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This chapter shows how Sanjib Datta Chowdhury’s anthropological work on spatial rituals in a Dutch residential home for the elderly changed my historical narrative on postwar policies concerning such homes. My initial argument revolved around policymakers’ reports and their notions of good care and independency. Chowdhury’s approach, however, made me revisit both my sources and analysis. First, I started studying the architectural plans and photography in the policy reports in more detail. Second, the ways in which these visualizations marked spaces as private, public, or semi-public, enabled me to explore how middle-class conceptions of what belongs to which type of space-at home, in villages, and in cities-co-inspired the layout of the residential homes. This warranted, in turn, a contribution to Chowdhury’s interpretations of spatial rituals. A more performative reading of the homes’ architectural representation as ritualized space, however, would have enriched the analysis and deepened interdisciplinary integration.

The August 2003 heatwave resulted in an additional 15, 000 deaths in France, mostly among the very old. In the wake of the disaster, an annual Solidarity Day (Journée de Solidarité) was introduced. By cancelling a public holiday, the French government sought to raise 2 billion euros to finance healthcare for older people and people who live with disabilities. The first such day in May 2005 led to confusion, with opposition from unions, demonstrations by public sector employees, and uncertainty in the general workforce. Using Marcel Mauss’ theory of gift and reciprocity, this chapter explores and tries to understand this confusion. It examines the moral and political obligations placed upon workers, older people, and the Republic through the engineering, or coercing, of collective solidarity. The chapter explores a fascinating contemporary case that tests the relevance and limits of Mauss’ gift cycle in the context of policy studies.

This open access book illustrates how interdisciplinary research develops over the lifetime of a scholar: not in a single project, but as an attitude that trickles down, or spirals up, into research. This book presents how interdisciplinary work has inspired shifts in how the contributors read, value concepts, critically combine methods, cope with knowledge hierarchies, write in style, and collaborate. Drawing on extensive examples from the humanities and social sciences, the editors and chapter authors show how they started, tried to open up, dealt with inconsistencies, had to adapt, and ultimately learned and grew as researchers. The book offers valuable insights into the conditions and complexities present for interdisciplinary research to be successful in an academic setting.

Researchers from Máxima Medical Centre in Eindhoven and Eindhoven University of Technology expect to have developed a prototype of an artificial womb by 2025. In collaboration with this team, speculative designers have designed a prototype of the artificial womb and organized an accompanying design-fiction exhibition. The exhibition imagined scenarios meant to spark debates about the ways in which the artificial womb might alter our attitude toward reproduction. This chapter shows how the prototype of the artificial womb has affinities with several past imaginations of women’s bodies as sites of ongoing contestation and exploitation. This simultaneously taps into a range of medical historical considerations and age-old ideas about reproduction and motherhood. Situating the prototype-design of the artificial womb in such historical settings with a philosopher’s eye for potential associations enables me to illustrate the wide ramifications of interdisciplinary collaborations between the arts, humanities, and sciences.

The open science movement promises to change the production and dissemination of academic knowledge by making the processes and results of research transparent and available, to the benefit of individual researchers, the pocketbooks of funders, and the research enterprise as a whole. Open, accessible, and standardized research data are seen as essential scaffolding for realizing these promises. Sharing and documenting research data, for example, offer a potential antidote to problems with reproducibility in science by providing a way to validate experimental findings. Reusing research data provides potential economic benefits, by limiting the amount of possibly redundant and nearly always costly data collection. Shared pools of research data offer new possibilities for using data science techniques to tackle society’s most wicked problems. Working to support these visions, data repositories and scientific publishers have increasingly become entangled in mass operations of data documentation and exchange. New tools have been developed to facilitate the discovery of data, and funders and policy makers have implemented policies at national and institutional levels for both open science and data management (European Commission, 2019). Users are invoked as being central to many of these efforts. Designers of data search tools experiment with sophisticated methods to present the user with the best possible results (e.g., Brickley et al., 2019). Educational tools are designed to help users of repositories and data management tools construct data which are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, or FAIR (Wilkinson et al., 2016). Various metadata schemas, standards, and tools are developed to aid users in discovering and understanding data (e.g., Ohno-Machado et al., 2017). Despite this stated user focus, the concept of the ‘user’ or ‘users,’ similar to that of ‘data’ and of the practices surrounding data reuse, is conceptualized differently across and within disciplinary domains. In many technical and design-oriented areas of information and computer science, users often remain at arm’s length, visible only via ensembles of click behavior, search logs, or data management plans (Van House, 2004). This acontextual, homogenous view of users contrasts with the heterogeneous, embedded, and socially constructed understanding of use which characterizes work in science and technology studies (STS) (Wyatt, 2003). Research rooted in these two conflicting views is often undertaken along parallel, yet isolated tracks. When they do intersect, communication between these two perspectives on users is challenging (Tabak, 2014). This chapter reflects upon a project which knit together differing notions of ‘users’ as a way of grounding interdisciplinary research. In addition to producing novel insights about the reuse of research data, this approach also served to bridge the distance between STS researchers and computer scientists, and between designers of data search systems and users themselves. After explaining the context of the project, we begin from the end, highlighting the results and outcomes which our ‘integrative-synthesis’ approach to interdisciplinarity (Barry et al., 2008) afforded. We then turn to the development of our interdisciplinary approach by exploring the conceptual roots of users within information/computer science and STS and discussing how we wove these ideas together within our research. We conclude by identifying and reflecting on three points that may be applicable to others conducting interdisciplinary research: (i) a common (yet differently conceptualized) idea, for example, ‘users,’ can serve as an anchor for interdisciplinary work, much in the way of a boundary object; (ii) interdisciplinarity itself is an evolving, contextual construct; and (iii) the broader impacts of interdisciplinary research may change perspectives and practices in ways which are difficult to trace.

