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Abstract Hazards and disasters arise from interactions between environmental and social processes, so interdisciplinary research is crucial in understanding and effectively managing them. Despite support and encouragement from funding agencies, universities, and journals and growing interest from researchers, interdisciplinary disaster research teams face significant obstacles, such as the difficulty of establishing effective communication and understanding across disciplines. Better understanding of interdisciplinary teamwork can also have important practical benefits for operational disaster planning and response. Social studies of science distinguish different kinds of expertise and different modes of communication. Understanding these differences can help interdisciplinary research teams communicate more clearly and work together more effectively. The primary role of a researcher is incontributory expertise(the ability to make original contributions to a discipline); butinteractional expertisein other disciplines (the ability to understand their literature and communicate with their practitioners) can play an important role in interdisciplinary collaborations. Developing interactional expertise requires time and effort, which can be challenging for a busy researcher, and also requires a foundation of trust and communication among team members. Three distinct aspects of communication play important roles in effective interdisciplinary communication:dialects,metaphors, andarticulation. There are different ways to develop interactional expertise and effective communication, so researchers can pursue approaches that suit their circumstances. It will be important for future research on interdisciplinary disaster research to identify best practices for building trust, facilitating communication, and developing interactional expertise.
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Lost in Translation? Integrating Interdisciplinary Disaster Research with Policy Praxis
Abstract Interdisciplinary research can help address complex issues such as community resilience and climate change. However, transcending disciplinary borders to provide better understandings of these cross‐cutting issues is not an easy task. While there has been a greater focus on improving integration across disciplines, less attention has been paid to the particular challenges in the inclusion and integration of policy praxis into interdisciplinary research. This article argues that to effectively integrate policy‐relevant goals, researchers need to understand the obstacles to transcending disciplinary borders to incorporate the perspectives of policy practitioners. Researchers also need to understand problems in integration when it takes place within research groups or entities comprised of a variety of scholars from diverse disciplines working with a set of practitioners from different agencies or levels of government. Impediments to integration include epistemological, disciplinary, and attitudinal barriers, differences in terminologies and timescales, the role of organizational culture, institutional barriers, data issues, and issues related to risk communication and liability. This article explores these challenges and how they affect the translation of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. It concludes with recommendations to help overcome challenges in synthesizing disaster research and policy practices and to enrich interdisciplinary disaster research approaches and designs.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1541089
- PAR ID:
- 10075782
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Risk Analysis
- Volume:
- 41
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 0272-4332
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 1232-1239
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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