Building 'home' & leaving it

Academic Home: Building Tribes and Transcending Boundaries?

Dr Lisa Mooney 2020

This is a short extract compiled from a number of papers focused upon bringing the arts and humanities into the innovation and interdisciplinary space we often call knowledge exchange (hereafter KE). The narratives and deliberations have sought to discuss and uncover the nature of building one’s disciplinary ‘home’, establishing one’s ‘tribe’ or ‘value chain’ and then crossing the boundaries of both discipline and industries to collaborate and innovate. This is not always an easy journey for many disciplines, and I will touch upon the importance of finding one’s way through to interdisciplinary practices.?

Through the collision between unusual disciplines and industry engagements, KE and innovation more often comes about. I have witnessed this in interesting places throughout my career - between corporate banking and philosophy, geospatial science and painting, music and magnetic resonance, dancers and engineers. Much of these experiences have shaped my career pathway, allowing me to move through academia with the knowledge and expertise to broker and orchestrate new and impactful partnerships. This paper briefly touches upon some of these and aims to challenge our thinking and extend our risk appetite toward more innovative approaches and methodologies.

Interdisciplinarity and KE are inextricably tied. They involve stepping into the unchartered, taking a critical journey off-piste, where one may need to leave markers behind to find a way home. No two journeys or destinations are the same, and few routes are easy, and even fewer recognisable or often rewarding.?

Then why are we preoccupied in wandering the complexities of the interdisciplinary and KE landscape? Why do we seek to find our place in the home of others, and when we do, why might it be so challenging to the notion of disciplinary home, where our rewards and recognition have been built throughout a career and across generations of academics before us??

Although the analogy seems somewhat domestic, it does open up the story of the development of ‘home’ in the context of one’s discipline, and the theme begins to widen its parameters to enable us to discuss tribes and territories, boundaries and peripheries, the pathways between, as well as the porosity and promiscuous behaviours inherent in the academic nomad. Both the conceptual boundaries and methodological challenges present a diversity that is often hard to pin down across the equally diverse landscape of multiple disciplines and variegated industries. Medical Humanities and Human Geography for example, are just two fields that have grown up with an extricable tie to interdisciplinary research, but they have also ensured that interdisciplinary learning has fed back into the mono discipline, as well as seeking a contemporary application beyond academia. This two- way dialogue and exchange between disciplines and industries has perhaps brought some unified understanding to the practices and their impact on one’s disciplinary home. Here the notion of value has perhaps begun to transcend tradition.?

Berger’s ‘vast archipelago’ describes the islands of the disciplines that require specific knowledge and tools to navigate beyond their territories effectively, and more often in collaboration with others. It is with this practical navigation and skills that we hone some key challenges around building an academic career. What are those navigation skills, where might we find them, and when is the best time to set out on the journey? It is rare that our disciplines broach the competency conversation; either for Interdisciplinarity or KE, and therefore our understanding of these skills remain immature for many disciplines and disparate as a result. In considering the notion of the interdisciplinary and KE appetite, we are perhaps witnessing new characters and behaviours?

entering academia. Our students and early career academics are bringing a completely new suite of competencies with them. They are starting to build new repertoires, pushing the boundaries of new landscapes, less fearful perhaps of leaving home and forming chains of multiple players, and as a result becoming more intellectually agile and mobile, more able perhaps to move beyond the boundaries of past practices.?

Despite a new academic breed coming into this space, it is evident that those living in the current environment are more often at odds with interdisciplinarity and KE and the recognised rewards and recognition that travel with it. In order to establish one’s career, we must still build the foundations and strength of a distinct disciplinary home, in order to open the door and confidently wander beyond it.?

Might we begin to build resilience and set new terms of reference, and if so, how do we change the perceptions and values of those measuring and establishing the boundaries of a discipline? This is a long game. Interdisciplinarity and KE has a firm chronology in academia that requires us to build faith, partnerships and sustainable communities of practice. This takes time. Igniting the culture and behaviour inherent in interdisciplinarity and KE and bringing it in to our curriculum is also a critical component to long term, sustainable change. In enriching and animating the learning experience of young people and early career academics, might we ignite the competencies for leaving home and building new alliances, therefore establishing more normative behaviours and practices between academia and industry??

I have recently had the pleasure of working with a large group of health humanities academics, talking about interdisciplinarity and its role in bringing about KE. Many of these academics sought to move beyond the disciplinary and career boundaries, but swiftly recognised that it could often be a lonely place, where you sometimes end up feeling like a stranger at home and away. We discussed the chronology of their early careers, where they had bravely opened the door to a long, slow journey across that ‘vast archipelago’ between professional practice and academia. Most noted was the challenge in embarking on an interdisciplinary career in partnership with new types of sectors and industries, not common to the humanities or health disciplines. They described the way in which the ground continually shapes and shifts in industry, and often at what feels like great speed, and whilst you are looking and residing in one space, the other is moving on without you. One cannot possibly be in two places at once, and one certainly cannot earn the rewards and recognition when one is not seen to be present and residing elsewhere.?

We are essentially movers and shakers between and across the disciplinary and industry boundaries, and although often a rich, fulfilling and exciting space, many feel isolated and alone when found furthest from their discipline. This is where we need to find a hardy resilience and perseverance, as well as intellectual agility, to survive and influence the territory. Despite the challenges, the intellectual rewards are often great. One does become hardier as one traverses the landscape, as one picks up the requisite tools and mechanisms to survive and thrive.?

Interdisciplinary researchers may offer new approaches and insights, develop new ground, new languages and new ways of thinking. Those who are at the early career stage are beginning to enter academia with a different backdrop to academic life, that has not yet developed deep rooted cultures and practices. Is not the potential synthesis between shaping our homes and shaping the homes of others, the academic to industry ecosystem we desire, but perhaps remain a little conflicted by??

In summarising this short narrative around the tensions and boundaries of Interdisciplinarity and KE, we come back to some intrinsic hurdles that require us to regroup and begin to reframe our thinking. Whether it is in defining these new qualities, skills and competencies, or addressing the optimum moment and the critical timing, we must expose the challenge and bring it up and out into the ether. It is demanded of us to open the imagination to interdisciplinary research and KE practices, move into these spaces, fill them with confidence and coherence, with brokers, collaborators and change agents. We must stop imagining it and start doing it. Shift it purposefully into the grand challenges space, animating it whilst learning and uncovering its principles and practices. We must convene and gather as cohorts and players in the value chains that bring about KE. Build fellowships that might begin to inform it, shape career pathways through it. Implicate upon the very space it occupies and inform a confident navigation toward new ground.?

It is up to us as academics, when learning to traverse that inextricable interface between Interdisciplinarity and KE, to collectively begin to inform it, and bring down boundaries that have been constructed around it. We need to be brave and persistent whilst making this unique space highly permeable, with perforated borders that start to allow us and our industry collaborators through and back again with more ease. Only by doing will we learn what it takes to recognise its shape, purpose and ultimate impact. To feel equipped to build ‘home’ and then confidently leave it.?