Keynote Speakers
Professor Steve Fuller (University of Warwick)
09:30 – 10:15 (A34)
Steve Fuller is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Originally
trained in the history and philosophy of science, he is most closely associated with
the research programme of ‘social epistemology’, which is the name of the journal
he founded in 1987, as well as the first of more than a dozen books, including
such popular works as Kuhn vs Popper (Icon, 2003) and The Intellectual (Icon,
2005). 2007 sees the publication of New Frontiers in Science and Technology
Studies (Polity) and The Knowledge Book: Key Concepts in Philosophy, Science
and Culture (Acumen). He has spoken in 25 countries and his works have been
translated into fifteen languages.
“Good and bad interdisciplinarity”
‘Knowledge production in the academy these days is tending towards interdisciplinarity.
Moreover, there is rarely a word said against this trend – of course, so long as
interdisciplinary work meets at the last the minimum standards of the contributing
disciplines. But is that the only – or even most important – proviso concerning the
promotion of interdisciplinarity? I shall argue that there is ‘good’ and ‘bad’
interdisciplinarity, a distinction I draw based on whether the work enhances or diminishes
the state of academic knowledge as a whole.
I shall proceed historically by arguing that at the founding of the modern university ideal
in the early 19th century, all knowledge production was ‘always already’ interdisciplinary.
Disciplines as we currently know them (corresponding to departments, journals and
degree programmes) only gradually emerged as institutionalised settlements between
clashing research programmes governed by overarching world-views. Thus, people who
we now call physicists, chemists and engineers were originally not so clearly
distinguishable. (The point is even more obvious in the ‘softer’ sciences.) As the
disciplinary boundaries hardened in the 20th century, intellectual gaps between the
disciplines began to emerge as blindspots, which interdisciplinary work could then redress.
The Cold War motivated much of this thinking, as national security became the ultimate
holistic concern. Here operations research, systems theory (in its various forms) and
artificial intelligence began to portray disciplines as obstacles to efficient knowledge flows.
By the 1960s this perspective was radicalised as feminists, postcolonialists, etc. came to
see disciplines as actively suppressing politically unruly subjects that prevented the
academy from effectively communicating with the larger society.
However, the end of the Cold War brought about a meltdown in the nurturing environment
that the ‘welfare-warfare state’ had provided for universities. We then entered the period
of ‘bad’ interdisciplinarity, which was, so to speak, imposed from ‘the outside’ in the form
of neo-liberal policy regimes. Here disciplinarity was portrayed as glorified ‘rent-seeking’,
whereby the normal trappings of academic life, e.g. technical language and self-regulating
work habits, were itself seen as an obstacle to knowledge production. In the Newspeak of
‘Mode 2’ that came to dominate especially European science policy circles in the 1990s,
‘interdisciplinarity’ hence came to refer to all the ‘real world’ problems that disciplinebased academia routinely ignored or devalued. Thus, research agendas and even degree
programmes were urged to include ‘users and beneficiaries’ (aka stakeholders) in their
very constitution. The precincts of academia that have flourished in this environment are
ones in which ‘interdisciplinarity’ is mainly expressed through the multiply applicable
method, rather than the comprehensively explanatory theory, even though the word
‘theory’ is often used (e.g. rational choice theory, game theory, complexity theory, chaos
theory, actor-network theory: None of these are ‘theories’ in the classical scientific sense.)
A likely long-term consequence of this ‘bad’ but increasingly prevalent form of
interdisciplinarity is a loss of academic autonomy. But is that the end of the story?’
Keynote Speakers
Professor Kevin Shakesheff (University of Nottingham)
16:40 – 17:25 (A34)
Professor Shakesheff is Professor of Advanced Drug Delivery and Tissue
Engineering (based in the School of Pharmacy) at the University of Nottingham.
He has a keen interest in interdisciplinary research in the natural sciences and has
recently headed an advisory group on developing and supporting interdisciplinary
research at the University of Nottingham.
Professor Shakesheff’s group is developing new methods of engineering liver,
nerve, cartilage, muscle and bone tissue for drug screening and medical
applications. He has previously held fellowships at MIT (NATO) and Nottingham
(EPSRC).
“The Centre for Biomolecular Sciences: Bringing 8 Schools together
to do interdisciplinary research”
‘The University of Nottingham has invested over £25 million on a new Centre of
Biomolecular Sciences (CBS). This ambitious project brings together over 300 researchers
from 8 Schools across 3 Faculties. This presentation will explore the issues involved in
establishing such a large scale collaboration. Examples of research, including tissue
engineering, stem cell technology, drug discovery and bacteriology will be used to
highlight the concept of CBS.’