Prospects for,and Challenges of,Research Design and Training in Cross‐Disciplinary Environmental Management Research

Research in coupled human and natural systems can be quite a cross‐disciplinary endeavour, requiring the combination of diverse concepts, methods, and approaches. While there is a wide recognition of the importance of incorporating different viewpoints, perspectives, and disciplines in achieving positive environmental and social outcomes, the methods through which such research is designed, specifically the processes engaged in, are largely absent from the literature. This presents challenges in research training for students in the field. This paper uses the example of a recent student project examining the management of Temperate Highland Peat Swamps on Sandstone to consider how research training might address project design, conceptual challenges, and methodological choices. The goal of this project was to build improved understanding of the role of context in the adaptive management of these endangered ecological communities from Commonwealth to micro‐local scales. The paper explores the complexities of integrating approaches and methods drawn from both social sciences and environmental sciences. Rather than providing a definitive ‘how to guide’ for conducting integrative cross‐disciplinary research, it offers food for thought on the processes involved in creating a research project which transcends boundaries between social science and environmental science that are easily entrenched in research training that is compartmentalised along discipline lines.     

Visions of Community: An Introduction

The co-editors' introduction to this special issue of History and Anthropology outlines the rationale for featuring this collection of essays by social anthropologists and historians on medieval and early modern communities in Europe and Asia. After discussing basic terms and concepts in this endeavour, the introduction proceeds to address the comparative challenges implied in such transcontinental and cross-cultural forms of methodological practices. From here, the argument introduces this special issue's main division into three subsections, that is, (A) “Interdisciplinary Inspirations”, (B) “Cross-cultural Comparisons” and (C) “Transdisciplinary Intersections”. The text concludes with brief introductions to the contributing articles, and by a summary of the innovative conceptual and methodological results emanating from these forms of cooperation.     

The future of human geography? Reflections on reading three recent texts

It is vital that we teach our students to understand and evaluate the rich diversity of geography's conceptual and philosophical approaches. If we do not, they will be in a poor position in their future careers to justify the application of particular geographical skills, or to understand the linkages between geography and other disciplines. Society's respect for the value and relevance of geography will be diminished and the subject's future placed in jeopardy. This article gives some pointers to the conceptual and philosophical bases of different approaches, and expresses concern that, despite the considerable strengths of two of the three text books reviewed they all fail to discuss the differences of approach evident in their source material and the implications of these differences.     

Cities in the modern world

SUMMARY: The archaeology of modern cities has grown enormously over the past half-century, driven in large part by developer-funded urban renewal. This activity has utilized a diverse array of methodological approaches, research paradigms and scales of analysis — a diversity increasingly reflected in the pages of Post-Medieval Archaeology. In this paper, we review the development of urban archaeology, with a particular focus on material remains from the past two or three centuries. We emphasize the role played by commercial archaeology and the growing importance of community engagement, along with changing theoretical models and the emergence of new analytical technologies.     

Shattering the silence of violence against women

The UN Development Fund for Women has selected 23 projects in 18 developing countries to be beneficiaries of a $1.2 million trust fund dedicated to the elimination of violence against women. While the projects offer a variety of approaches to preventing and eliminating the domestic violence suffered by a third of the women in developing countries, all involve awareness-raising and advocacy, capacity-building, literacy, training, action research, and prevention/deterrence activities. A project in the Philippines will train women migrant workers who have been victimized by abuse to produce videos about their experience in order to raise consciousness about the rights of women and of workers. A South African project, which will address sexual assaults of high school students that occur in dating relationships, will involve a prevalence survey, a pilot project, an expansion of the project and curriculum development, a play on date rape, crisis intervention counseling, production of a video and manual, a national conference, and publication of essays produced by students who participated in the program. The Trust Fund was proposed by Japan in response to the urgent call for action issued by the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women and is funded by donations from governments and private sources.     