What makes or breaks interdisciplinary collaborations is how well a team can work together. In this chapter, we focus on the work that is behind teamwork. We explain what ‘doing’ interdisciplinary teamwork entails by drawing parallels with the subject of our research: ‘doing’ family. We draw our examples from the transnational child raising arrangements projects (tcra and tcraf-eu), investigating how transnational migrant families ‘do family’ when their members are separated by great geographical distances. Families are not just people related by blood ties or marriage but are defined and held together through the ‘work’ of commitments and obligations consisting of communication, trust, and emotional work. This chapter draws on these elements—communication, trust, and emotions—to unpack the work involved in ‘doing’ teamwork. Teamwork in interdisciplinary research has been discussed but not often in terms of the personal and emotional work that it entails.keywordsinterdisciplinary teamworkemotional workcollaborationcommunicationtrust.

To unpack healthcare practices, I frequently use video-reflexive ethnography (VRE). This visual methodology asks clinicians to become co-researchers. Studying practices in this way brings interdisciplinary and multi-paradigmatic alliances. This chapter describes situations in which different epistemic cultures meet each other and that may generate risks for researchers’ epistemic credibility, as well as opportunities for on-the-ground problem-solving. The first case study is about an Australian Emergency Department and demonstrates how a solid preparation of research includes potential risks for one’s professional reputation. The second case study draws on a Midwifery Science project in the Netherlands. It describes how real or imagined threats to professional credibility can affect both the experience of interdisciplinary collaboration and the relationship with one’s own academic community. By reflecting on these situations, I aim to explicate the learning potential of such encounters. Such new experiences in doing research in traditions other than one’s own make one humble and can prevent dogmatism.

In this chapter, we will focus on research in the inter-and transdisciplinary collaboration between an orchestra, a higher arts education institute, and a university situated in the South of the Netherlands. Starting from the shared problem of how symphonic orchestras can shape new futures through innovating their practices, one project focused on studying and experimenting with artistically relevant forms of audience participation. It involved the design and organization of experimental concerts. Drawing on the work by Richard Sennett (Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation. Allen Lane, 2012) on cooperation, and his distinction between dialectic and dialogic conversations, we present fieldwork on one of these concerts. We show how the practical work to make an event happen can be traced through the many conversations that shaped the collaborative process. We conclude that cooperation is a skill that needs care, imagination, but also the open-endedness of continued learning from each other.

This chapter aims to show how interdisciplinarity can help us include Eastern Europe in European Studies in a more symmetrical way and how this enables us to better frame Europe’s contemporary challenges. Starting from the premise that the notion of ‘Eastern Europe’ was invented as a space in-between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘barbaric, ' I will employ evidence from history, geography, linguistics, religion studies, economics, and politics to re-conceptualize East-West dynamics within Europe. I will discuss how and with what consequences Eastern Europe was made to fit into an emerging system of nation states. I will also trace how the aspiration to be accepted as ‘fully European’ has interacted with the rise of exclusive nationalisms in recent decades. My interdisciplinary approach, in which insights from a wide range of disciplines feed into a history of political ideas, ultimately intends to help rethink hierarchies of power and knowledge in European Studies.

