Three angles from which to view the practice of researchers

My book, Unruly Complexity: Ecology, Interpretation, Engagement (Taylor 2005), considers three angles—like facets of a crystal—from which to view the practice of researchers:

A.  their study of complex situations;

B.  their interactions with other social agents to establish what counts as knowledge; and

C.  their efforts to pursue social change in which they address self-consciously the complexities of their own situatedness as well as of the complexities of the situation studied.

These angles are evident in the larger structure of the book’s three parts: I. Modeling ecological complexity, II. Interpreting ecological modelers in their complex social context; and III. Engaging reflexively within ecological and social complexity.  The complex situations referred to in angle A are primarily those studied in ecology and socio-environmental research, but the complexity of influences studied in the interpretation of science leads to an equivalent set of three angles.

For each angle, I discuss problems with simple formulations of well-bounded systems that have coherent internal dynamics and simply mediated relations with their external context (labeled type 1 formulations in Chapter 6).  I contrast these formulations with work based on dynamics among particular, unequal units or agents whose actions implicate or span a range of social domains (type 3).  I note, however, that simple formulations are easier to communicate than reconstructions of particular situations and simple formulations appear to have more effect on social mobilization.  I introduce, therefore, an in-between kind of formulation (type 2): simple themes that open up issues, pointing to greater complexity and to further work needed in particular cases.  Indeed, opening out across boundaries and opening up questions provides the impetus from each chapter to the next.  This mode of expository and conceptual development is conveyed by the summary in the next post of the book’s themes and the questions opened up.

This 3×3 structure (summarized in a subsequent post) should be applicable to other fields with complex subject matters.

Probe, create change, reflect: A spin-off blog

The name “probe, create change, reflect” comes from the logo below (with “probe” replacing “inquire” to suggest that we need to look beyond first answers):

The logo is that of the Critical & Creative Thinking graduate program where I work, helping mid-career or career-changing students to “develop reflective practice as we change our schools, workplaces, and lives.” Posts on this new blog are in the same spirit. Posts specific to complexity in environment and biomedicine continue to be made on this Intersecting Processes blog (from which the first four months of the new blog have been extracted).  I am imagining that most readers with science and complexity interests will prefer to peruse blogs in that area when they visit this blog and ditto for readers with reflective practice interests when they visit the new blog.  Cross-posting will lead readers from one area of interest to the other, if they are inclined.

Related to the new blog: tweets, wiki on critical thinking and reflective practice

Why a blog? As before:
1. To make sure I write every morning (even if the post is drawn from past work) before the busy-ness of teaching and administration takes over my day.
2. To see if these daily bits of writing and thinking (and recalling past writing and thinking) combine in ways that lead to new insights.
3. To expose my work more widely, including unpublished work, in the hope that kindred thinkers might come across it and make contact.

Q: What constitutes a kindred thinker for the new blog? A: Someone who wants to promote critical thinking and reflective practice through teaching, groups processes, institutional change in the academy, and more broadly.

(Taking the new blog and this Intersecting Processes blog together, a kindred thinker would be someone who is interested in addressing complex situations “that cut across scales, involve heterogeneous components, and develop over time” and in extending this interest to the interpretation of the researcher-in-social-context and to engagements that modify the directions that researchers take—including their own.)

From Social Theory to enactable, contingent social theorizing

In the late 1980s Roberto Mangabeira Unger laid out a “constructive social theory,” which centered on “institutional and imaginative frameworks of social life [that] supply the basis on which people define and reconcile interests, identify, and solve problems.” He went on to note: “These frameworks cannot be adequately explained as mere crystallized outcomes of interest-accommodating or problem-solving activities” (1987, p. 4). Unger sought to present a view of how these “contexts [or frameworks] stick together, come apart, and get remade” (1987, p.5). At the time I was attracted to his efforts but found his work too theoretical, that is, too difficult to translate into practical action. In my thinking about scientific activity I was exploring a notion of representing-engaging, while Unger seemed to be presenting a outside representation of our “society-making powers.”

