Keywords

Introduction

Teamwork is frequently discussed as being integral to interdisciplinary research, but it does not just happen. It takes work. This chapter focuses on the work that is behind teamwork and especially the less-discussed elements relating to the personal and emotional work that it entails. The authors are three researchers who have worked together since 2010 on two large interdisciplinary and international research projects on transnational families. These projects study how people ‘do’ family across international borders. Families are not just a connection of people related through blood or marriage ties, but they are defined and held together through the ‘work’ that goes into giving and receiving care to its members. This work entails commitments and obligations, supported by communication, trust, and constructive frictions that keep families acting as such. In this chapter, we draw parallels between ‘doing’ family and ‘doing’ teamwork by focusing on these elements—communication, trust, and working with frictions—to unpack the work that is entailed in ‘doing’ teamwork. This chapter is structured as an open conversation between the three researchers. We chose this format as an illustration of the way we work together. Conversation is an integral part of the praxis of working together that we developed over the years. Inclusive conversation allows for exploration and unexpected insights to come to the fore, and it contributes to the creation of a team in which members feel heard and respected.

A note on the interdisciplinary projects: The Transnational Child Raising Arrangements projects (TCRA and TCRAf-Eu), funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and the New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Co-operation in Europe (NORFACE), respectively, studied transnational families in which parents migrate from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe and some or all their children remain in the country of origin in the care of someone else. The main aim was to investigate the effects of geographical separation on child raising practices across borders. We followed migrant parents in Europe and their children and caregivers in Africa. These projects included researchers from anthropology, migration studies, child psychology, development economics, demography, geography, political science, and family sociology. We employed both qualitative ethnographic and quantitative survey methods. Mazzucato was the Principal Investigator of the projects, and Dito and Haagsman were post-doc and PhD, respectively.

Open Communication

Key for transnational child caring arrangements to work is communication. There is a lot of ‘work’ in communicating: for migrant parents to negotiate their needs in a new country with those of their child and the caregiver; for the caregiver in the country of origin to manage the information flow to the parent in order not to worry them; and for the child to vent their frustrations to the parent while catering to the caregiver’s demands. All of these situations entail daily communication and negotiation between actors, in the form of small, everyday decisions, such as when to make a phone call, what to say on the phone, what to leave out, how to communicate a matter, whose needs take priority, and how to come to a common solution so that the transnational family continues to function as such (Poeze et al., 2017). The same is true for the importance of communication in teamwork, involving everyday communications, decisions of when and how to communicate, all of which foster a team feeling. As with transnational families, this section will show that interdisciplinary collaboration requires constant communication and dialogue, regular meetings, curiosity, and an open mind.

VALENTINA: In heading interdisciplinary research projects, I pay a lot of attention to how to establish good communication. This has to do with meeting frequently at the beginning of a project, also just to get to know each other. It is often said about interdisciplinary collaboration that you need to work on establishing some ground rules and developing a common language as disciplines come with their own theories and concepts. But to me, what is even more important is the atmosphere that one establishes: it needs to be open, people need to feel that they can contribute, no matter what their perspective is. There needs to be respect for each other’s methods and, most of all, people need to feel safe being vulnerable. That is, that they can say when they are unsure about something, or admit that they may have made a mistake, or are free to explore something when they don’t yet know where it will lead them. To create such an atmosphere, you need to meet frequently, for work, but also include some other kinds of meetings. For example, I instituted a yearly three-day research retreat with only one rule: if it is not fun, we don’t do it. During these retreats we talk about our research but in very different ways than we are used to, such as through making a theater play about it or having workshops on making people feel heard, seen, and respected (Liberating Structures, n.d.). I think these moments are fundamental in creating trust so that, when we have work meetings, people are respectful of and trust each other.

KARLIJN: I agree, and a lot happens before you actually get started with the data collection. It’s helpful to be clear about things from the start. For example, one needs to talk about the praxis of collecting and sharing data before the data collection starts as there are many ways to do this. We also met on a weekly basis to develop a methodology and read literature to create a common conceptual framework. I remember that at first, as a PhD on the project, I was quite shy. But the weekly meetings and the team activities really helped me to feel comfortable to speak up, even if it was to say that I didn’t understand something. Teamwork is not something you just jump into; there’s really a lot of preparatory work, and it takes time, and a lot centers around communication.

