Liminality in practice: A case study in life sciences research

Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL) comprises three faculties: Humanities and Social Sciences; Science and Engineering; Medicine and Dentistry. In 2015 (when this research was undertaken), the university had 21,187 registered students (15,474 undergraduates and 4842 postgraduates) from 155 countries enrolled on over 240 degree courses. QMUL is a member of the Russell Group and was rated 9th in the UK in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) the system used in the UK to assess the quality of research produced by higher education institutions.

These domains were aspirational and constituted a strategic attempt to guide QMUL researchers to realise the theme of post-genomic population health. Taken together, they resonated with the UK Life Science agenda through its concern to understand how diseases affect different people in different ways in order to facilitate the development of tailored medicines (Department for Business, Innovation & Skills and Office for Life Sciences 2011). They also built on pre-existing QMUL research strengths, funded by organisations including: the Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council, Department of Health, European Research Commission. Examples include the following: the community genomics study East London Genes and Health (East London Genes and Health 2016); the national genomics sequencing endeavour The 100,000 Genomes Project (Genomics England 2014); and the diabetes-focused epigenetics and fetal programming project Genomic and lifestyle predictors of foetal outcome relevant to diabetes and obesity and their relevance to prevention strategies in South Asian peoples - GIFTS (GIFTS 2016). The LSI also aimed to contribute to the regeneration of the east London area. The development of the LSI includes the proposed establishment of a Life Sciences campus that is an integral aspect of the Whitechapel Vision (Tower Hamlets Council 2015) a regeneration project run by Tower Hamlets Council which includes various planned infrastructure developments including the repurposing of old hospital buildings into a civic space, new rail links, housing and retail developments.

The broad scope of the LSI, incorporating both its ambition to produce world-class research and its aspiration to ensure its connectedness to problems of local social relevance, resonates with contemporary ‘holistic’ notions of biology that attempt to bring together diverse communities of practice through the research process. Niewöhner has described a comparable phenomenon in his detailed anthropological observations of working practices in an environmental epigenetics laboratory as “a molecularisation of biography and milieu” (Niewöhner 2011, p. 13). He demonstrates how biology is increasingly understood as intimately connected to local cultural practices, individual experiences and stressors associated with e.g. food consumption, the environment, physical activity, housing, work and trauma (Klawetter 2014; Krieger 2005). Through this work, he explains that notions of ‘the universal material body’ (traditionally the preserve of the natural sciences) and the ‘contextual encultured subject’ (traditionally the preserve of social science and the humanities)—which are usually regarded as distinct from each other—are becoming increasingly blurred (Niewöhner 2011, p. 15). Their integration has implications for the nature of engagement between scholars of biology and anthropology, or more broadly, the human and natural sciences (see also Lock 2005, 2015; Rose 2013). Through the concept of ‘customary biology’—the inseparability of the social and the biological—Niewöhner offers an epistemological approach through which interdisciplinary teams might account for and work with the notions of biology, the body, health and disease that are concomitantly encultured and natural. For example he argues for the importance of ethnographic data, “rather than crude structuralist indicators of social order from epidemiological studies” (Niewöhner 2011, p. 16) to identify regularities with regard to how people dwell in their environment and how regularised dwelling practices mark their body in both social and biological terms.

In the following section, we demonstrate how life scientists at QMUL and other institutions represented at the research symposium articulate a disconnection between emerging ideas of life and traditional knowledge-making systems. Specifically, we will show how attempts to ‘do’ customary biology—and in the case of QMUL, attempts to ‘do’ post-genomic population health—are often hampered by conflicting, sometimes incommensurable epistemological commitments and associated institutional arrangements. We show how this apparent disconnection, even in the context of considerable efforts to overcome it, renders the practice of life science deeply confusing and ambivalent for those involved. We conclude by exploring how life science work might be staged differently in order to achieve something that more closely resembles customary biology, and which can potentially produce more relevant and human life science knowledge.

The multiplicity and variability of the phenomena that life scientists produce and work with was acknowledged repeatedly throughout the interviews and workshops. Reflecting more general life science discourses, there was agreement that causes of poor health were complex and challenged established modes of biomedical thinking. For example, when explaining why it was necessary that the LSI involved all three QMUL faculties (Humanities and Social Sciences, Science and Engineering, Medicine and Dentistry) a senior academic explained that the major health issues that face us today cannot simply “be addressed via technological solutions developed in the laboratory” as they are “the result of complicated social interactions…such as those that occur between people’s lifestyles, economics”, and “all sorts of things happening in the world”.

Originally devised to interpret rites of passage in traditional societies (van Gennep 1960) liminality describes the occasion of being suspended between two recognised social roles/structures (e.g., child/adult). During these liminal occasions—or moments of ‘anti-structure’ (Turner 1969)—the normal rules that govern social life do not apply, and as such they are deeply affective and potentially transformative in nature. Szakolczai (2009) suggests that contemporary societies are in a state of permanent liminality in that the social structures, values and referents that traditionally structure the social world are continuously being transgressed by technological advances and associated epistemic mutations. If, as Niewöhner (2011) suggests, the knowledge-making practices of a discipline like biology assume a “universal material body” then biologists are likely to be troubled by engagement with understandings of life (as emergent, situated) that presuppose a “contextual encultured subject” since this reduces any capacity to confidently know, understand and intervene on life with certainty.

In the next sections we draw on the concept of liminal hotspots in our analysis of two interrelated and contested issues that arose in our data, and are present in Life Science discourses more widely. The challenges of interdisciplinary work and the meaning of ‘community engagement’ in life science research. We present a detailed account of the difficulties that life scientists face, how they account for these difficulties and how they envisage that these may be overcome in ways that might catalyse productive transformations—or “pattern shifts” (Stenner and Greco 2017)—in their knowledge-making.