The same tensions are evident—not resolved—in the summaries I wrote in the notes of Unruly Complexity: Ecology, Interpretation, Engagement (U. Chicago, 2005) on social theory in relation to environmental change and the relation of agency and structure(dness), which are excerpted in the next two posts (Social Theory, agency and structuredness).   The tensions also run through my recent thinking about combining Intersecting processes (which has an outside representational emphasis) with Historical scan (produced by a particular group at a particular time) to generate enactable, group-specific praxis.

How so?

1.  I am interested in social theory (but critical of what I call Social Theory) and think that intersecting processes provides an approach that improves on the well-known structure-agency duality (i.e., actions of social agents are enabled and constrained by social structures and, in acting, social agents imperfectly reproduce those structure).

2.  At the same time my preliminary notes on these issues take more of the representational stance I note above in Unger’s work (see next two posts).

3.  I am also interested in people’s problem-solving and path-charting abilities in well-facilitated collaborative processes (which Unger might criticize as putting too much stock on “crystallized outcomes of interest-accommodating or problem-solving activities”), but have wanted to find ways to inject understandings of structures (or Unger’s structure-making) into these processes.

4.  At the same time I am critical both of a. discussions of the kind what Obama should do, what U.S. policy should be etc., as if the speaker (or the listener) could be transported into that position and act true to their principles without having been changed by the process of assuming this role in the structured system; and b. discussions of the dynamics of capital (or fractions of capital, such as the finance sector) dictating what is possible, as if no-one could assume a role within the structured system that could alter the dynamics and as if the human actors were blind to the real dynamics.  These latter discussions don’t address well the heterogeneity of things people do and say, nor the shifting associations and, to borrow Unger’s words, how they “stick together, come apart, and get remade,” nor the shifts in what any one person does and say from one micro-context to another.

5. I am interested in social theory that addresses the preceeding heterogeneity, shifting associations, and contingency–that brings the multiple strandedness of changing social life into the center (as against being the variation or noise around the deeper [more essential] Social Dynamics [capitalization deliberate here]).  That’s why the variety of responses in the on-the-spot, off-the-cuff discussion about race interested me.  And it’s reflected in my recent thinking about combining Intersecting processes (which has an outside representational emphasis) with Historical scan (produced by a particular group at a particular time) to generate enactable, group-specific praxis.

6. Something I would say, at this stage in my thinking, is that the focus should shift a. from shaping a better social theory to allowing for social theorizing, and b. from representing social dynamics to enacting the social theorizing so as to repeatedly define and pursue engagements in the heterogeneous dynamics that intersect in all kinds of society-making.  Enactable, contingent social theorizing maybe unsettled and unsettling, but should social theorizing be more something all that much easier to grasp than society-making?

Mapping: Can scientists become interpreters of science and bring the interpretations to bear on their science? II

Although the goals of mapping workshops were not fully met in the initial experiments described in the previous post, lessons can be drawn for the more general project of helping researchers reflect on their situatedness and act self-consciously to change their subsequent scientific practice.

1.  The workshop participants were self-selected and by no means representative of researchers.  Almost all of them were advanced graduate students willing to commit time to reflect on their research and possible future directions.  Having cut their teeth as researchers, they were now receptive to expanding the range of influences, both theoretical and practical, in planning their work.[i] The challenge for a workshop convener is to attract researchers other than students and to sustain their interaction long enough for maps to be revised and new collaborations to emerge.  On a simple level, revision could be helped by suitable computer software to draw and redraw maps, so that researchers would be better able to respond to the input of other participants in the workshop.  At a more fundamental level, workshop convenors who hoped to achieve wider participation and sustained interaction would need more institutional resources, workshop leading skills, and time than Haila and I had during these initial mapping workshops.

2.  Mapmakers may not be successful in modifying the directions in which they subsequently move. The original assumption behind mapping was that identifying multiple potential sites of engagement would help mapmaker change, but a successful outcome does not necessarily follow.  As it turned out, for example, E was not able to complete his study of urban carabid ecology.  Making a map or producing some other account of how research is constructed provides no guarantee that researchers will become able to mobilize different resources to their advantage.  Stanley Fish, an influential interpreter of legal texts and literature, takes this insight a step further and asserts that reflection on one’s situatedness is irrelevant to changing it (Fish 1989).

