Abstract
This paper centralises the question of what academics in higher education settings need to know about other fields to stimulate cross-disciplinary collaborative work. The concept of ‘knowledge’, while recognised as important within cross-disciplinary studies, has failed to be properly problematized. Little attention has been paid to what cross-disciplinary knowledge actors should possess, the purposes that knowledge might serve and few pause to consider the concept of collaboration itself, as an inherent source of situated learning. The result is recommendations about what researchers should ‘know’ that cannot be operationalised in practice. Highlighting a distinction between ‘Of-Knowledge’, entailing a detailed understanding of a field, and ‘About-Knowledge’, a rudimentary form of knowledge about fields, we explore two key points of the cross-disciplinary collaborative life-cycle to evaluate the needs, purposes, limits and possibilities of knowing. Noting that cross-disciplinary learning is a long process, and for which no pre-packaged ‘knowledge’ emerges to address the kinds of cognitive deficits that researchers typically identify, we argue that collaboration itself provides a non-substitutable venue for cross-disciplinary learning. In contrast, focusing on the point of ‘envisioning’ where specialisms are ‘scoped out’ and collaborative horizons ‘mapped’, we argue for efforts to be placed in enhancing researchers’ ‘About-Knowledge’, a form of connective knowledge that extends researchers’ basic knowledge about other fields prior to constructing collaborative projects. Critical for the aspirations of futures research, and the importance of fostering global, national, regional and local collaboration, we highlight how a little knowledge can go a long way.
Highlights
Central to this paper is the question of what and how much academics in higher education settings need to ‘know’ about other fields and specialisms in the context of cross-disciplinary collaborative work
We argue that many of the problems that scholars in the field of interdisciplinary studies point to around cognition find their roots in a lack of broad ‘connective knowledge’ which is needed at that ‘fuzzy front end’—for these are most keenly exposed at this point of ‘envisioning’ collaborative projects
Once we identify that cross-disciplinary collaboration constitutes the ideal vehicle for addressing much of what might be rationalised as an inevitable Of-knowledge deficit, our aspiration to address gaps in knowledge look like knowledge of a far humbler kind
Summary
Central to this paper is the question of what and how much academics in higher education settings need to ‘know’ about other fields and specialisms in the context of cross-disciplinary collaborative work. That this constitutes a novel query might be surprising given the volume of work within interdisciplinary studies literature that highlights the numerous epistemic and cognitive challenges involved in cross-disciplinarity collaboration. Priaulx and Weinel European Journal of Futures Research ‘collaborative’ workshop on ‘expertise’, a concept that is central to both groups, yet fail to understand each other due to clashing conceptualisations of ‘expertise’ that is particular to each disciplinary domain. This kind of knowledge deficit, about other fields, provides fertile ground for misconceptions about other specialisms, for actors exceeding their own field of expertise [3, 61] and importantly, for missed opportunities for valuable and important collaborations by virtue of a failure to understand the value of, and expertise inherent within other fields and specialisms
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