BILISUMA: For me, one of the fundamental aspects of interdisciplinary teamwork and having good communication is the attitude of the team members: they need to be open-minded. Understanding the limitations of one’s own training is a good way to start, at least that was true for me. My interdisciplinary PhD environment really helped me to integrate within the team of researchers in the TCRA project who came from different disciplinary backgrounds. Even though I was one of the few quantitative scholars on the team, I was met with an open-mindedness by team members that paved the way for developing collaborative working relationships. For me, this was fundamental for the articles that I co-authored: the theoretical framework for the quantitative analyses that I did, incorporated the insights from the qualitative researchers to identify the variables that we included in our models. The reason why I could shift my path of inquiry and include new kinds of variables, was that I had these variables at my disposal because we discussed, as a team, the different elements that we felt might underlie parental choices to migrate without their children (Dito et al., 2017), which we drew from our different disciplinary knowledge. So, I ended up including variables that I would not have thought of on my own, drawing only from my discipline of economics. This was possible because of the interdisciplinary questionnaire designed by other team members before I joined the project.

KARLIJN: Also during the interpretation of results, it was really important to communicate in the team and be open to other interpretations. I remember when we found that the sex of migrant parents did not make a difference in terms of their well-being outcomes. We could have stopped there. Yet, we asked the ethnographer on the team (Miranda Poeze) to look into this. She found that women and men do experience different hurdles, so her work allowed us to understand our own results better. Combining our two results, we came to our interpretation that men experience and talk about separation in a different way, yet, in terms of well-being measures, they are impacted as much as women (Haagsman et al., 2015). This was a new finding in the literature.

BILISUMA: Yes, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. To achieve this, especially in integrated projects such as ours, there’s also the need to share data. But we also found that data sharing was not always easy. When team members are less enthusiastic to share their data, it can limit team collaborations. Sometimes this is inevitable, especially when people come from disciplines where they are not trained to work in teams. But you can go a long way to minimizing this if teams engage openly and continuously about the possibilities and the limits of data sharing. I also think co-authorship among team members with different disciplinary and methodological backgrounds can facilitate data sharing since it creates a sense of joint ownership of the end product. But I guess we’ll return to this point later in the conversation.

Trust

One of the things that made transnational families function well, where members, although separated by thousands of kilometers, were still able to maintain a sense of family and well-being, was trust (Haagsman et al., 2015). Parents had to trust that the caregivers in the origin country were taking good care of their children (Poeze et al., 2017), caregivers, in turn, had to trust that parents were doing their best, even when remittances were not forthcoming, and children had to trust that their parents were interested in their well-being even when parents were not able to send money home (Dankyi et al., 2016). What created this trust? Being vulnerable, giving each other the benefit of the doubt and taking time. These are elements we also find in teamwork. Yet, contrary to families, teams do not start with a shared history. They therefore first have to work on building a community of practice within which trust can be built.

KARLIJN: What I said earlier about daring to speak up as a PhD student in a team of people from different disciplines but also in different academic positions has to do with trust—trust that I won’t be judged if I dare to be vulnerable. For example, at the beginning, when I had to present my work in our team meetings, I was quite nervous, because I was not yet sure of what direction I wanted to go in. But because we met frequently, and we all shared our unfinished work, we also shared our insecurities. Valentina set the tone by showing her own doubts and creating a sense that we were all in the same boat. We were all quite supportive of each other. This didn’t mean we avoided difficult discussions. In fact, we had to be willing to sometimes go back to the drawing board, such as when Miranda (the ethnographer) pointed out to me that I should nuance the interpretation of my results, or when Bilisuma (the economist) pointed out that I had missed some important variables in my statistical models.