Not surprisingly given my view that all scientific agents “assess… the practical constraints and facilitations of possible actions in advance of their acting” (see post on imagination), I dispute Fish’s assertion.  It should be an empirical matter—one to be established through experiment and experience—which kinds of reflection, workshop processes, and modes of interaction and support contribute most to scientists modifying and restructuring the situations in which they undertake research (see Taylor 2005, Chapter 6, section C2 and C3, and Epilogue; also posts on workshops).  Of course, would-be workshop conveners who hope to experiment and apply the experience gained would need resources, such as those to which I alluded in the previous paragraph.

3.  The maps were centered on the individual mapmaker, tended to be idiosyncratic, and were not explicit about theory about the researchers’ situatedness in society and its implications for their scientific practice.  Again, further experiment and experience would be needed to promote more systematic map-making approaches and to assess their value.  What might happen if, say, workshop leaders urged a standard format, offered models from analogous situations, or promoted various theories or propositions about micro- and macro-social change?  Would some idiosyncrasy still have to be encouraged to ensure that scientists reflect freely on and consider changes in their own particular research settings?

Deciding the extent to which to seek regularized, theoretically explicit maps recalls all the conceptual and methodological choices identified in Taylor (2005, chapter 5, section A):  The boundaries of maps call out for negotiation—how far away from the individual researcher should the “horizon” of the map be drawn?  Should something other than the researcher’s issue be placed at the center?  If shifts in focus are entertained, the appropriate categories for interpreting and engaging with science are far from obvious.  The traditional focus that scientists and philosophers place on scientific claims can be stabilized only by separating research questions from research work and social support.  These realms are routinely traversed by scientists, however, even as they talk as if their scientific work derived only from the situations studied, not from their situatedness.  Moreover, once mapmakers acknowledge the existence of resources in their work situation or in the wider social context, should they look for regularities or structure in those resources?  Should they borrow from social theory and attempt to generalize about the situations in which research is done?  To the extent that generalizations discount or filter out the contingency and idiosyncrasy of scientists’ actions, do they inject a degree of determinism not apparent in the individual situations?  Finally, as answers to these questions are decided, mapmakers might ask what engagements or social actions they are privileging and facilitating.

The questions could be posed not only to mapmakers but also to anyone “reflecting on their situatedness” with a view to “acting self-consciously to change their subsequent scientific practice.”  Yet note the tension between pragmatic considerations and the logic of posing these as open questions (see discussion of practical reflexivity in Taylor 2005, chapter 5, section A).  It is quite a challenge for mapmakers to choose and depict the diversity of connections around their focal issue, without the additional task of reflecting deeply on the categories, boundaries, generalizability, and so on, of their maps.  Indeed, future workshop leaders may facilitate mapmaking by supplying a template of interpretive categories and themes.  Even so, there is nothing natural about the depth to which mapmakers (or other researchers) reflect on their situatedness in seeking to change their practice.  Any choice that mapmakers make or take for granted could be queried by their fellow workshop participants, who could ask how readily that choice could be modified.  Such probing would begin to expose diverse practical considerations that support such choices.

Mapping workshops offer a more direct path for bringing interpretation of science’s sociality to bear productively on scientific practice.  But they do not escape practical reflexivity’s tensions and complexities, which remain not only for the mapmakers but also for workshop conveners.  Conveners might want their workshops to distribute among others the work of interpreting and engaging with research, but this goal is unlikely to be realized unless the convenors have significant institutional resources, workshop leading skills, and free time.  Whether such resources can be assembled is a matter not of the workshop conveners’ will alone, but of their distributed agency.  In my own case, while waiting for an appropriate conjunction of circumstances for further mapping workshops, I used teaching and scholarly presentations to pursue another approach to encouraging researchers to reflect on their diverse resources,, which centered around the concept of intersecting processes.

