Radical Interdisciplinarity in Scientific Practice : Placing Social Networks in Marine and Fisheries Sciences

New modes of scientific research that involve more integrated collaboration between disciplines, as well as better links between knowledge, decision-making, and action, are increasingly argued as critical for the environmental and sustainability sciences. Yet despite such wide-ranging reference to interdisciplinarity, the notion itself is often left unspecified and ambiguous, ranging from collaboration between similar disciplines to more radically interdisciplinary work that spans the natural and social sciences. To better understand the ways in which interdisciplinary research might facilitate more sustainable futures, it is necessary to first understand who or does not collaborate, how this has changed over time, and why. We use social network analysis to chart changes in the forms of interdisciplinary research and compare two different organizational communities of practice of fisheries scientists in the Northeast and Pacific Islands of the United States, with similar mandates for sustainability but different cultures, contexts, and knowledge networks. We also employ results of a survey of scientific staff at both organizations to better understand the reasons for and impediments to participating in collaborative research. We show that while scientific research has increasingly involved greater participation of different disciplines, the social sciences generally remain on the periphery of knowledge production, though the emergence of a hybrid scholar that combines interdisciplinary training indicates different pathways for knowledge production as well as the importance of the co-production of knowledge and community, offering insight into how to facilitate more integrated and participatory approaches