How to implement interdisciplinarity

Yesterday in University of Nottingham, Dr. Sarah Whatmore from the University of Oxford gave a talk with the topic "Environmental Knowledge Controversies -- Science, democracy and the redistribution of expertise".

In her speech, Dr. Whatmore mainly addressed the trends in knowledge generation and distribution. As the information technology develops, today scientific knowledge is no longer only distributed among academic people, any invention or discovery can be known by the public and very possibly invite controversy. Besides, the public is changing their position in the flow of innovation. Before they are only the receiver of the results of innovation. Today, they will play a major part in the evaluation of the innovation, even become the cause and driver of innovation.

Such trends calls for the change of public involvement. It has been recognised that past form of involvement, characterised by given options or 'debate points' and late participation of the public, must be substituted by early and more profound forms of participation, the public should be able to participate from the very beginning throughout to the end (I am glad that I addressed this in my exam).

A new form of interdisciplinarity can be produced in such participation. Functional interdisciplinarity is common today, that knowledge from different disciplines are integrated to form the anwser to a certain complex question. But Dr. Whatmore says as the controversy and early participation increases, the interaction between social and natural scientists, and that between scientists and the public, will increase. Not only the formed knowledge, but also their approaches in different disciplines will be integrated with and changed by each other.

Thus a new unit of participation, a 'Competency Group' will emerge. Competency here means skill. In such a group, different skills (the way we examine the world) are combined. And this group provide spaces for debate, thus science become a stakeholder that can be challenged. The controversies will be acknowledged from the beginning, instead of being useless post-issue talk.

This idea seems to be very inspiring and appealing, but cannot justify it as a practical approach instead of another concept of interdisciplinarity. Some kind of experiment using this idea is underway. So far, the concept still fails to address some key questions in public participation: who should participate and who should not? Who define the 'relevant' members of the group? Will the stakeholders (or more precisely participants) identify themselves? Will there be a dominant voice in the group and hijaak the policy? How to facilitate communication in and between such groups? All these questions need to be answered. Maybe in 3 or more years the experiments can give us some of the answer. I will try to keep tracking its development.