Keywords

Introduction

Complex practices, such as the emergency department or intensive care unit in a hospital, the control-room for train traffic or air transportation, or the kitchen of a busy restaurant, are highly dynamic and usually clear manifestations of ingenuity and responsiveness. Scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) try to unravel such practices by acknowledging the relevance of what is traditionally ignored or considered unimportant. As an STS scholar, I thus pay close attention to the role of the ‘mundane’ in stabilizing practices and I explore whether its unpacking may help us to learn from it. More often than not, ordinary daily work proves to involve plenty of rich and resourceful actions and activities, rather than merely routine ones. I identify informal processes as the glue that holds practices together. This counter-intuitive way of reasoning also makes me stress the potential of ‘ambivalence’ and ‘inconsistency’ in preventing practices from stalling. In sum, by considering the ‘ordinary’ as an extraordinary accomplishment, it becomes possible to question why things go well and what is the role of the attributes that are usually neglected when trying to raise our understanding of complex practices.

Unpacking common, day-to-day matters is important not only from an academic point of view but also for practice optimalization. Although innovation is the ‘traditional’ way to improve practices, in line with Rein De Wilde (2000), I take an exnovative approach. According to De Wilde, innovation makes us blind to the importance of what is already in place. Practice improvement, he argues, also requires ‘exnovation’: the explication of the hidden strength of practices and to learn from this. After all, the achievement of quality may in part be the product of an unplanned yet effective set of initiatives. By exposing what is already there, exnovation acknowledges that unarticulated actions serve as a vital resource for the accomplishment of work and opportunities for improvement. Scrutinizing practices from such an exnovative angle may generate input for both scholarly work and practice optimization.

Everyday application or recurrent use of solutions within practices, however, is likely to turn effective routines into habitual forms of conduct that are hardly noticed anymore. Although present, practitioners no longer pay attention to them. How, then, are we as researchers to identify these potential resources for improvement when practitioners themselves may no longer be aware of them? In order to gain access to what is taken-for-granted, we potentially benefit from finding ways to combine an outsider’s awareness with an insider’s understanding. It is here that video-reflexive ethnography (VRE) comes in, as this approach allows the familiar and unfamiliar to coincide, as it were.

Video-reflexive ethnography is a visual, collaborative, and interventionist method for studying practices by video-recording day-to-day work and analyzing this footage together with the practitioners in reflexive sessions (Iedema et al., 2019). In these sessions, practitioners have an opportunity to look at their own workplace from a different angle. This new way of perceiving their daily routines, in combination with the ‘outsider-questions’ posed by the researchers, has the potential to exnovate the ‘hidden’ strengths of practices. The collaborative analysis of the footage opens room for identification and clarification, awareness, and appreciation, sharing experiences, questioning assumptions, and discussing suggestions for improvement. These analytic reflections are recorded and subsequently used for further analysis by the researchers. This twofold analysis provides the input for both scholarly output and practice optimalization. Importantly, such collaboration with participants is not limited to the analysis of footage in the reflexive meetings but runs all the way from agenda-setting, what to film (as well as when and where), the selection of clips for the reflexive discussions, and their analysis in the reflexivity sessions to publishing the ultimate results (e.g., Carroll et al., 2021). In VRE, research subjects truly act as co-researchers. As researcher, my focus on the taken-for-granted within practices necessitates interdisciplinary collaboration because it is impossible for me to unpack ‘the everyday’ without those who inhabit it. The VRE method provides the formula to do so.

This perfect fit between the VRE method and my ambitions to unravel complex practices and making a difference in these practices hardly guarantees a smooth, easy ride. As I study predominantly medical practices, my co-researchers do not only have a different disciplinary background, but they also rely on an epistemic culture (a realist paradigm) that differs from mine (constructivist paradigm). The epistemic culture in medicine is dominated by the idea that the biomedical realities involved are objectively observable and exist independently of the human knower. With adequate methods, science can provide an objective description of those realities. This epistemic orientation contrasts with the constructivist paradigm serving as my epistemic base, which defines realities as being socially and experientially based and, as such, allows for multiple realities. In other words, VRE projects in healthcare are not only interdisciplinary but also multi-paradigmatic.