Despite success in practicing this style of interdisciplinary working, Participant 4 later conceded that this approach is high risk, often fails to engage researchers and stimulate activity and is exceedingly difficult to facilitate in a contemporary UK university setting. They explained that the systems for structuring and accounting for research are at odds with this orientation, despite the rhetoric of the interdisciplinary imperative that pervades the higher education sector (see, for instance, Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy 2016). To award grants most research funders require a fully formed project based on clear research objectives, that uses established methodologies and promises particular research outcomes. Moreover, for those who take part in interdisciplinary research there is the additional pressure to produce high impact research disseminated through particular discipline-bound journals associated with their field. As Participant 4 put it later in the workshop “why would a clinical researcher give their time to publish in a social science journal with an impact factor of 3?”

In the following section we import theory from the fields of environmental justice (Corburn 2005; Montoya 2013) and pragmatist approaches to community organising (Harney et al. 2016; Harney and Wills, 2017) to suggest how a new ecology of research practice—one that can attune to situated and emergent notions of health and well-being—might be accomplished in the kind of work undertaken in the LSI.

Though our data analysis we have demonstrated the difficulties of ‘doing’ something akin to customary biology in the contemporary university setting. The proposition that such an approach is necessary was borne out in the views of our study participants. They broadly agreed that contemporary health problems are underpinned by multiple behavioural, cultural, social, environmental and biological processes, but expressed disquiet about the extent to which current enactments of interdisciplinary and community engaged working are able to comprehend and work with this proposition. The lens of ‘liminal hotspots’ has enabled us to illuminate the nature and extent of this disquiet and possible approaches to organising practice that might attend to it effectively.

The liminal hotspot summoned by the relationship between epistemological and institutional processes associated “the universal material body” (Niewöhner 2011, p. 15) and the “contextual encultured subject” (Niewöhner 2011, p. 15) was often encountered in ways that did not catalyse new forms of knowledge-making (“pattern shifts”) across disciplines and with the communities it sought to benefit, despite the potential to do so. The climate of accountability that pervades contemporary university life favours “fast” and “benchmarked” science (Stengers 2011; Mueller 2014) and does not provide the time, space or incentives for researchers to engage in speculative, serendipitous and “slow” life science knowledge-making that can contribute to the propagation of the “shared something” that can be collectively acted on. Likewise, although optimistically constructed as a democratic form of knowledge-making that can inform a ‘situated’ approach to life science research, the depth and breadth of community engagement remains limited. The persistence of epistemological and institutional processes associated with “the universal material body” barred “experts by experience” from collecting around and propagating the “shared something” around which knowledge could be made. Our findings have encouraged us to consider alternative ways of staging and enacting life science knowledge-making that may enable the “shared something” to flourish.

In a recent report on “Community University Partnerships” (CUPs) produced by pragmatist geographers at QMUL (Harney and Wills 2017) a new ecology of research practice, akin to those suggested by Montoya and resonant with the concerns of our research participants, is outlined. The report presents a critique of top down public engagement activities in which “universities approach the question of social impact as a means of meeting the outside demands to widen participation and demonstrate impact in the REF” (Harney and Wills 2017, p. 7). The authors are concerned—as were our case study participants—that this approach results in “superficial” (Harney and Wills 2017, p. 7) impact that is “unlikely to have much lasting or significant effect on the complex social issues that exist in the world” (Harney and Wills 2017, p. 7). They suggest that Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are “uniquely placed” (Harney and Wills 2017, p. 7) to “act as credible and prestigious spaces for knowledge generation” (Harney and Wills 2017, p. 7) that can contribute to “finding solutions to society’s most pressing issued by working collaboratively with non-academics to generate new ideas and institutions for addressing them” (Harney and Wills 2017, p. 8). Three potential modes of partnership are outlined (Community Based Research, Knowledge Exchange and Student and Staff Volunteering) to achieve this, which share a common commitment to “the principle of reciprocity, involving the two-way flow of knowledge information and benefits” (Harney and Wills 2017, p. 9). The ‘community’ associated with CUPs is always “defined variously by identity, place or issue” (Harney and Wills 2017, p. 9). We suggest that community university partnerships offer potential to support new repertoires of practice enabling researchers and their co-producers of knowledge to do ‘customary biology’, attend meaningfully to contemporary understandings of the body, the person, disease and health, and re-situate ‘humanness’ at the centre of life sciences.

We have conducted this research as situated actors within our own organisation, with established working relationships with some of the participants in the Life Sciences Initiative, and a stake in its development. This presents some challenges to our data collection, analysis, interpretation and theorising. Immersion in the assemblage of practices we were studying behoves us to be as reflexive as we can practically be. Just as some interpretations are “obvious” to us—as they were to participants with whom we share a similar frame of reference—so too are certain silences. Some statements we take at face value, whereas others we open up to more detailed scrutiny. Our attempts to capture this phenomenology in motion reflect the very difficulties our participants have in constructing workable interdisciplinarities. (Callard and Fitzgerald 2015) The “obviousness” of some of the tropes used in our participants’ discussions may lead some readers to feel unsurprised by the data. We argue that this “lack of surprise” is an achievement. On the one hand, when actors in our symposium say (more or less) what one might expect a historian or a professor of medicine or a community organiser to say; they articulate a shared set of norms that is enabling of interdisciplinarity, rather than the mute incomprehension, which might be present if no such norms existed. On the other, some articulate incomprehension—which our research also highlights—is likewise an achievement: a reassertion of particular power relations, disciplinary norms, and claims of territory. (Biagioli 1990)