Is interdisciplinarity distinctive? Scientific collaborations through research projects in natural sciences

This article focuses on (inter)disciplinary collaborations through the co-application to research projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the main provider of research funding in Switzerland. We suggest that interdisciplinarity is a potential mode of distinction and that its frequency and the disciplines involved may be associated with specific configurations of scientific, institutional, international, extra-academic, and network resources. We rely on biographical data on all biology and chemistry professors in Switzerland in 2000 (n = 342), including all their funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation. In a first step, we highlight the role of the resources mentioned previously in structuring the symbolic hierarchy of disciplines using multiple correspondence analysis. In a second step, we look at how interdisciplinarity fits into these structures based on an opposition between international and institutional resources and on the unequal distribution of scientific (and social) capital. We show that these interdisciplinary logics of social distinction differ across the two disciplines. On the one hand, collaborations with biologists seem to help chemists reaching dominant positions in the academic field, while their degree of internationality is associated with interdisciplinary collaborations. On the other hand, the biologists who are the most endowed with symbolic capital are more likely to collaborate with the medical sciences

Structural Power and Epistemologies in the Scientific Field: Why a Rapid Reconciliation Between Functional and Evolutionary Biology is Unlikely

The past decade has been marked by a series of global crises, presenting an opportunity to reevaluate the relationship between science and politics. The biological sciences are instrumental in understanding natural phenomena and informing policy decisions. However, scholars argue that current scientific expertise often fails to account for entire populations and long-term impacts, hindering efforts to address issues such as biodiversity loss, global warming, and pandemics. This article explores the structural challenges of integrating an evolutionary perspective, historically opposed to functional determinants of health and disease, into current biological science practices. Using data on Swiss biology professors from 1957, 1980, and 2000, we examine the structural power dynamics that have led to the division between these competing epistemologies, and how this division has influenced resource allocation and career trajectories. Our analysis suggests that this cleavage presents a significant obstacle to achieving fruitful reconciliations, and that increased academicization and internationalization may benefit functional biologists at the expense of evolutionary biologists. While evolutionary biologists have gained symbolic recognition in recent years, this has not translated into valuable expertise in the political domain

Sharing the cloudlet: Impression management and designing for colocated mobile sharing

This article explores how designing for impression management affects the design of cloudlet and other mobile colocated sharing services. We demonstrate how colocated concepts and experimentation led to the conceptualization and design of a sharing interface that provides users with control over their shared content. We uncover usage behaviors and privacy concerns through the use of a technology probe and use those discoveries to develop a prototype designed with the principles of impression management to give sharers control over their content and identity. Our designs and results indicate users of cloudlets and other colocated sharing systems require visual control and privacy over shared content

Complex Network Visualisation for the History of Interdisciplinarity: Mapping Research Funding in Switzerland

In Switzerland, the panorama of scientific research is deemed to be deeply affected by language barriers and strong local academic identities. Is this impression confirmed by data on research projects? What are the factors that best explain the structure of scientific collaborations over the last forty years? Do linguistic regions (Switzerland is divided into three principals) or local academic logics really have an impact onto the mapping of research collaborations and to what extend are they embedded in disciplinary, historical and generational logics? We focus on the very large database of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the principal research funding agency in Switzerland, which lists all the 62,000 projects funded between 1975 and 2015. While scientometric studies generally focus on measuring work – and financial – performance, we aim to raise awareness on pursuing a socio-history analyse of Swiss academic circles by crossing the SNSF data with a prosopographic database of all Swiss university professors in the twentieth century provided by the Swiss Elite Observatory (OBELIS). Beyond the interest for the history of science and universities, we explore the noteworthy technical challenge of a network analysis of nearly 88,000 researchers and more than a million of collaborations. By combining those two databases, we measure the temporality and spatiality of academic collaborations, i.e. to define a way to deal with the volume of information in order to provide not only a global vision but also to enable a fine processing of personal trajectories

Designing and theorizing co-located interactions.

This paper gives an interwoven account of the theoretical and practical work we undertook in pursuit of designing co- located interactions. We show how we sensitized ourselves to theory from diverse intellectual disciplines, to develop an analytical lens to better think about co-located interactions. By critiquing current systems and their conceptual founda- tions, and further interrelating theories particularly in regard to performative aspects of identity and communication, we develop a more nuanced way of thinking about co-located interactions. Drawing on our sensitivities, we show how we generated and are exploring, through the process of design, a set of co-located interactions that are situated within our social ecologies, and contend that our upfront theoretical work enabled us to identify and explore this space in the first place. This highlights the importance of problem fram- ing, especially for projects adopting design methodologies