Although the paradigmatic underpinning of research projects tends to reside in the background, occasionally, it will take up a foreground position. In this chapter, I will use two case studies to discuss one issue in particular: how paradigmatic differences impact trust in professional credibility in the context of interdisciplinary collaboration—trust in epistemic qualities is key in interdisciplinary research. By means of the case studies, I will discuss how interdisciplinary collaboration has the potential to undermine epistemic credibility when acting as a relativist in a realist environment. The first case study is based on a project conducted together with Katherine Carroll, a VRE colleague, in an Emergency Department in an Australian hospital. The argument of this case study draws on one of our publications (Mesman & Carroll, 2021) in which we demonstrate how a solid preparation of research includes potential risks for the professional reputation of the involved researchers and as such for building interdisciplinary alliances. While the focus of the first case study is on establishing collaboration with research subjects, the second case study shifts the attention to collaborative dynamics within the research team itself. Based on a project in Midwifery Science in the Netherlands, this case study allows me to explain how real or imagined threats to professional credibility can affect the experience of interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as the relationship with one’s own academic community. By discussing and comparing both case studies, I aim to convey situations that generate potential risks to researchers for loss of their epistemic credibility, as well as opportunities for on-the-ground problem-solving aimed at preserving or reclaiming their professional reputation.

Methodological Rigor Comes with Mess

Vignette: First Impressions

Emergency Department (ED) ward: Entering the ED, we are welcomed by the chief medical specialist. He shows us around on the ED and introduces us to several ED staff members. We see nurses attending to documentation and talking to patients. Curtains around patients are being closed and opened again, and while we hear phones ring, medical staff is constantly walking in and out, attending to their tasks. This orientation on the ward gives us a first impression of what this particular ED is like. (Adapted from Carroll & Mesman, 2011, p. 160)

The focus of our project in the Australian ED was on the ways in which clinicians—including ambulance personnel, triage nurses, and emergency doctors—hand over patient information effectively within such a complex work environment. By identifying their collaborative strengths, we aimed to contribute to improving clinical handovers in the ED. To unravel their styles and strategies, we used the method of video-reflexive ethnography. However, for VRE to work and result in reflexive learning and intervening, ED staff had to become co-researchers. Therefore, we had to get them motivated to join us in the first place. Clearly, we had to do some groundwork first.

Like any other ethnographic research, building a methodological foundation for applying VRE involves more than getting approvals and explaining your project in boardrooms and staff meetings. First and foremost, it requires trust and learning the cues of the practice (Carroll & Mesman, 2011; Iedema et al., 2019). Positioning themselves in the local ecology of the work site enables researchers to build rapport and to get acquainted with the different roles, responsibilities, and organizational rhythms and structures. Such a contextual exploration also helps to identify key-informants, as well as the best moments to film and the right spots to be in. In addition, being among staff all day allows researchers to further explain the project’s focus and set-up on a more individual basis, and, most importantly, to build trust to recruit clinicians to become engaged as co-researcher.

Fully aware of the importance of a solid preparation, Katherine and I went into the Emergency ward once we felt ready to do so. Quite soon, however, things became rather challenging, and, unexpectedly, at one point, even our professional reputation was at risk.

Vignette: Finding the Right Spot

ED ward: Being donned in scrubs, we feel more than ready to start filming clinical handovers. We are informed by the clinical staff what time and location their handovers are usually done in the ED. To be able to capture them on film, we had to find a place that will allow us to do so without disturbing their handover meetings. In consultation with the ED staff, we position ourselves next to the pole in the middle of the ward’s workstation with our camera ready. (Adapted from Carroll & Mesman, 2011, pp. 161–162)

As detailed in this vignette, we decided on the best location for filming the handover practices based on information of the ED staff. It turned out, however, that clinicians engage in many informal handover activities as well. These ad hoc exchanges were also vital input for our project because they constituted a substantial segment of the ED handover practice. Yet, these informal handovers, as we found, were not always neatly planned or organized. In fact, many of them were quite discreet, involving multiple informal handovers concurrently or taking place at various locations at unpredictable moments. To capture the informal handovers on film, though, we had to able to recognize them as such. This turned out to be rather difficult.

