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Interdisciplinarity and boundary work: challenges and opportunities for agrifood studies

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Abstract

Despite its vigor, agrifood studies research faces two fault lines: the durability of disciplines, and challenges in engaging non-academic stakeholders. In this essay, I use the concept of boundary work from social studies of science and technology to reflect on the challenges and opportunities for more engaged interdisciplinary research in agrifood studies. I draw on recent field visits to several “sustainable food chain” research projects funded through the Rural Economy and Land Use Programme (RELU), an innovative interdisciplinary research initiative of the UK Research Councils, to highlight the contradictory nature of boundary work in interdisciplinary research. Involving efforts both to bridge interfaces and to separate, exclude and manage other disciplines or stakeholders, boundary work is inherent to interdisciplinarity. Innovations in the organizational culture of projects and in the larger structural context for research can multiply the more generative potential of boundary work, and also yield more and better interdisciplinary research in agrifood studies.

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Acknowledgements

Comments from those who read an earlier longer version of this paper presented at the 2007 annual meeting of the Rural Sociological Society in Santa Clara, California provided thoughtful guidance for moving toward the present essay. I especially appreciate the support of an ESRC/SSRC Visiting Fellowship with the UK’s Rural Economy and Land Use Programme, which has stimulated and deepened my thinking on interdisciplinarity.

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  1. Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology, The Pennsylvania State University, 112F Armsby Bldg., University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    C. Clare Hinrichs

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  1. C. Clare Hinrichs
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Correspondence to C. Clare Hinrichs.

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Hinrichs, C.C. Interdisciplinarity and boundary work: challenges and opportunities for agrifood studies. Agric Hum Values 25, 209–213 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-008-9118-0

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