Ethnography and interdisciplinary work: experiences from the US and Brazil

ABSTRACTThis paper reflects on previous ethnographic research with multidisciplinary scientific teams in order to consider the place of STS-inspired ethnographies in thinking about and doing such larger scale, collaborative work. The practice of ethnography of/in multidisciplinary projects is both productive in terms of enabling knowledge about “interdisciplinary science in the making,” and disruptive, as it becomes a part of said knowledge processes in ways we have yet to fully consider. Through looking back at results from research conducted in the US (with a group involved in building a model of heat transfer in tissues) and in Brazil (with remote sensing scientists and work around deforestation monitoring), the paper explores two interrelated facets: (a) misunderstandings in interdisciplinary work are not reduceable to communication gaps, but pertain to differences in epistemic cultures, backgrounds, understandings of truth, and method; (b) participating in such interdisciplinary interactions places t...