Integration topologies help interdisciplinary researchers critically reflect on their collaboration
Résumé
Why examine how integration occurs in interdisciplinary teams? Rosé & Lund (2013) showed how facilitating analyses of shared data between researchers from different traditions makes them realize how brittle an analysis conducted from only one perspective can be, thus setting the stage for integrating analyses from other viewpoints. Integration can arise from engaging with divergent assumptions underlying our own theories and methods and those of others. This can lead to strategically reformulating our assumptions in order to find common ground for exchanging insights with our colleagues (Lund, et al., 2013).
The Input-Process-Output (IPO) model of integration has been applied to accounts of cross-disciplinary work (O'Rourke, Crowley & Gonnerman, 2016; Laursen 2018) and used to evaluate how effectively review teams integrate knowledge (Bugin, et al., 2021). But can the IPO model and its extensions be mobilized during interdisciplinary projects to help researchers make sense of their own activities?
We analyze visualizations of interdisciplinarity as well as interview data from 8 interdisciplinary projects within a 5-year 4,3M€ project on language complexity in France. Results show how integrative relations (O’Rourke and Crowley 2012) and topologies of integration (Laursen 2023), both based in the IPO model, help researchers make sense of intertwining contributions at project, research phase, and task levels. After using these models to facilitate embedded, intentional reflection, researchers imagined using them for organizing grant proposals, writing papers, and reporting to funders, each of which could benefit from more explicit description of cross-disciplinary integration. Integration topologies render research practices explicit and should be a tool for Integration Experts (Hoffmann, et al., 2022). We conclude with ways our empirical results can be used to refine frameworks and models of integration.
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