BILISUMA: Yes, it also feels uncomfortable sometimes. I remember feeling a bit hesitant about some of our quantitative models because we were not preoccupied with methodological issues that economists obsess about such as endogeneity. But as I worked more in the project, I realized that, at the end of the day, we were not out to prove to the world that our models were perfect, but rather we were filling a gap in the literature with unique data and interdisciplinary insights that would help to further the field of transnational family research.

Sometimes, with my quantitative methods, I inevitably need to simplify reality. Then, I get so many detailed questions from the ethnographers, asking me to delve into nuances. But this is quantitative work, how am I supposed to incorporate all these ideas? So, my first reaction was to become defensive. But, then, because of the constructive way the feedback was given, I realized I needed to be careful with my generalizations, to qualify things. You know, I come from a tradition of a very structured way of writing research papers. It is a different way of presenting data than the more storytelling way of qualitative researchers. At first, I felt very uncomfortable with this. I would think, okay, how am I supposed to make sense of all this fuzziness. Remember Karlijn, we’d have many conversations about this. I sometimes just didn’t understand what the ethnographers were trying to bring to the table.

KARLIJN: Yeah, it’s funny, I had the opposite experience because I originally studied anthropology and in my first quantitative papers, my supervisors told me to be less descriptive and more to the point. And remember Bilisuma when we first co-authored together? You had a certain way of writing up the analysis that was so different from mine, which we struggled with in the beginning, but through practice and being open about this difficulty we merged our two ways and found a common way.

VALENTINA: I think a key to teamwork is to be okay with feeling uncomfortable, knowing that your teammates won’t judge you for mistakes or not knowing. I draw inspiration from David Bohm, a physicist who has thought long and hard about creative dialogue. He states, ‘communication can lead to the creation of something new only if people are able freely to listen to each other, without prejudice, and without trying to influence each other’ (1996, p. 3) (Fig. 1). And this stance of ‘we’re all in this together to come to a greater understanding’ really requires time. It takes time to build trust, through many conversations, to build a common vision. Because working together is also about daring to change your own mindset and that takes time.

Fig. 1
A photograph of some untangled strips of paper ribbons.

Visualization of ‘creating something new together’ © Mazzucato et al.

Full size image

In the TCRA projects we questioned the notion of family that is prevalent in family sociology and child development psychology. We developed more dynamic categories of families that included important members at a distance, who these members are, and how these compositions change over time (Mazzucato & Dito, 2018). But developing these categories was a whole process of thinking that evolved over time and in conversation with other researchers on the team who kept questioning us. Having this questioning attitude helps you become reflexive about the way you are used to seeing things. It’s so easy to fall into tunnel vision just because we are used to thinking of a particular societal issue, or a group of people, in a certain way. We inherit certain categories, as it were, from our disciplines. We all use categories—even people who are critical of categories, use categories. We can’t get away from using them, but we can question the categories we use, reflect on the kind of knowledge they generate, and be critical of them by proposing alternative or additional categories. This is where a real added value of teamwork comes in.

BILISUMA: This makes me think of the inter-cultural dimension of teams. It is not per se that you have to have people from different cultures to do interdisciplinary teamwork, but, just like disciplines can create tunnel vision, so can having people all from the same cultural background. I remember that in the TCRA project, we had discussions about child raising norms in the context of Ghana and comparing them with Asian contexts, where most other studies were done. I remember feeling slightly uncomfortable with saying ‘culture in Ghana is like this.’ I think we managed to a certain extent to not make such big generalizations about cultural norms, but it was important to have this continuous reflection about what culture means. We had some heated discussions, I remember. New generations have different norms than older generations, and urban inhabitants different from rural ones. So there are differences even within a culture.

KARLIJN: Yes, I remember a discussion I had with a Dutch woman at a conference. Even though we talk about Dutch families as nuclear, the extended family is important for child raising. Just look at the role of grandparents in taking care of their grandchildren in The Netherlands.

