Abstract
Interdisciplinary researchers and educators, as community members, creators of knowledge, and environmental activists and practitioners, have a responsibility to build a bridge between community practice, academic scholarship, and professional contributions aimed at establishing environmental sustainability. In this paper, I focus on an undervalued area of environmental politics, practices, and often unarticulated assumptions which underlie human–environmental relations. This article challenges interdisciplinary studies that are not connected with practice by reconfiguring the meaning of a community-based, interdisciplinary approach. Drawing from works by Foucault, Latour, and Haraway, this paper first shows how to reconfigure the meaning of an interdisciplinary approach. Second, using Bourdieu and Brightman’s ethnographic studies as a framework, the paper situates practice as central to our efforts to deconstruct and replace current interdisciplinary initiatives with a practice-based approach. Through a practice-based interdisciplinary approach (PIA), environmental educators and researchers gain an awareness of and learn to make an investment in sustainable communities. As teams of environmental researchers practising in the local community, they are meaningfully involved with the community, with each other, and with the environment.
Highlights
Efforts to better link theoretical understanding with people and their practice involved in community-based environmental research are receiving increased interest and attention
I suggest that environmental research is a community-engaged, interdisciplinary, and integrated approach; can connect together the social and cultural with technological and scientific fields of practice; it can provide a setting for creative investigation and response
The practice-based interdisciplinary approach (PIA) as a process and strategy for environmental research has potential to promote collectivity and community actions, and centralise the task for community members to understand the contradictions of the dominant ideology in the environmental research [1]
Summary
Efforts to better link theoretical understanding with people and their practice involved in community-based environmental research are receiving increased interest and attention. Both discipline-oriented and profession-oriented SIA practitioners were busy explaining how they could create a more effective interdisciplinary approach In this interdisciplinary PhD program, we felt that, in most cases, disciplinary and professional practices dominated; the local problems or issues, people and their community’s practice became secondary. Within these limitations, we often discussed unanswered questions: Why are we studying SIA if we cannot challenge disciplinary problems? I questioned how far we could progress if we were unable to create SIA from our everyday practices [13,19,20]
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