Extracted from Taylor, P.J. (2005) Unruly Complexity: Ecology, Interpretation, Engagement (U. Chicago Press), chapter 5, Part B.

References

Fish, S. (1989). “Anti-foundationalism, theory hope, and the teaching of composition,” in Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies.  Durham: Duke University Press, 343-355.

Novak, J. D. (1990). “Concept mapping: A useful tool for science education.” Journal of Research in Science Teaching 27(10): 937-949.

Taylor and Y. Haila (1989). “Mapping Workshops for Teaching Ecology.” Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 70(2): 123-125.

---

[i]

Mapping workshops and teaching

One participant of the Helsinki mapping workshop observed that “one question leads to ten questions—What is a lake? Why is phytoplankton one category?…” Another likened mapping to the process of writing and revising: “Like writing, out of mapping comes awareness of new parts of the map that need more work.”  Just as in a good graduate student dissertation research seminars, students raised a whole range of issues—from nagging uneasiness they feel about certain research directions to specific technical points—when these would have remained latent in a seminar dedicated to a specific theme.  Mapping workshops certainly warrant attention from other teachers as an approach to stimulating advanced students to define their research (Taylor and Haila 1989).  This approach, it should be noted, differs markedly from concept mapping (Novak 1990) in which the focus is on well-established relationships between concepts.  Mapping as described in the previous post allows mapmakers to explore what is not yet clear about an issue on which they want to take action.

Why a blog? Why this blog?

Recently I have received some long comments on earlier posts that address genetics and race. I need more time to digest the arguments and research cited, but already see that the direction is not one I agree with. Getting these comments has led me (at the advice of a colleague) to clarify why I am blogging:

1. To make sure I write every morning (even if the post is drawn from past work) before the busy-ness of teaching and administration takes over my day.
2. To see if these daily bits of writing and thinking (and recalling past writing and thinking) combine in ways that lead to new insights.
3. To expose my work more widely, including unpublished work, in the hope that kindred thinkers might come across it and make contact.

Q: What constitutes a kindred thinker? A: Someone who is interested in addressing complex situations “that cut across scales, involve heterogeneous components, and develop over time” and extending this interest to the interpretation of the researcher-in-social-context and to engagements that modify the directions that researchers take (including their own).

Q: What is my attitude about non-kindred thinkers who submit comments? A: Ad hominem comments disparaging others will not be approved for posting. Other comments will be accepted even if that means giving “airplay” to agendas of which I am quite critical. Sometimes I may have time to respond to such comments as I would as a teacher; sometimes not. I may also learn about research and ways of arguing that I need to think more about.

4. To complement, not substitute for, the personal connections through workshops [e.g., NewSSC] or regular conversations [e.g., ISHS].

Q: What combination of kinds of internet-facilitated connectedness is generative, sustaining, sustainable? A: I have been exploring this question with colleagues who make effective use of social media, e.g., making friends after twittering during conferences or having their blogs viewed after commenting on other people’s blogs.  The best result seems to be nested kinds of connectedness, with some people linked in immediately responsive and helpful ways and others just aware of one’s existence.  This is a topic for more exploration, reflection, and discussion.

Future Ideal Retrospective: Collaboratively generate a practical vision for future developments

Collaboratively contribute to each participant generating a practical vision for future developments based on evaluations or on statements, questions, and/or reservations concerning a certain challenge, such as learning from what has happened before (e.g., in a course, at a conference, etc.). This approach is based on Strategic Personal Planning as developed by the Institute for Cultural Affairs in Canada.

Preparation
1. Either a. assemble written evaluations from, say, a conference, or b. ask a defined group (e.g., students in a course) to compose five statements, questions, and/or reservations that are important to them concerning a defined challenge (e.g., supporting each other to complete the course project by the end of the semester).
Session Proper (which may only include a subset of those who composed the evaluations or statements, Qs, etc.)
2. Circulate the sheets. Digest them one by one and make notes on what you read with a view to representing not only your own views but also those of others (who may or may not be present at the session).
3. Future ideal retrospective:

Imagine yourself some time in the FUTURE looking back with a sense of accomplishment on how far the group (e.g., conference organizing group, the students in the course) have come in response to the challenge (e.g., the issues raised the evaluation) = the IDEAL. Construe accomplishment broadly so it can include your own reflection and growth. RETROSPECTIVE: What happened to make this so?–What different kinds of things do you envisage having gone into or contributed to the positive developments?

