So, you know, we’re looking at a more holistic definition of life and we’re obviously talking about human life here. But we’re placing human lives within the context of the social environment that we live in, um, so that we can ensure adequate emphasis on social determinants of human life. But at the same time recognising that human life, um, includes the way in which we can intervene at the level of the cell or the organ or the genome. Um, and then, importantly, making um, [an] explicit link between human life, our social lives, with the environment…Um, because the environment is increasingly going to impact both on the social context but, and the many ways in which the environment also affects humans at the level of the organ and itself.
In this interview extract, a Senior Lecturer in Public Health presents ‘life science’ research activity as warranting “a more holistic definition of human life”. He emphasises the interrelatedness of the social, biological (cell, organ, genome) and ecological determinants of health—conceptualisation that resonates with policy makers, researchers and funders (Department for Business, Innovation & Skills and Office for Life Sciences 2011; Landecker and Panofsky 2013; Rose 2013; Wellcome Trust 2015). No longer regarded as “within-discipline problems” (Ledford 2015, p. 309), a compelling rhetoric supports the notion that new ways of ‘doing’ life sciences research, involving interdisciplinary modes of working that, it is claimed, may be more successful in embracing the tangle of behavioural, cultural, social, environmental and biological factors that constitute ‘wicked’ contemporary health problems (Barry and Born 2014; Gleed and Marchant 2015; Nature 2015; Research Councils UK 2016; Rittel and Webber 1973; Viseu 2015a). Alongside this are equally compelling calls for stronger public engagement wherein the solution to the complexity of health problems is assumed to lie in involving the potential beneficiaries of knowledge (for example particular ‘at risk’ groups) more actively in knowledge-making practices—an arrangement that is supported by practical, ethical and democratic justifications (Berkman and Kawachi 2000; Corburn 2005; Israel et al. 1998; Montoya 2013). Montoya suggests “community knowledge…offers a means to ensure that humanness remains at the center of the life sciences” (Montoya 2013, p. S46) and argues that “theories of disease that do not account for the ecological, contextual, and the human in context making and being made by their world” are being destabilised (Montoya 2013, p. S52). Montoya’s insistence on ‘humanness’ here underscores the complex relationship between the focus in life sciences research on human health and concerns that a focus on biological processes lose sight of “the human” and “the humane” through technological and scientific reductionisms. These arguments resonate with the literature on social determinants of health in that health outcomes and inequities are perceived as being “the result of the conditions in which people are born, live, grow and age” (WHO 2017a, b) which are themselves patterned by interrelated issues including “governance, environment, education, employment, social security, food, housing, water, transport and energy” (WHO, 2017).
However, seductive these suggestions may be, these ‘new’ forms of engagement—between researchers from different disciplines, and between researchers and non-academic knowledge-making communities - often result in a “tangle of diverse and often incompatible disciplines and sub-disciplines, theories, concepts, arguments, bodies of evidence, experimental set-ups…riven with controversies over some rather fundamental issues” (Rose 2013, p. 8). Explorations of how health and well-being are constituted through the interplay between intercellular, psychological, biographical, social, environmental and cultural processes do not align with the experimental reductionism typical of past versions of the life sciences (Rose 2013). Life science researchers (including those from the natural and social sciences) may continue to use relatively fixed ways of thinking and experimental languages that are familiar to them but which are not attuned to the inherently variable and dynamic nature of the biological knowledge proposed by this ‘new’ version of life sciences (Lock 2005). This may go some way to explain why social scientists ‘integrated’ into life science institutions for the purposes of producing inter/transdisciplinary research (see for example Fitzgerald et al. 2014; Rabinow and Bennett 2014; Viseu 2015b) have found the traditional knowledge gaps and power asymmetries between natural and social science disciplines very difficult to overcome. Alongside these conceptual and methodological difficulties, there are also obvious institutional barriers to collaboration, from commitments to professional or disciplinary norms, to departmental organisation, to building and campus geography, and the structure and incentives of publication, research funding and technology transfer institutions. Hence, whilst some claim that the understandings of life summoned by fields such as epigenetics open a “critical window” (Landecker and Panofsky 2013, p. 336) through which engagement between different knowledge-making communities might occur, more skeptical voices have drawn attention to how such a cosmology of life has been met with caution and confusion (Pickersgill 2016)
Through a process of empirically based theorising informed by our case study research on one university-based life science initiative in the UK, we explore how the mobilisation of interdisciplinary working and public engagement is playing out and with what consequence for notions of ‘life’. We explore ‘how’ the calls for interdisciplinary and publically engaged life science research are understood and embodied by life scientists who are attempting to grapple with a paradox that seems to underpin contemporary understandings of biological processes. That is, the more we have come to know “the more uncertain it seems we are about the meaning of this information and what to do with it” (Franklin 2014, p. 4).
