance reviews (Lau and Pasquini, 2008). The remaining part of this paper considers the underlying factors that continue to present challenges for ethnographers working in hospitality management schools.…”