Vignette: Finding the Right Conversation

ED ward: ‘Come on, let’s go over there. They are doing one, I’m sure’! Afraid to miss specific handover moments, we leave our position next to the pole and move around to be able to film as many as possible encounters between staff members. This results in us franticly filming all kinds of information exchanges. After all, it might involve a handover activity. As we try to get a sense of the various handover practices, the clinicians can see us literally running around with a camera, filming whoever is talking, and apologizing for recording the wrong conversation or for being too late for the right ones. As a result, they look at us clearly wondering what on earth we are doing. (Adapted from Carroll & Mesman, 2011, p. 162)

Unlike in other research traditions, such as when doing laboratory experiments, in the case of video-reflexive ethnographic studies, methodological thoroughness is not defined and applied before you enter the field site. Instead, it is generated on location as the activities to be studied unfold (Iedema et al., 2019). To build a solid research infrastructure in such an evolving context implies a dramatic change for the position of researchers, because all efforts to develop a sound methodological foundation occur in real time, in front of the eyes of everyone present. If all goes well, this is not a problem. Frequently, however, this stage will also be marred by uncertainties, if not outright mistakes. This is part and parcel not only of the VRE methodology but also of research in general. Despite descriptions of orderly research processes in the methodology sections of much academic literature, all research involves a rather messy process to some extent, as argued by John Law (2004). From this perspective, us ‘running around’ with a camera was just a dynamic form of getting to know the place. Our asking ‘stupid’ questions or filming the wrong conversations should be considered to some extent as an inevitable, ‘messy’ dimension of the preparatory stage of the research involved.

The usual dynamic for a consultative and collaborative research method, in other words, will involve a disorderly process. It is in the interrelated turbulence that researchers will learn about and connect with others. The fact that we, as ethnographers, are at ease with our messy preparation does not guarantee that the same applies to others as well. In an environment like healthcare, where common sense realism is the dominant framework, it will be harder, we argued, for (prospective) research participants to accept disorderly actions as part of serious and solid research (Mesman & Carroll, 2021). Healthcare staff is familiar with a pre-fixed, coherent research protocol with a well-formulated hypothesis to be tested on the basis of pre-defined conditions and steps to be taken. Instead, they saw two women running around with a camera, filming every conversation, including those about Saturday-evening plans. The contrast between the messiness of our preparatory work and their experiences with the clean set-up of medicine’s random controlled trials harbors the risk of us being regarded as probably lost, presumably methodologically inadequate. While VRE groundwork is aimed at relationship building and starting up collaboration, its local and immediate character is potentially harmful to the participants’ responsiveness and the researchers’ trustworthiness. In other words, the actions required to build a solid foundation for collaboration can simultaneously jeopardize its realization.

How, then, can researchers ensure being taken seriously and maintain participants’ interest in collaborating actively in their project? Our VRE project on the ED survived the perils of exposure and we succeeded to enlist staff as our co-researchers. For one thing, it was the hierarchical culture of medical practice that opened up possibilities for safeguarding our professional reputation (Carroll & Mesman, 2011). In the hierarchical ecology of the ED, our academic seniority and institutional affiliations buttressed our credibility as researchers. It positioned us on a level that gained us the attention of the chief clinicians involved. Their support was key to be accepted by their colleagues as well. The fact that we were seen with the chief clinician on the first day secured our position. Despite we could read amazement on the faces of some of the ED staff about our way of doing research, being seen in the presence of their clinical management caused them to assume everything was okay. Furthermore, their being re-assured made them more approachable for us, allowing us to interact with them and to build respectful relationships. These interactions also provided possibilities for further explanation of our ethnographic project and its methods, which contributed to the staff’s understanding of our ways of doing and reasoning. Over time, they too considered our ‘messiness’ as ‘constructive adjustment’ and ‘required flexibility’ (Mesman & Carroll 2021, p. 172). In retrospect, doing our preparatory work in the ‘here and now’ had the potential of creating confusion or even suspicion about the quality of our project or the credentials of us as researchers. But this full exposure also provided us the possibility to establish recognition because our ‘messy’ approach was accompanied by a ‘relationally-driven, collaborative, transparent, humble and therefore trustworthy’ attitude (Mesman & Carroll, 2021, p. 172).

