Interdisciplinary scientific teams are increasingly prevalent, and there is growing interest for the processes by which knowledge emerges, in practice, across team members with heterogeneous backgrounds. Here I present the case study of a large collaborative project across the Universities of Maroua, Cameroon and Ohio State, USA, which involved social scientists, earth scientists, ecologists, computer scientists, local fishermen and rural development specialists. The project aimed to study the dynamics of a floodplain fishery system in Cameroon, using a combination of field research, remote sensing analysis, and numerical modeling. One of the explicit objectives of the original proposal was to ‘develop an integrated computer model to simulate the dynamic couplings among social, ecological and hydrological systems of the floodplain’. For this talk I am positioning myself as both a participant in the project and a student of its unfolding. I start by introducing some of the project’s research outcomes, and then move on to a preliminary analysis of the collaborative process itself. Based on three years of data from team meetings and collaborative platforms, I explore the elements that made our heterogeneous scientific practices gradually ‘hang together’. I argue that in our case, it was more useful to consider the numerical model as an epistemic processes supporting interdisciplinary exchange, rather than solely as a research outcome.

Contact:

Sarah Laborde, Postdoctoral Researchers

Dept. of Anthrolopogy, The Ohio State University