Todd Sanders and Elizabeth Hall bring our debates about interdisciplinarity to climate change, a major global issue for which the need for interdisciplinary perspectives is taken for granted. How, they ask, “do we imagine and practice 'interdisciplinarity’ to save the planet?” The authors describe and critique a range of contrasting modalities for doing interdisciplinary work on climate change and the assumptions under which they operate. Sanders and Hall also reflect on the complexities of studying interdisciplinarity when its practitioners and observers are part of the same milieu—both being “natives” in the world of research.
Elizabeth F. Hall
Elizabeth F. Hall is an independent scholar. She is a public health physician and epidemiologist and has worked in clinical, policy, and academic settings in the UK, Ireland, and Canada. Her current research draws on the anthropology of knowledge and science studies. It focuses on knowledge problems that accompany policy-relevant scientific knowledges: interdisciplinarity, accountability, and reproducibility. Recent publications include (with Todd Sanders) “Accountability and the Academy: Producing Knowledge about the Human Dimensions of Climate Change,” which the British Sociological Association awarded second prize for the best sociological article published on climate change in 2015.