This case study demonstrates how paradigmatic differences can impact interdisciplinary alliances in unforeseen ways. Evidently, learning the cues and recruiting staff simultaneously in the same space creates potential risks for the professional reputation of researchers. At the same time, being ‘on location’ can also provide the means to maintain or re-establish professional reliability before damage is done beyond repair. Yet, the potential for undermining a researcher’s position is not limited to the interaction with research subjects. Within a research team, paradigmatic diversity can also cause concern about the professional credibility. My next case study will display how collaboration across disciplines comes with expertise and ignorance, and how these can impact a researcher’s professional reputation.

Professional Credibility Meets Professional Identity

According to Kim Fortun and Todd Cherkasky, collaboration is all about ‘diversity’ in which we understand ‘diversity as a resource’ (1998, p. 146). People with different expertise align into a synchronized effort to accomplish something that could not be done otherwise. In this way ‘collaboration marks the difference between those who work together rather than their sameness’ (Fortun & Cherkasky, 1998, p. 146). Interdisciplinary collaboration takes diversity to another level. The set-up of interdisciplinary collaboration is affected by methodologies and theoretical choices, as linked to specific tasks, discourses, modes of practice, roles, and responsibilities. Methodological and theoretical decisions are framed by, for example, the distribution of power, paradigmatic (in)compatibilities, and requirements of the field of application. In this way, interdisciplinary collaboration also implies feelings of being more or being less ‘at home.’ The potentially uncertain role of ‘visiting researchers’ who venture beyond their disciplinary comfort zone comes with insecurity that resembles fieldwork-related anxieties as described by Jörg Niewöhner (2016): ‘will they like me?’ (relationship building), ‘will they tolerate me?’ (epistemic authority), and ‘will I have something new to add?’ (research output). My second case study, from research into Maternity Care, serves as basis for discussing such insecurities in relation to interdisciplinary collaboration. This discussion has its focus on the concern of losing one’s epistemic authority and shows how solving this problem comes with a risk of drifting away too far from one’s own disciplinary turf.

Maternity Care aims for a safe birth trajectory for mother and child. Considering the complexities involved in everyday Maternity Care practices, a group of scholars in Midwifery Science initiated a study on the ways midwives, obstetricians, and parents-to-be accomplish effective collaboration (Korstjens et al., 2021). Aiming at in-depth insights into the implicit ways professionals establish constructive interactions among themselves and with parents, video-reflexive ethnography was applied as methodological approach. Because of my VRE expertise, I was invited to join the research team, which I consider a privilege. Because of the team’s intellectual drive and know-how of the maternity field, the whole trajectory was a highly valuable experience for me. But occasionally, I felt also confused and ambivalent about our project (Smolka & Mesman, forthcoming). In some cases, I even wondered about the status of my epistemic credibility and felt alienated amidst my midwifery colleagues. Such feelings of uncertainty also deserve attention when reflecting on interdisciplinary collaboration. Based on my experiences in the midwifery team, I will unpack situations that generate doubt about epistemic authority, specifically in relation to my own insecurity.

Management of Ignorance

In many disciplines, including Midwifery Science, it is common practice to perform a systematic review of existing theories on the topic of investigation before doing the actual empirical research. The aim of such a systematic search is to identify the knowledge already available in the literature and to develop sensitizing concepts that directs the empirical data collection and analysis. The midwifery team aimed to get the results of this review published in a Maternity Care journal that had a strong focus on quantitative research. Hence, for strategic reasons, our literature search was partly based on a quantitative approach, which took me to unknown places. In VRE, the principle of ethnographic openness and the input of the co-researchers rule out the pre-fixed focus of a literature review. Having been a VRE researcher for over a decade, a preliminary literature search was no longer part of my way of working when I started my collaboration with the midwifery scholars.