This chapter shows how Niklas Luhmann’s theoretical sociology, especially his work on self-organizing social systems, helped refine my examination of educational debates about the modernization of higher education in the nineteenth-century Netherlands. What the application of a discursive analytical approach based on systems theory allowed me to do in particular was to reconsider the presumed influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s educational philosophy in the Netherlands. One of the study’s surprising outcomes was that Humboldt’s world-famous ideas on university education as Bildung hardly played a role in nineteenth-century educational debates in the Netherlands. Recent contributions to the historiography of universities in Germany corroborate this finding by situating the relevance of Humboldt’s ideas in the twentieth rather than the nineteenth century. This outcome, however, would not have been possible without the engagement of various stakeholders in the articulation of the research question and intense interactions with scholars from various disciplines.

In this chapter, I detail how a philosophical detour profoundly altered my study on the role of expectations in innovation in the early 1990s. The initial research question, drawn from history and economics of technology, and from science and technology studies (STS), was how expectations reduce uncertainties in innovation. Halfway through the trajectory, I accidentally came across the works of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), who sketches the human condition as taking up roles in dramas to achieve an imagined life. Reading his texts helped me to formulate a “sociology of expectations, " because it reversed the gaze: expectations about technology are not just instrumental in reducing uncertainties, but they also introduce a self-invented play, in which firms and engineers involved in the development seek to make it happen. Moreover, Ortega y Gasset’s bold intellectual style and unfamiliar phrasing offered me a novel approach to research puzzles.

What explains constitutional reform, or, in the case of the postwar Netherlands, the absence of reform? In this chapter, this question serves as the starting point for a reassessment of the boundaries between historical and legal scholarship. For historians, law typically only features as the outcome of a political process. Yet, what if archival sources clearly suggest that legal frameworks, as systems of norms and practices, significantly shape that political process, for example, when varying understandings of “the constitution” enable particular paths for constitutional reform while constraining others? This chapter suggests an improved integration of legal beliefs, practices, attitudes, and norms in political history by borrowing the concept of “tradition” from legal scholarship. Demonstrating how the concept can be employed in explaining Dutch constitutional reform, it contributes to an interdisciplinary conversation that could benefit both law and political history.

This chapter examines interdisciplinary aspirations of art-science collaborations using an art-science project at the Maastricht Brain Stimulation and Cognition research group as a case study. Studying the epistemic living spaces of this fifteen-month project from a science and technology studies (STS) perspective, I point to the pervasive presence of anticipation and confusion as typical affects in interdisciplinary work. Art-science projects allow for momentary inversions of hierarchies and a-synchronicities in the aims and effects of collaboration. The tacit structures I describe in this chapter demonstrate the implications of (ideals of) interdisciplinarity in particular situations, capturing some of the social, epistemic, and symbolic operations of the slippery term “interdisciplinarity” in action.

Although the study of international development is by necessity an interdisciplinary field, efforts to agree on mutually intelligible research methods and propose concrete policies have resulted in its general positioning in the social sciences. History and other humanities disciplines have often been sidelined. This chapter recounts an experience in which historical concepts and epistemologies nonetheless proved pivotal to my work as a development scholar. The concept of “low modernism, " developed by historians, has allowed me to understand how Japan’s aid agency is attempting to transfer Japanese management techniques to Ethiopian factory floors. It has helped me to situate this project within longstanding debates around industrialization in the Global South, thereby highlighting what is truly novel about Japanese-Ethiopian development cooperation-and what is not. Closer and renewed encounters between history and development studies may help the latter to overcome criticisms that its prescriptions and critiques too often occur in a presentist vacuum.

This chapter aims to investigate how methodologies from fields as diverse as literary studies, art history, exhibition design, sociology, and ethnography can enrich the study of exhibition storytelling. It focuses on fieldwork done in 2020 at the Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean (Marseille, France) on the semi-permanent exhibition Connectivities. Because of the content and form of the exhibition and the multimodal nature of museum communication, I chose to employ a range of interdisciplinary methods to analyze the exhibition. This enabled me to distinguish my approach from previous practices in museum studies, which, because of the tendency toward “evidenced-based” policies and funding in the cultural field, have frequently adopted a positivist approach to their research. Instead, I aimed to analyze not only the intent of the institution when it comes to narrative production but also its legitimacy to and its impact on audiences.