Frictions

Family relationships are about commitments and obligations. Sometimes such commitments are not easy to fulfill and can lead to frictions. Migrant parents might find it hard to send money home because of their precarious positions in the country where they migrated to. Caregivers who care for migrants’ children in the origin country may see their economic situation waning, making it more difficult to care for the children. Children may also find it difficult to focus on their schoolwork without the emotional support of their parents. Those transnational families that we found functioned best, in terms of fulfilling the emotional and care needs of family members, were those that, despite the frictions, were able to oblige the commitments to each other (Poeze et al., 2017). Also in interdisciplinary teamwork, frictions can be experienced either within the team or with the broader academic world that is still dominantly organized along disciplines. The point is not to avoid frictions but to learn how best to deal with them in a team.

VALENTINA: One thing that is often said about interdisciplinary research is that it is hard to get published because most journals are still disciplinary. How do you feel about this?

KARLIJN: Well, I think it depends on which journal, I guess. Luckily, in the field of migration, there are more interdisciplinary journals. I think we always chose the journals that were open to this kind of interdisciplinary research, also as we wanted to reach academics working in multiple fields and hence wanted to make sure we did not only reach one discipline. We put our topic and findings central rather than the discipline.

VALENTINA: That’s true, but don’t forget that we also published in psychology journals showing that if you have something innovative to say to disciplinary theories, sometimes, it is even possible to publish in disciplinary journals.

KARLIJN: True, but we also experienced some frictions with disciplinary scholars and this was quite challenging to deal with, emotionally. I remember when I presented our findings at a conference, I was attacked by an anthropologist. The simple fact that I presented numbers made her discredit the results. At another conference, I was in a panel with mainly economists, and they criticized my analysis for not following a certain procedure. I was a PhD student and these attacks felt very personal. It’s important to develop thick skin. It really helped to have the project team with whom to discuss the criticisms and realize that part of the criticism was because we were innovating—doing things out of what is considered ‘normal.’ As the team members were from various disciplines, they could help me understand the feedback and how to deal with it. They helped me put it in perspective. This gave me confidence.

BILISUMA: I have a question for you Valentina. I think the issues we raised before about openness or vulnerability and building trust in teams, also have to do with personality. Maybe it is important not to have a big ego? In these projects, you selected the team members. How do you go about selecting a team? What do you look for when you are hiring people?

VALENTINA: Well, aside looking for competent people, I also look for collaborators. So, during job interviews, I ask about people’s prior experience with teamwork, what they liked but also what they found challenging, I ask about concrete experiences with teamwork that did not function, because this happens a lot. What’s important for me is not that they did not have negative experiences but what explanations and lessons they draw from such experiences. Also, if someone has no or very few co-authored articles, then this is something I ask about. Yes, and indeed, it is best to avoid big egos.

KARLIJN: Oh, I remember this one candidate we were interviewing for a position on the team. They had a fantastic CV and grades. They also gave great answers to our questions. But then I made a mistake because I had overseen something on their CV and the way they reacted, offended, and really blaming me for the mistake, do you remember Valentina?

VALENTINA: Yes, it was the best thing you could have done, making that mistake because their true character came out. I thought to myself, oooh, if someone reacts like this for a simple mistake, this does not promise well for collaboration.

BILISUMA: I think what’s also important is the complementary nature of our knowledge. I mean, I was the only economist on the team, but instead of feeling isolated I felt I could actually contribute to this team because the team members appreciated my insights. There was this feeling of ‘my contributions matter.’ Valentina, you’ve always been the PI on these projects, but I never felt the hierarchy in conceptual or analytical discussions. That is, you have your strong opinions on many issues, but personally, I never felt that you didn’t take my inputs on board. I actually felt respected as a researcher. And I think this is key to interdisciplinary collaboration: we need to learn from each other. If it is only the PI’s or the professor’s ideas that count, then you don’t learn from each other.

KARLIJN: In a way, this points to the importance of listening, truly listening, and showing empathy to the people on the team.

VALENTINA: It makes me feel happy to hear you say this. Because, of course, this is part of the challenge as well in teamwork: there needs to be someone who makes sure the project stays on course and delivers what it had promised to the funder. On the other hand, you want team members to feel like they have the freedom to make the project theirs. This can lead to frictions, although I have to say that, when this happened, it was really important to be able to explain to the person involved what our obligations are, as a team, toward the funder and what we promise. It helps if you have the time in projects to really build up a common vision of what the aims of the project are and how each of us has a role in achieving these aims.

