Toppling the totem pole. How deleterious are hierarchies for interdisciplinary research work?

Degavre, Florence;Edwards Maisa;Tateo Luca;Ingrid Aguiar Schlindwein;Abbasi Zahra;et.al.
(2022) INTERDISCIPLINARY AND TRANSDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT SECOND EDITION - INCREASING THE CONTRIBUTION OF TRA — Location: Louvain-La-Neuve (24.November.2022)

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Abstract
Despite the emphasis by policy makers and university leaders on the necessity of bridging disciplines and expertises of all sorts toward solutions to Grand Societal Challenges, the in-depth practice of interdisciplinarity remains difficult and marginal. Such endeavors usually face obstacles. One of them are existing hierarchies between disciplines and between researchers- both in universities and in the research community itself. This assumption emerged from discussions between the article’s authors at the first Circle U-Global Health meeting last September in Louvain-La-Neuve. The goal of our contribution is to carefully build up on the hierarchy-hypothesis as one crucial yet under-studied obstacle to interdisciplinarity in research work. The hierarchical nature of academia, materialized in the differential of value given to disciplines and methodologies used or the evaluation of researchers’ performance have led to the creation of a totem pole: a ladder of challenges that must be overcome in order to perform interdisciplinary work. In a first part, we will identify hierarchies in research work and at what crucial moments they appear. We will then review the scientific and non-scientific explanations for the separation of disciplines in the first place that led to hierarchies. In particular we will look at individual and institutional gatekeeping attitudes in universities and in the research community. The deleterious aspect of hierarchies will be analysed in a third section. Questioning hierarchies as a potential obstacle to interdisciplinarity becomes even more significant at a time when the environmental crisis made us aware of how catastrophic the positivistic decision of drawing the disciplinary border was. These new global issues have led to a renewal of longing for old unity of intents all around the globe, hence the flourishing of transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary new fields - such as Ethnobiology, Environmental Humanities, Digital Humanities,One Health, Health Ecology etc. – which try to approach knowledge from a holistic, complex, systemic, and non-reductionist epistemology. Our conclusions will discuss how to mitigate those identified hierarchies of different nature through a learning and respect culture, adequate organisation of space and time and adapting research design.
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Degavre, F., Edwards Maisa, Tateo Luca, Ingrid Aguiar Schlindwein, Peeters, A., Daprà, M. M., & Abbasi Zahra. (2022). Toppling the totem pole. How deleterious are hierarchies for interdisciplinary research work? INTERDISCIPLINARY AND TRANSDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT SECOND EDITION - INCREASING THE CONTRIBUTION OF TRA, Louvain-La-Neuve. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/246410