These things can span the mundane and inspiring; tangible and intangible; process, as well as product; relationships as well as individual skills. Record these things on Post-its (3-5 WORDS IN BLOCK LETTERS)
3a. Discussion in pairs of each other’s post-its while waiting for others to finish.
4. Photocopy assembled post-its (so each participant has a copy).
5. Grouping, naming, and synthesis done separately by each participant:
Once you have about 30 post-its

Move the post-its around into groups of items that have something in common in the way they address the challenge.

Describe the groups using a phrase that has a verb in it or, at least, indicates some action. For example, instead of “Holistic Artistic Survival Project,” an active name would be “Moving holistically from surviving to thriving as artists.”

Group the groups in pairs or threes and give these larger groups descriptive active names.

Group these groups and name them, until you arrive at a descriptive active name for the practical vision post-its as a whole.

After the session
6. Complete stage 5 and distribute them to others (example)

Goals

Collaboratively contribute to each of us generating a practical vision of future steps

Use post-it brainstorming (incl. clustering & naming) to rapidly assess a complex situation in a way that creates an experience of creativity

Experience post-it clustering as a fruitful way to clarify your future and thus go on to complete the activity after the session is over.

The Rs of personal, professional, and intellectual development through a program of studies

When the interdisciplinary graduate program I teach in (CCT) was moved under a Department of Curriculum and Instruction, I decided to learn more about the theory that guided the Curriculum studies field. I came across William Doll’s account of postmodern curriculum design, which centers on another “4R’s”, in this case: richness, recursion, relation, and rigor (Doll 1993). My immediate response was that his R’s do not capture a lot of what goes into CCT students’ mid-career personal and professional development. I soon had twelve R’s, and then more. The figure below took shape as I played with ways to convey that some R’s will make limited sense until more basic Rs have been internalised and that periods of opening out alternate with periods of consolidating experiences to date.

I sometimes present this schema to students as a way to take stock of their own development. I suggest that, at the end of each semester for as many Rs as they are ready to, they give an example and articulate their current sense of the R’s meaning(s). However, I mostly use the many R’s to remind myself as a teacher to expect the flow of development to be windy and less than direct (see note below on the contrast with “backward design”).

Note:
Counterpoint to backward design. The schema of many R’s also stands as a counterpoint to the popular idea of backward design in curriculum, that is: identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence of students achieving those results, plan learning experiences and instruction accordingly, making explicit the sought-after results and evidence (Wiggins and McTighe 2005).

References:
Doll, W. E. (1993). A Post-Modern Perspective on Curriculum. New York, Teachers College Press.
Wiggins, G. P. and J. McTighe (2005). Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

(Extracted from “Teaching/Learning for Reflective Practice,” a section of a book manuscript, Taking Yourself Seriously: A Fieldbook of Processes of Research and Engagement, also on the web.)

Collaboration among diverse participants

“…the challenge of bringing into interaction not only a wider range of researchers, but a wider range of social agents, and to the challenge of keeping them working through differences and tensions until plans and practices are developed in which all the participants are invested.”

The quote comes from p.199 of my book, Unruly Complexity: Ecology, Interpretation, Engagement Chicago UP (2005). In this book, I argue (quoting here from my website homepage) “that both the situations studied and the social situation of the researchers can be characterized in terms of unruly complexity or ‘intersecting processes’ that cut across scales, involve heterogeneous components, and develop over time. These cannot be understood from an outside view; instead positions of engagement must be taken within the complexity. Knowledge production needs to be linked with planning for action and action itself in an ongoing process so that knowledge, plans, and action can be continually reassessed in response to developments — predicted and surprising alike.”

