The dynamics of identity struggle in interdisciplinary meetings in higher education

In response to shifts in requirements for research funding, interest in interdisciplinary engagement has burgeoned, but as yet the interactional dynamics of interdisciplinary meetings have received almost no attention. This chapter draws on a data set of over 20 hours of audio-recorded talk from 12 different interdisciplinary meetings involving biologists, mathematicians, bioinformaticians and statisticians. Drawing on a combination of applied conversation analysis and quantitative analysis (using the Interactional Discourse Lab developed by one of the authors), it explicates the ways in which disciplinary identities are deployed in the reconciliation of different perspectives on shared problems. In interdisciplinary engagement, it will argue, the interactive and contingently accomplished process of identity construction is mediated by reference to epistemic rights associated with disciplinary membership, and that while there is assumed parity of disciplinary entitlement, in practice the power of a dominant discipline can be invoked by relevant participants in order to establish epistemic precedence.