Vignette: Getting Lost and Losing Face

Midwifery Department (MD): the principal investigator (PI) of the project, a PhD student, and myself are sitting in an office of the MD. We discuss our work on the literature review. The PI explains what actions to take to ensure ‘content validation,’ ‘trustworthiness,’ and ‘credibility.’ She is clearly on familiar grounds. I, on the other hand, am struggling and, too many times, I wonder what she is talking about. Some of the words she uses and the actions she proposes are anything but familiar to me. But I don’t dare to ask at this moment. Not again. I am sure she must be rather fed up with my questions. Sometimes, I sense frustration on her part, given that all these questions delay the research process. It is evident that my questions surprise her. Not because they are so brilliant but because they are so basic. Sometimes, I see disbelief in her eyes: ‘What do you mean, you don’t know’? More than ever, I am aware of my ignorance in this area. I realize they invited me as an expert, but in too many moments I act like a novice. I am out of my depth and feel stupid and embarrassed. I clearly sense a dissonance between the expectations and my performance. I fear this impression will damage my scholarly reputation and my position in the team. After all, how many questions are you allowed to ask before losing your credibility as an expert?

Not being familiar with the selected methodologies or theoretical armature is a common situation in interdisciplinary research (e.g., Fitzgerald & Callard, 2015). After all, intellectual pluralism is a leading motive for interdisciplinary collaboration. Yet, capitalizing on complementary knowledge implies at least some level of ignorance on the part of those involved. Moreover, according to Maria Jönsson and Anna Rådström (2013), what we don’t know says something important about who we are. Because ignorance is the automatic result of being disciplined, it is not something to be embarrassed about. Likewise, Zachary Piso et al. (2016) have argued that while you acquire the knowledge characteristic of your field, you are also being disciplined in which aspects to ignore because they are deemed irrelevant. This distribution of attention implies that ignorance is actively produced while gaining expertise in your field. In this way, interdisciplinary research reinforces ignorance on an individual level, making us aware of being a ‘situated knower’ (Piso et al., 2016, p. 648).

At the same time, being formally excused for lack of knowledge by being disciplined does not take away the potential impact of (false) expectations on your professional reputation. In the midwifery project, I was expected to have expertise not only in VRE research but also—if implicitly—in performing such a systematic literature search. Considering my background in qualitative research, it was assumed by my midwifery colleagues that a systematic review was a standard technique in my research practice as well. Certainly, I know my way around in scholarly literature, but I lack the expertise to perform a review based on their standards and (partly) quantitative approach. Moreover, as VRE scholar, I was ‘disciplined’ to ignore any pre-defining activities, including systematic reviews aiming to define sensitizing concepts that would guide our data collection and analysis. In this project, however, Midwifery Science featured as the dominant disciplinary orientation. Accordingly, the entire set-up was based on its paradigmatic understanding of doing qualitative research. Furthermore, the communicative context of the project, that is, Maternity Care journals, needed additional methodological steps to be taken to meet the field’s research quality criteria. But this required expertise was a lacuna on my part. Obviously, a mismatch between expectations and performance can potentially weaken one’s epistemic authority. Even though the interactions of the team did not give any indication of such a problem, I grew concerned that my academic reputation would be undermined before taking up my responsibility as VRE expert in the second stage of the project in which the VRE method was center stage.

Paradigmatic Convictions Under Pressure

Being afraid that my lack of expertise in the literature review stage of the project would negatively affect my expert position in the VRE stage, I had to re-secure my professional credibility. To regain the team’s trust (if I had lost it at all), I decided to ignore my uncertainties and instead open up, learning new skills, and go for it by joining them wholeheartedly. Although everything worked out well, my enthusiasm also came with costs.

