The Relational Infrastructure of Innovation: What Holds Interdisciplinary Collaboration Together
The session opens with a short mapping exercise, influenced by yarning, an Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander methodology (Bessarab and Ng'andu, 2010). Participants trace the connections that brought them to their current work: who drew them in, who vouched for them, whose involvement made the work possible. The resulting map renders visible a layer of relational activity that institutional accounts of collaboration tend to omit, and that layer is the subject of the talk.
Drawing on a recently completed doctoral study of three Australian university innovation initiatives, Dr Laura Kayes argues that this relational work did not supplement formal coordination structures but substituted for them. The programmes reported interdisciplinary outcomes while depending on particular individuals to sustain coordination their design did not provide.
The conditions that shaped these interdisciplinary programmes, compressed timelines and a preference for outputs that are readily demonstrable, also governed which disciplines could establish a foothold. Humanities and social science researchers were repeatedly engaged too late, or for contributions the structure could not register. The study treats this pattern not as a problem of inclusion but as diagnostic: the disciplines an infrastructure cannot accommodate at its margins indicate the limits of what it can accommodate at all.
Participants will leave with a map of how they are connected to others in the room, and a way of seeing the relational work that usually holds collaboration together without being noticed.
We look forward to welcoming you to the launch of the SPINE Series.
For further information about the SPINE project and research group: SPINE – University of Copenhagen