The technological versus methodological revolution of portable XRF in archaeology

Portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) instruments have gained considerable attention within the archaeological community. Few other recent instrumental developments have generated such debate. Much of this debate, which is dominated by scepticism over analytical performance, has occurred in informal settings. Rather than judge the use of pXRF based on unpublished work and conference banter, we conducted an extensive literature review of peer-reviewed research that used this technology. Our focus is developing an understanding of how, where, and why pXRF is being used in archaeology. What interests us most are research designs into which only pXRF could be integrated and the new research approaches these instruments may facilitate. Trends that emerged from the literature are surprising. For example, only 43% of the archaeological “pXRF” papers actually involve handheld instruments. In addition, more than four-fifths of handheld pXRF in archaeology is apparently conducted in laboratory contexts. Only 3% has been conducted in a fieldhouse or on-site laboratory, and 15% at an excavation, on a survey, or inside a historic structure. Here we argue that, while the technical capability to analyse archaeological materials using portable instruments may exist, it is not necessarily true the methodological and theoretical frameworks are in place to allow such activities to be archaeologically successful and significant. Because handheld pXRF is uniquely suited to in situ analysis, we expect the first changes in methodological and theoretical approaches will involve space, context, and related frameworks.     

When Natural met Social: A Review of Collaboration between the Natural and Social Sciences

Abstract

This paper investigates the opportunities for further collaboration between the natural and social sciences. From 81 systematically identified and reviewed papers published in scientific journals, it became clear that complex situations that depend on human behaviour as well as natural processes require natural–social science collaboration. The creation of a community of collaborative natural–social science research, that learns from and can contribute to best practice across the sciences, is advocated to support natural– social science collaboration. Across disciplines, it became clear that such a community should deal with (1) difference between paradigms in the current sciences; (2) creation of skills and competences of the involved scientists; (3) scarcity of institutions sympathetic to collaborative research; and (4) the internal organization of collaborative projects.     

Community through the eyes of children: blending child-centered research and qualitative geovisulization

Community is an ambiguous concept, and the meanings of community as a subject of study have received a great deal of attention across various disciplines. This paper discusses how children's diverse meanings of community shape and are shaped by the social, cultural, and physical environments of their everyday lives. To explore these meanings I combine principles of child-centered research and qualitative geovisualization into a research methodology. I demonstrate that this integration displays the transformative nature of qualitative analysis and visualization to support interpretive analysis of various forms of qualitative and spatial data together, and offers us a hybrid methodological framework for gaining insights into the diverse meanings of community held by the children. The main case study is drawn from a multi-year research collaboration called the Children's Urban Geography (ChUG), in which I participated along with children who lived in a relatively poor but emerging multi-cultural Hispanic neighborhood in Buffalo, NY.     

HISTORICAL FUTURES

This article outlines the agenda of a collective research project that aims to explore modalities of historical futures that constitute our current historical condition. To present the collective work adequately, we have teamed up with History and Theory and initiated a long‐term serial publishing experiment. In the coming years, each issue of the journal will feature contributions to this research endeavor. In our project‐opening piece, we briefly introduce the experiment and the premises of the collective research agenda. We begin by recounting the many ways in which increasingly towering novel future prospects have begun to capture the scholarly world's attention across disciplinary boundaries. We then introduce the notion of historical futures. Crediting theoretical inspirations and paying intellectual debts to conceptual relatives, we define “historical futures” as the plurality of transitional relations between apprehensions of the past and anticipated futures. At the core of the article, we formulate our call for a collective investigation of modalities of historical futures and sketch three basic sets of concerns that the explorative works in this experiment may address: kinds of transitions from past to futures, kinds of anticipatory practices, and kinds of registers as interpretive tools that position such practices on a variety of spectrums between two poles (for instance, a value register with the poles of catastrophic and redemptive futures). Finally, we close with a brief note about the necessity of collective endeavors.     

Statistical tool for dating and interpreting archaeological contexts using pottery

Analyzing chronological patterns is one of the major issues in archaeology. How can the date of a specific context be estimated? Is it possible to identify residual and intrusive material in it at the same time? Numerous statistical methodological approaches have been developed and implemented to estimate dates but have less often addressed the issue of socio-economic area or the functional interpretation of contexts. This article deals with the construction and analysis of two different probability estimate density curves of context dates using pottery. By contrasting the two curves we can define the boundaries of the socio-economic area and make a chrono-functional interpretation of a context. This statistical tool allows the archaeologist to visualize and analyze chronological patterns easily. The method is applied to the analysis of contexts in the town of Tours in particular and more generally in the centre-west of France, based on collected pottery finds.     