Our engagement with this paradox stems from our proximity to it as interdisciplinary researchers based at Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL), keen to generate research that improves health and well-being in the broadest terms. Our disciplinary backgrounds include medicine, philosophy, science and technology studies (STS), anthropology and sociology but we regard ourselves as scholars who work across disciplines and who share an overarching interest in health and well-being. Between us we have extensive experience of working in interdisciplinary teams of researchers and producing research with non-academic partners, such as community organisations, health service providers, health service users and policy makers (Greenhalgh et al. 2015, 2016; Swinglehurst et al. 2011).
Like many UK higher education institutions, QMUL has recently launched an interdisciplinary Life Science Initiative (LSI). The initiative has grown out of extensive preparation and planning and is a consolidation of QMUL’s intention to establish a permanent Life Sciences Institute, intended to mobilise the expertise of academics from across university faculties. QMUL is situated within a borough ranked (in 2015) as the 10th most deprived in England (Tower Hamlets Council 2015a) with its associated negative impact on local population health. The LSI aspires to benefit the health, well-being and prosperity of this local community by drawing on the diverse expertise and perspectives of its members.
The data that inform the paper are derived from analysis of documents relating to the LSI (the initiative website, press releases and reports) and 16 audio-recorded in-depth interviews with academics and university managers from QMUL about life science activity. A purposive, maximum diversity sample included participants from across all the faculties at QMUL, incorporating a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, and variation in the extent of participants’ involvement in the LSI activity (e.g., engaged on a regular basis to not at all). Participants were encouraged to articulate their understanding of life sciences, ‘tell the story’ of life sciences at QMUL, describe their experience and understanding of the initiative and explain whether and how their work related to life sciences research activity both within the LSI and more widely within broader life sciences communities. They were also invited to draw (and reflect on) a picture of what they thought the LSI looked like in practice; this activity prompted articulations on the present, ongoing and (possible) future evolution of the LSI to accompany their experiences of it to date. Interviews were transcribed and analysed to identify provisional themes, which informed six research workshops in which anonymised extracts of interview data were used to prompt discussion. Workshops took place in the context of a research symposium organised by the research team and attended by participants from within and beyond QMUL. Audio-recordings of the workshops were listened to independently (by MC and DS) and collaboratively to identify ‘critical moments’ or short segments of interaction in which participants constructed and ‘worked through’ contested issues and meanings. These segments were transcribed to enable closer analysis of participants’ accounts and their attempts to address and resolve contested meanings (or not). We synthesised our analysis across these datasets to develop a critical account of how life scientists articulate their understandings of the ‘life sciences’, and how they account for, negotiate and challenge notions of interdisciplinarity and community engagement. Our findings provide insights into how life scientists ‘work with’ and ‘intervene in’ contemporary accounts of biology and disease and how they speculate about alternative ways of working.
In our analysis, we present the ambiguities that surround life science activity and, by focusing on participant practices of ‘interdisciplinary’ and ‘community engaged’ working, we demonstrate how such ambiguities are grappled with in practice. These two key themes in our participants’ narratives are also of central salience to broader policy discourses around life sciences (Wellcome Trust 2015). We also import the notion of ‘liminal hotspots’ (Stenner and Greco 2017; Motzkau and Clinch 2017) as a sensitising concept to generate a deeper understanding of how such ambiguities may be both detrimental and beneficial to life science practice and health outcomes. We conclude by combining the diagnostic potential of liminal hotspots with ‘process pragmatism’ to suggest ways of transforming how life science research questions are identified, framed, investigated and evaluated. Process pragmatism is an approach to community organising underpinned by its commitment to understanding how knowledge can be made in ways that produce social change (Harney et al. 2016). We speculate that by attending to liminal hotspots through practices inspired by process pragmatism it may be possible to unleash potential for new ways of working that can grapple more effectively with situated and evolving cosmologies of life and health, and ensure that humanness remains the center of life science activity.