The emphasis on “involv[ing] heterogeneous components” poses a challenge for such a process view of knowledge-making and reassessing, thus the question this session aims to address. The emphasis on “cut[ting] across scales” also sets up a tension that concerns me, namely, taking seriously the participation of diverse people whose livelihood is directly dependent on an ecosystem or city or…, and, at the same time, acknowledging researchers’ professional identities and abilities as people who can contribute analyses of changes that arise beyond the local region or at a larger scale than the local.

A 18 Feb. 2010 faculty seminar addressed these challenges through a post-it brainstorming and clustering (described elsewhere).   In brief, to generate ideas on post-its participants were asked to: “Imagine a project you’re working on or and endeavor you’d like to pursue. It’s 2-3 years in the future. You meet a friend and are telling them how wonderful it is that the project is managing to ‘bring… into interaction not only a wider range of researchers, but a wider range of social agents, and [kept] them working through differences and tensions until plans and practices are developed in which all the participants are invested.’ The friend asks what has contributed to making that possible.”  Each participant then grouped the post-its and named the resulting clusters, then grouped those clusters, etc.  This is my synthesis.

Later, I subject the clusters to back-of-the-envelope “interpretive structural modeling,” in which the cluster is lower in the diagram and linked to a cluster above it if the addressing or acknowledging the consideration reflected in the first cluster makes it easier to address the consideration reflected in the second cluster. The result is given in a prezi presentation, in which the clusters are also grouped within three frames as defined in the original synthesis, and these are grouped into one overall theme at the top.*

* This prezi can be viewed as a whole by zooming in or out using the + and – button. Or, by clicking the arrow you can trace the various pathways of the form addressing/acknowledging the lower consideration makes it easier to address the higher consideration. Or, by clicking the More button you can do this automatically and can see a full screen view.

It is interesting to note that addressing or acknowledging that “FEAR IS REAL, BUT WE HAVE HAD SECURE BASES” lies at the root. In the jargon of ISM, it is a deep driver. (Conversely, not taking time/space to address that makes it harder to make progress on the other concerns.)

Why emphasize collaboration in environmental research?

Since the 1990s collaboration has become a dominant concern in environmental planning and management (Margerum 2008), but the need to organize collaborative environmental research can be traced back at least as far as the tropical rainforest ecosystem projects led by H.T. Odum in the 1950s and 60s (Odum and Pigeon 1970).  This emphasis ran through the International Biological Program (1964-74) and the Long-Term Ecological Research projects that began in 1980.  Yet what exactly is it about developing environmental knowledge that calls for collaboration?  A number of different ways to think about collaboration in environmental research can be readily identified (Taylor 2001).  We divide this list into two categories: the first reflecting the simple idea that collaboration aims for a sum of multiple parts; the second, the hope that something greater than the sum of those parts will emerge through their interaction (Box 1).

Box 1. Why emphasize collaboration in environmental research?

A. Sum of the Parts

Combining multiple perspectives

• When research is tied together with planning and management that involves meetings and networks of representatives of established and emerging stakeholder groups, the knowledge and questions from the different groups and kinds of research needs to inform the research projects (Margerum 2008, Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000).

• When researchers are concerned about social justice, they can shape their inquiries through ongoing work with and empowerment of people whose lives stand to be most affected by some change in social policy or technological development, such as digging of deep wells for irrigation (Greenwood and Levin 1998).

• When the knowledge and research skills of more than one person/specialty are needed, multi-disciplinary research teams are established.

• When the labor of research, especially in data collection, is beyond any research group, amateurs—”citizen scientists”—can be sought as collaborators (Wikipedia n.d., Barrow 2000).

• Workshops and other organized multi-person collaborative processes in environmental research constitute a self-conscious example of what sociologists of science and technology have called “heterogeneous engineering” (i.e., the mobilization of a variety of resources by diverse agents spanning different realms of social action) (Taylor 2005, 93ff).

Extending over time

• The nature of environmental complexity means that ongoing assessment (as against a one-time analysis) is needed, so an ongoing organization or group is formed to conduct the assessment.  (The need for ongoing assessment is recognized in the field of Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management; Resilience Alliance n.d., Gunderson et al. 1995.)

