William Barley, assistant professor of Communication and 2015-2016 NCSA Faculty Fellow
Interdisciplinary teams are increasingly touted as necessary for scientific progress but research shows these teams face serious communication challenges and often fail. Given these findings, there is a pressing need to understand how successful teams overcome these relational challenges. In this talk, I will discuss finding from a study designed to uncover the strategies and challenges that researchers, engineers, and technicians at NCSA encounter as they seek to construct partnerships across disciplinary boundaries. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data, I show that researchers developed intricate techniques for building interdisciplinary relationships but experienced a number of structural and cultural barriers that inhibited their ability to perform these strategies. I argue that addressing these barriers requires us to move beyond a frame of interdisciplinarity as a process of “connection” toward recognizing of the important role of “dialogue” for success. I will close by discussing the implications of such a re-framing for individual and organizational strategies, as well as for science policy.
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