Revamping community‐based conservation through participatory research

Community‐based conservation is experiencing a crisis of identity and purpose as a result of a disappointing track record and unresolved deficiencies. The latter include over‐simplified assumptions and misconceptions of “community,” the imposition of externally designed and driven projects at the community level, a focus on conservation outcomes at the expense of community empowerment and social justice, and limited attention to participatory processes. New approaches are urgently needed to address these weaknesses and to counter a rising trend towards environmental protectionism and a preference for conservation approaches at an eco‐regional scale that threaten the interests of local and Indigenous communities. We propose that three core principles of community‐based participatory research (CBPR)—(1) community‐defined research agenda; (2) collaborative research process; and (3) meaningful research outcomes—hold much promise. Drawing on the experience of a research partnership involving the James Bay Cree community of Wemindji, northern Quebec, and academic researchers from four Canadian universities, we document the process of applying these principles to a community‐based conservation project that uses protected areas as a political strategy to redefine relations with governments in terms of a shared responsibility to care for land and sea. We suggest that basic assumptions of CBPR, including collaborative, equitable partnerships in all phases of the research, promotion of co‐learning and capacity building among all partners, emphasis on local relevance, and commitment to long‐term engagement, can provide the basis for a revamped phase of community‐based conservation that supports environmental protection while strengthening local institutions, building capacity, and contributing to cultural survival.     

Hello Sailor! How maritime museums are addressing the experience of gay seafarers

Traditionally, maritime historians and maritime museums have adopted a very narrow view of seafarers’ lives and issues of social diversity have been little explored. Whilst some research has been undertaken on women and ethnic minorities in recent years, the experience of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered seafarers has received virtually no attention. This paper will consider how museums have begun to address this issue and will look in detail at the special exhibition, Hello Sailor!, organised by National Museums Liverpool in 2006. Hello Sailor! was based on ground-breaking research about gay seafarers on board British cruise liners in the mid-twentieth century, mainly gathered from oral testimony. The paper will examine the content, development and impact of the exhibition and will place it in a context of how maritime museums are beginning to address questions of social diversity and to make themselves accessible to a wider and more diverse audience. In particular, it explores the difficulties faced by curators, including the paucity of documentary sources and secondary literature, the limitations of existing museum networks and the almost total absence of objects and other visual material with which to tell the story.     

Mexico‐US Bilateral Planning: Institutions,Planners and Communities

This paper examines developments in bilateral planning in the border regions of Mexico and the US. Pressures of globalization and regional integration are transforming institutions and communities in these border regions, changing planning from a diplomatic to a transborder and translocal process. Drawing on institutional examples and community case studies, the paper highlights the role of political mobilization and community collaboration across the border as an effective mechanism to address Mexican-US border region planning issues.     

Values in a vacuum? Towards an integrated multi‐level analysis of the governance of European space

This article calls for a new analytical approach to address how the emergence of a new European spatial policy field conditions policy‐making and implementation across Europe. This is now urgent because as the new policy field takes shape, its core ideas and values are being contested across different scales, sectors and territories of governance, creating new debates and arenas where understandings of space, place and connectivity, and relations between environment, society and economy, are being recast in a European light. In the full flow of generating a new policy field, we still seem to know little about what is being put at stake, or specifically how this is occurring. A value‐driven critical response from the research community is therefore needed, informed by research activity reaching across many dimensions of governance and policy‐making. The point of developing such an approach is not to discount previous research, but to explore how to generate synthetic and critical insights from different disciplinary and conceptual approaches within an integrated analytical framework. After this discussion, we conclude by proposing that IMAGES (Integrated Multi‐level Analysis of the Governance of European Space) can provide such a framework for analysing the emerging policy field of European spatial polices by constructing narratives of how spatial policy ideas and concepts turn into programming space, and how different territories interrelate with these policy concepts, and at the same time contribute to shaping them. This viewpoint and framework are predicated on the authors' belief that values behind the concepts remain hidden at present, both in policy processes and related research. Spatial policies seem to happen in a vacuum of values. By putting spatial justice as a value into this vacuum and by exploring the multi‐level governance of European space within an integrative analytical framework, the further development and application of the IMAGES framework can fulfil the need to contest the idea of objective policy‐making and analysis in European spatial policy.     