Vignette: Full Immersion and Lost Again

MD: To my own surprise, I hear myself discussing issues of bias with my midwifery colleagues and join them in actions aimed at content validation. We work together on the basis of strategies to accomplish these aims by analyzing data together, alternated with independent assessments based on strictly worded selection criteria. Checks and balances include performing duplicate extractions from systematic collected samples, and discussions until consensus is reached. We read and re-read all verbatim transcripts, developed a coding scheme, and defined categories. We chart huge tables, make flowcharts, and make sure readers can evaluate whether our findings are transferable to other contexts. Clearly, methodological data and investigator triangulation are high on our agenda. (Adapted from Helmond van et al., 2015, pp. 211–212)

For many researchers, most of these actions will look familiar. After all, this is how research is done. Although being impressed by our work, I also felt a mixture of alienation and awkwardness. The terms mentioned were not quite my language. Nor was the cross-coding my way of reasoning and ordering data. In other words, I did not recognize my usual ‘ethnographic me’ in this project. Leaving one’s academic turf raises the question of how far one can travel and spend time somewhere else before getting lost. To answer this question requires more insight into the underlying causes of my somewhat disturbed academic self. While being fully immersed in the project, I became concerned about the fact that I did not only join a team with a different disciplinary profile but that I also had to work within a different paradigmatic tradition. Paradigmatic differences imply that researchers will navigate other standards, tasks, or requirements for doing research. VRE is anchored in a post-qualitative tradition (Iedema et al., 2019). This implies that VRE privileges being over knowing, style over method, entanglements and multiplicities over binaries and categories, emergence and fluidity over stability and fixedness, engagement over professional distance, and creating to enable over thinking to know, just to name a few characteristics. Indeed, my colleagues from Midwifery Science looked at some things from the other extreme of these various binary opposites. By joining them I was crossing a line.

Making use of VRE for over a decade caused me to internalize its research style. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that while being engrossed in a highly systematic exploration of the literature to predetermine the focus of our ethnographic part of the project, the VRE scholar in me resisted. Such ways of doing and thinking are, moreover, at odds with my identity as an STS scholar. However, when I joined the team, I did so without much thought about these concerns. As all team members were qualitative researchers who agreed on using VRE as a main research instrument, I didn’t bother about spelling out our paradigmatic positions. After all, all of us were delighted with each other’s expertise. Looking back, it is easy to be surprised about this naïveté, but one should also realize that, in many research projects, an eagerness to get going may push such more fundamental considerations toward the background (e.g., Fitzgerald et al., 2014).

To secure my position in the midwifery team, I had committed myself to their ways of doing research. However, joining them with enthusiasm in activities that were aimed at meeting the quality standards of their field merely relocated—rather than solved—my concern of losing my academic credibility. And, this time, it was related to my own discipline. Many of my activities were based on assumptions rejected by me and most of my colleagues. Triangulation, for example, assumes that there is a fixed point of reality at which all perspectives meet. Avoiding bias, to name another example, aims for neutrality. Both these considerations do not align with the overall epistemic framework on the basis of which I conduct research. I felt that I had drifted too far away from my scholarly moorings, and I began to fear that my STS/VRE colleagues would come across a publication with my name on it that presented a methodological argument from which we as STS scholars, as a matter of principle, aim to move away. I felt like a vegetarian about to get caught in a steakhouse. All kinds of thoughts crossed my mind: would such a publication give the impression that my epistemic convictions can change overnight? Should my name be on the final version? Was I disloyal to my own community? Was it self-betrayal to my own epistemic convictions?

How to stay true to one’s own paradigmatic convictions while being fully submerged in interdisciplinary teamwork based on other research principles? One strategy is to perceive the activities of the interdisciplinary team as a topic of investigation as well (e.g., Fitzgerald et al., 2014; Haapasaari et al., 2012). Because STS scholars are interested in knowledge production, membership of a multi-paradigmatic team provides a splendid opportunity for doing an epistemic ethnography. When involved in activities that are geared toward credibility, trustworthiness, and triangulation, researchers find themselves in an excellent position to study knowledge production ‘from within.’ In such a situation, gaining new competences will not only serve the main research project but also re-align researchers with their own academic community: in my case, the STS community for whom analyzing knowledge production is an important building block of the field. Furthermore, studying the activities of the team also creates a platform for deliberation, as other team members have their own moments of confusion and surprise while having a stranger in their midst.

