Interdisciplinary methods and methodologies

To foster innovative and experimental ways of generating knowledge, we’re expanding the role of interdisciplinary methods through new lines of inquiry and a sustained focus on methodological innovation and collaboration across different fields.

Methods are pivotal to CIM’s intellectual and practice-based work. They are key sites where knowledge is made and remade, through application, innovation, negotiation, contestation and experimentation. Conversely, methods can be sites where knowledge-making is hampered or censored, either implicitly or explicitly, and they may introduce either robustness or brittleness into systems. Materialised in processes and procedures, methods inform how phenomena are sensed, and how they’re made sense of, through signs and abstractions. Methods inform what is produced and how materials are accessed, assimilated and understood.

At CIM we’ve created an interdisciplinary space for new thinking and research on the epistemological, socio-technical and cultural effects that methods produce and the forces they activate. It’s also a space for researching how interdisciplinarity itself is created and constituted, including through methodology development and the critical analysis of methods. Where possible, we aim to fold this understanding back into the development of methods, with the aim of developing more reflexive approaches to the application of method and methodology development.

Projects

CECAN - Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus
Linking and Modelling Tempos for Complex Policy
Inventing indicators of Interdisciplinarity
Creating Interfaces

Publications & other outputs

Lury, C., Fensham, R., Heller-Nicholas, A., Lammes, S., Last, A., Michael, M., & Uprichard, E. (2018). Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods. Routledge.

Staff associated with this theme: Celia Lury, Noortje Marres, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Emma Uprichard, Matt Spencer, Scott Wark, Greg McInerny