Interdisciplinarity and industry collaboration in doctoral candidature: tensions within and between discourses

Abstract

Existing tensions within and between the discourses permeating doctoral candidature are being exacerbated by those of interdisciplinarity and industry collaboration. Drawing on the author's experience as a doctoral candidate within a cooperative research centre, this article interrogates the conflicting and challenging pressures placed on candidates and their supervisors in interdisciplinary and industry collaborative environments in the humanities, arts and social sciences. The article questions the common assumption that ‘more (disciplines) is better’ to address complex social, economic and environmental problems. It highlights the ways in which interdisciplinary and industry-led projects can inadvertently silo the doctoral candidate and the problem to be ‘solved’ within dominant ontological, epistemological and political frameworks. The article calls on supervisors and candidates to adopt the role of negotiators and translators in complex research relationships. It concludes that in some cases, discipline-specific, independent research may provide the novel and innovative answers required to address ‘real-world’ problems.

• interdisciplinarity
• doctoral candidature
• doctoral supervision
• industry collaboration
• doctoral education
• discourse

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my colleagues, Dr Cecily Maller, Professor Ralph Horne, and Professor Pavla Miller, for their useful comments on previous drafts of this paper; Dr Robyn Barnacle, coordinator of RMIT University's Supervision of Higher Degrees by Research course; my PhD supervisors from RMIT (Dr Anitra Nelson and Professor Mike Berry) and Lancaster (Professor Elizabeth Shove and Dr Will Medd) universities; my PhD funders and collaborators; and the anonymous reviewers of this paper.

Notes

The author's PhD was funded by the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design and received top-up support from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. It was conducted within the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies (GUSS) at RMIT University, and included a three-month visiting student position at the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University.

Registration fees for energy industry conferences typically cost AU$3000-5000 and rarely offer discounts for doctoral candidates or speakers.