Bridging the geo-divide: reflections on an interdisciplinary (ESRC/NERC) studentship

摘要

This boundary crossing reflects on the academic journeys undertaken by three collaborators on an ESRC/NERC studentship1 examining cultural reactions to volcanic hazards in Indonesia. The studentship has required an alliance (and translation) between geology and geography and encapsulates the wider tensions and implications for interdisciplinarity. In what follows we also consider how these translations and conflicts speak to evolving literatures on interdisciplinary scholarship. Writing in an earlier boundary crossing, Demeritt (2008a) is not the first to scrutinise and describe 'geography as a discipline torn in two' (the more common description is 'divided', as in Viles 2005). Yet the breaches between human and physical geography and geosciences/geology cannot easily be patched-over; any crossing demands negotiating entrenched and diverse conventions of method and theory, not to mention skirmishes and barbed assumptions. Demanding something more than the hybrid, GIS/critical (Kwan 2004) or humanatureon-human (Whatmore 2002) geographies advocated elsewhere, this is treacherous ground for early career researchers. Our commentary builds on Evans and Randalls' (2008) discussion of the challenges faced by ESRC/NERC doctoral students through incorporating reflections from both supervisors. We are also mindful of the call - in the introduction to a recent set of papers on interdisciplinarity within and beyond geography - for 'critical reflection linked more firmly with theoretical understandings of interdisciplinarity' (Bracken and Oughton 2009, 372). Therefore three voices are heard below: first, the doctoral student (Katherine Donovan), second, her geology supervisor (Iain Stewart) and finally, the supervisor from human geography (James D Sidaway).