One thing that contributes to the coherence and cohesiveness of projects is co-authorship. That is, the idea that we will all show up in the outputs of the project also creates more of a sense that we are in this together and it eases the hurdles that team members may feel about sharing ‘their’ data. Data are not owned by the person who collects them. Data are the product of a whole team effort that starts from the preliminary team meetings aimed at creating a common vision, to establishing the methodology, to developing the tools, developing an analytical frame, analyzing the data, and writing up the findings. Too often in the social sciences and humanities, research is attributed to the writing phase. But there are so many phases that lead to the actual final written product and so many people involved in the different phases. The hard sciences such as Medicine or Biology are much better at acknowledging research as a collective effort. I think true interdisciplinary collaborations should always strive for co-authored outputs—it’s a way to acknowledge everyone along the process.

BILISUMA: On co-authorship, I think that the length of our projects helped us. We always worked on longer projects of about four years which gave us the time and opportunity for more cross-pollinated research papers. But what is key is that these expectations and different ambitions of the team members and the PI are discussed at the start of the project and get revisited during the project.

KARLIJN: Yes, and co-authorship is still not always appreciated. For example, in selection committees of funding agencies or academic positions, sometimes applicants are judged by how many single-authored papers they have produced. It seems like they think that co-authored papers require less effort. I find this problematic, as we have been saying, to work together actually costs a lot of work and leads to better and more nuanced insights. I know for sure that the papers I’ve co-authored are better than if I had done everything by myself. They are more nuanced, innovative, and integrate more literature. So, to then say you are not a good researcher because you mainly co-produced, is narrow-minded and simply wrong. But this is mainly academics from particular disciplines which are not used to co-authorship.

BILISUMA: That’s an important point that needs to be raised because co-authorships are for sure results of interdisciplinary collaborations. Your point hits the mark on what kinds of attitudes and cultures need to change in academia. We cannot encourage interdisciplinary research without changing the reward and recognition systems in place.

VALENTINA: Indeed, but the system is also us, and it is by actually engaging in interdisciplinary projects, appreciating what we gain from them, while also tackling the difficulties, that we can change a research system to one that acknowledges that much research is, at its essence, a collaborative endeavor.

Well, as always, it’s been fun and insightful to engage in these reflections with you both!

Conclusion

This dialogue was the result of a series of recorded unstructured conversations about our experiences working in interdisciplinary projects together. We relistened to the conversations and clustered the points around three themes that resulted as most prominent: open communication, trust among team members, and the ability to constructively deal with frictions. We realized that these themes paralleled those of our research on transnational families, which, with hindsight, is not surprising. In both our research topic and in our teamwork we pay attention to the work that is entailed in making collaboration function. Although one can argue that these themes are important in all teamwork, not just interdisciplinary teamwork, they are even more important in interdisciplinary teams because the potential for miscommunication, lack of trust, and discord is greater when one comes from different academic disciplines, each with its own vocabulary and praxis. Just like in transnational families, the distance makes family ‘work’ even more essential when one cannot count on everyday physical exchanges.

Our work has benefitted from our interdisciplinary collaboration. However, interdisciplinary teamwork is not easy and doesn’t come automatically. Interdisciplinary teamwork takes time and is also an emotional investment that not everyone is willing to make. It necessitates empathy and reflexivity. The atmosphere needs to be one of open communication and trust so that members can dare to be vulnerable and share unfinished work. Open-mindedness is necessary to be willing to call into question one’s own ways. While everyone needs to feel free to share ideas, we benefitted from clear hierarchy where one PI steered the team in one direction but also ensured that conversations continued and that data are shared and published in a fair and inclusive way. In sum, interdisciplinary teamwork is made up of small, everyday actions that are often invisible or go unnoticed but which, together, build up to a praxis and an atmosphere conducive to collaboration and interconnection.