Discovering curiosity and commonalities in methods
At the end of the last academic year, Horizons research managers Kate Kellett and Poppy Leeder brought researchers from very different disciplines together to share their methods and challenge each other’s perceptions in a series of three online sessions. Here, Poppy Leeder shares some takeaways from these sessions, including the aims of the series, the unexpected directions, and the ways in which researchers find benefit in stretching outside their own disciplines.
What happens when you take a tried and trusted method, one that is regularly used in activities and works very well, and demonstrate how it works in a very different setting? This is what we challenged ourselves to do in June and July this year with our Methods Link series.
Horizons institute regularly brings people from very different disciplines together to talk about the methods they use in their research — or more simply, how they do what they do. We use this technique in workshops for groups of up to 30 people, where pairs or groups of three discuss their working methods.
Exploring commonalities
In the Methods Link series, to showcase this, we had a pair of participants talking and discussing their methods in front of an audience of up to 30 people observing how the discussion developed.
This was a somewhat risky undertaking because, when we normally do this in a group of 30 people with 15 pairs, some of the conversations result in interesting insights and identify exciting commonalities between the two protagonists that can be investigated further. Others go nowhere: no areas of commonality are identified and, while it may be very interesting, there is nothing obvious to follow up on. Not only that, but by undertaking this in a public forum with the two participants being observed it added a completely different dimension; we didn’t know how being observed might impact on the openness and innovativeness in the discussion.
As it happened, all three discussions were very different, very interesting and challenged both participants and observers.
When we run these discussions, we usually base them around 4 questions, namely:
- What are the data/information that you collect?
- Why do you collect it?
- How do you collect it?
- What do you do with it?
We primed these discussions with these same four questions.
Finding a common language
Maybe it’s because we don’t sit in on every single one of those conversations in the workshop settings that we didn’t anticipate that the questions themselves would invoke an immediate response, and that clarifying what these mean, in the context of each discipline, would be the starting point of some really interesting discussions.
In the first two sessions the first question in and of itself required interrogation.
For our participant from Arts and Humanities, ‘data’ collection is not what they do, while our participant from Biological Sciences was more comfortable with data collection as part of their work. This immediately led to a conversation about what it is we were really asking them to discuss, how they actually work, and where the similarities and differences could be found in the methods that they use. It is exactly this that makes these method discussions such a powerful technique in early interdisciplinary conversations — because the languages and approaches of disciplines are different, there is an immediate need to start to explore meanings, find shared understanding and seek out the overlaps.
In the second session, the discussion immediately started from that first question again — but this time focused on the word ‘collect’. For our participant from Arts and Humanities, working in an area where considerations arise about power, the voices that are missing from a conversation, and other dynamics of inequality, the word ‘collect’ was itself problematic.
This took the conversation in a very different direction, the exploration of the language used and how a word can give or remove power was thought-provoking, with several observers commenting on this during the session. The real sweet spot between the participants, however, came from the discussion of missing voices, or missing observations in the context of our other participant, a conservation biologist, who identified that often it is the unseen elements of data that provide the biggest insight.
Reflecting on drivers and values
In the third of our series, between participants from Engineering and Physical Sciences and from Arts and Humanities, the common area took longer to uncover. Our participants had to persevere with the process and push the conversation to the limits to find their overlap. When it came it was very personal and really touched both them and us, as observers, as they uncovered a commonality in their values-driven approach and personal motivation for the direction of their research.
This conversation really demonstrated the power of cross-disciplinary conversations, by focussing on what they do and how they do it, the two participants discovered an underlying connection in why they do what they do. This final session gave a real insight into the sometimes deeply personal motivations that drive researchers which resonated with the audience who reflected on their own motivations and focus in their research.
Wide-ranging discussions
In all three sessions, the discussions between participants covered a range of issues and raised interesting points for those of us watching to consider and reflect on, whilst also thinking how this might impact on our own work. Everyone, from the facilitators to the participants and the audience, took something away from each discussion.
This method is so powerful because you don’t need to understand somebody’s discipline or the specifics of their research. You just need to be willing to listen, to discuss, to ask questions, to hear answers, to debate what that might mean, to explore it further and to try to identify some common ground that you might otherwise just not be able to reach if focusing only on your research question.
Discussion of methods enables researchers, coming from very different disciplines, to start their conversation from a different place. By providing a framework to these conversations, researchers can explore similarities and differences to build a platform of understanding as a foundation to develop interdisciplinary connections.
Further developing methods interventions
Horizons Institute will continue to explore how we can use equipment and methods as a way into interdisciplinary discussion. If you would like us to facilitate a discussion between you and a researcher from another discipline to see how it feels, to broaden your network, and hopefully to give you a different perspective on your own research, please get in touch with the Horizons team via horizons@leeds.ac.uk