Spanning distance

• Researchers in separate projects and disparate locations use the tools of eco-informatics to combine their data and thereby generate a larger picture (Halpern et al. 2008).

B. Greater than the Sum of the Parts (i.e., outcomes over and above A.)

Generating new perspectives

• Knowledge and further research questions can be generated that the collaborators (individually or in sum) did not have when they came in (Olsen and Eoyang, 2001).

Durable

• Guided by skillful facilitators, collaborators can become invested in the plans, policy, and ongoing collaborations that emerge from the research (Stanfield 2002, 17ff).

Developing capacities

• Collaborators develop skills and dispositions for collaboration in various settings, as warranted by the rise of citizen participation and of new institutions of “civil society” (Burbidge 1997, Taylor 2005, 204ff).

We have expressed the items in the second, “greater than the sum of the parts” category in more generic terms, but we see them as grounded in many of the more concrete objectives of the first category.  At the same time, we recognized that the objectives in the second category raised questions about the theory and practice of collaboration that need not be specific to environmental research:  Why do well-facilitated group processes result in collaborators’ investment in the product of the processes?  How can collaborators (or facilitators of collaboration) ensure that knowledge generated is greater than any single collaborator or sum of collaborators came in with?  How does a person become skilled and effective in contributing to such outcomes?

There is an obvious flip side to these questions.  What can we learn from interdisciplinary workshops and collaborations that fail, for the most part, to generate new knowledge and investment in the product; that do not enhance participants’ ability to contribute to effective collaborations in the future?  Each of us had seen time, energy, funds (and associated carbon footprint) poured into workshops in which the parts competed more than added up to any sum.  Where the pressure for products was allowed to squelch generative processes so that participants perpetuated familiar patterns of defending territory and speaking at cross-purposes.  Where we headed home without being enriched by perspectives and frameworks from other disciplines—and, in many cases, without any products emerging.  Yet, grouching about such frustrating experiences (which seem far from rare) is not productive; the question is how can we do better?

Current Direction of Inquiry: Becoming skilled and effective in contributing to collaborations

Let us pick up the last question that flowed from the “greater than the sum of the parts” objectives: How does a person become skilled and effective in contributing to collaborations?

Excerpt from “Cultivating Collaborators: Concepts and Questions Emerging Interactively From An Evolving, Interdisciplinary Workshop” (with S. Fifield and C. Young) Science as Culture, forthcoming.  (In the meantime, contact me if you want the references.)

Intersecting Processes, autobiographical note

As a student and environmental activist in the 1970s I developed an interest, which continues to this day, in ecological complexity as a challenge to conventional scientific ways of knowing. Although ecological and environmental researchers partition complex situations into well-bounded systems and backgrounded or hidden processes, such moves tend to be confounded by “intersecting processes” that cut across scales, involve heterogeneous components, and develop over time. These cannot be understood from an outside view, I concluded; instead positions of engagement must be taken within the “unruly” complexity.

As I developed this picture, my work in ecology and environmental studies opened out to interpretive studies of science and then to facilitation of critical, reflective practice. The integration of these three levels or angles is evident in my book, Unruly Complexity: Ecology, Interpretation, Engagement (U. Chicago Press, 2005). This work not only examines the problematic boundaries of the complex situations studied by scientists, but also interprets their efforts to build social support for adopting explicit or implicit boundaries and studying what is inside. Similarly for the complex situations interpreted by sociologists, historians, and other scholars in the area now known as science and technology studies (STS). Moreover, I explore ways to stimulate researchers (and students training to become researchers) to examine self-consciously the complexity of their social situatedness so as to change the ways they address the complexity of the situations they study. In recent years, I have transferred this three-level engagement with complexity from ecology to social epidemiological approaches that address the life course development of health and behavior.

See http://www.faculty.umb.edu/pjt and http://sicw.wikispaces.umb.edu for more detail.

Note: Blog posts will also address critical thinking and reflective practice in environment, biomedicine, and social change, but the picture of intersecting processes will usually be there in the background.