Looking back makes me realize that it was ‘difference’ that created discomfort. It was difference that made me feel insecure as well as forced me to choose sides. It was also difference that made me feel alienated and that gave rise to my study of the epistemic culture of my collaborators. In other words, interdisciplinary collaboration kept me busy trying to resolve differences. Evidently, there is a lot to learn from studies on interdisciplinarity in practice, where a focus on collaborative unity is replaced by ‘careful equivocation’ (Yates-Doerr, 2019). Instead of trying to find the same scale of valuation, a common referent, or reconcile tensions, it is argued that researchers should honor differences and learn from it (e.g., Fitzgerald et al., 2014; Yates-Doerr, 2019). In such a frame, feelings of disloyalty are absent, for no one has to choose sides, as difference is not a binary logic but a mode of productive relating (Yates-Doerr, 2019). In sum, interdisciplinary collaboration implies not only specific expertise but also specific ignorance. As portrayed in the case study, ignorance can generate insecurity about the status of one’s own epistemic authority. One way to deal with this is to close the knowledge gap and resolve the difference. Joining the midwifery team in their analysis and learning the ropes in combination with my own epistemic ethnography was my strategy to build bridges to each side. However, other studies on interdisciplinary collaboration offer a different view. In this perspective there is no gap as ignorance is just the other side of the coin and, as such, uncertainty over epistemic reputation resolves. Next time I ‘go native,’ I travel the trails of ignorance with my head held high.

Concluding Remarks

When in the early 2000s, I embraced exnovation as a productive concept that motivated me to develop video-reflexive ethnography as a fertile analytical approach, this provided a strong boost to my interdisciplinary profile and focus. Over time, I experienced how differences between disciplinary conventions can produce tensions, feelings of estrangement, and uncertainty. These effects point out how repertoires of reasoning, normative orders of justification, vocabularies of communication, and scripts of doing are at the heart of our professional identity. The two case studies presented here demonstrate the rich potential of interdisciplinary research. For one, such research will open doors to new field sites and journals that used to be out of reach. Moreover, joining an interdisciplinary team may result in a profound learning experience, leading to a more detailed awareness and higher appreciation of other ways of collecting and analyzing data. It is here that we touch upon one of the major advantages of doing interdisciplinary research: it allows researchers to move from ‘being acquainted with’ to ‘having know-how’ regarding other research traditions.

To be sure, both case studies also underscore how moving around in other paradigmatic landscapes can create discomfort and real or imagined threats for professional credibility. Paradigmatic discrepancies will challenge our positions and arguments, and this exposes our research principles and processes not only to others but also to ourselves. Being experienced researchers, we may think to know them all; over time, we may have become unaware of many of them. In this way, interdisciplinary teamwork is exnovative in itself: instead of a camera perspective, it is the paradigmatic contrast that provides a window for looking at our own research practice from another angle and learn from it.

While doing STS requires a relativist perspective as to the theories and methods the knowledge practices under study convey, studying exnovation with VRE both challenges and articulates the abilities we need for acting as a relativist in a realist environment. To effectively adopt pluralism as a strategic choice and to feel comfortable in doing so requires a specific set of attitudes and actions (Fortun & Cherkasky, 1998). First, it calls for intellectual outward looking and internal permissiveness that encourage an openness to each other’s way of reasoning, including its norms and values (Castree et al., 2009). Also important is the art of attentiveness that prompts one to listen carefully and pay respectful attention to get to know each other and learn how to craft meaningful responses (van Dooren et al., 2016). Such attention is vital for responding appropriately in a research process based on diversity. These terms of engagement will benefit from a reflexive monitoring of the research dynamics. Consequently, working together on how to work together is the indispensable dialog that underpins interdisciplinary research. Building bridges in this way allows for a mutual exploration. This learning process involves a journey through another methodological and conceptual landscape. These new experiences in doing solid research in other traditions will impress, make one humble, and—most significantly—prevent dogmatism.