Archaeological Ethnography,Heritage Management,and Community Archaeology: A Pragmatic Approach from Crete

This article examines the introduction of archaeological ethnography as an approach to establish positioned research and bring context-specific and reflexive considerations into community archaeology projects. It considers recent critiques of heritage management in archaeology and the role of archaeologists as experts in it, contending that smaller and less prominent sites exist in different contexts and pose different problems than large-scale projects usually addressed in the literature. We describe how the ‘Three Peak Sanctuaries of Central Crete’ project, investigating prehistoric Minoan ritual sites, involves communities and stakeholders and what demands the latter pose on experts in the field. Archaeological work is always already implicated in local development projects which create and reproduce power hierarchies. It is therefore important that archaeologists maintain their critical distance from official heritage discourses, as they are materialized in development programmes, while at the same time engaging with local expectations and power struggles; they also have to critically address and position their own assumptions. We use examples from our community archaeology project to propose that these goals can be reached through archaeological ethnographic fieldwork that should precede any archaeological project to inform its methodological decisions, engage stakeholders, and collaboratively shape heritage management strategies.     

Geographic Visualization in Archaeology

Archaeologists are often considered frontrunners in employing spatial approaches within the social sciences and humanities, including geospatial technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS) that are now routinely used in archaeology. Since the late 1980s, GIS has mainly been used to support data collection and management as well as spatial analysis and modeling. While fruitful, these efforts have arguably neglected the potential contribution of advanced visualization methods to the generation of broader archaeological knowledge. This paper reviews the use of GIS in archaeology from a geographic visualization (geovisual) perspective and examines how these methods can broaden the scope of archaeological research in an era of more user-friendly cyber-infrastructures. Like most computational databases, GIS do not easily support temporal data. This limitation is particularly problematic in archaeology because processes and events are best understood in space and time. To deal with such shortcomings in existing tools, archaeologists often end up having to reduce the diversity and complexity of archaeological phenomena. Recent developments in geographic visualization begin to address some of these issues and are pertinent in the globalized world as archaeologists amass vast new bodies of georeferenced information and work towards integrating them with traditional archaeological data. Greater effort in developing geovisualization and geovisual analytics appropriate for archaeological data can create opportunities to visualize, navigate, and assess different sources of information within the larger archaeological community, thus enhancing possibilities for collaborative research and new forms of critical inquiry.     

What is a Burin? Typology,Technology, and Interregional Comparison

Classification of artifacts has long marked a significant edge between theory and practice in archaeology. While considering classification to be a necessary methodological device, most practitioners also recognize that it carries with it built-in assumptions. This essay approaches the issue by way of a specific stone tool type from Old World sites: the burin. By asking “what is a burin?” the study shows the need to reconsider typologies to reflect changes in research questions and progress in dating methods, especially when working with museum collections and secondary data between regions and across national traditions, and the need to study whole collections from the perspective of technological choices.     

‘Concerns,Attitudes and Abilities of Early-career Geography Faculty’: Research Context and Future Directions

This article reflects on the experience of a large interdisciplinary research team that included geographers in a study of older people's participation in community life in areas of rural Britain. The mechanisms used for facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration around the development of a collective conceptual framework and associated methodologies for investigating aspects of rural community inclusion in later life are outlined. Lessons relevant to geography education learned about the benefits and “messy reality” of interdisciplinary working are highlighted.     

Transdisciplinarity in Practice: The Emergence and Resolution of Dissonances in Collaborative Research on Brownfield Regeneration

Abstract

The restoration of areas contaminated by industrial or mining activities has been a major issue in environmental research in many European countries since the 1980s, and it also constitutes a major area of research at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research — UFZ. Within this research environment, a consortium consisting of natural and social scientists has developed an EU-funded research project aimed at providing problem- oriented, tailored approaches and technologies for the revitalization of contaminated areas. The approach taken by the project is one that seeks to integrate scientific and non-scientific knowledge. In this paper we show how the idea of joint knowledge production between scientists and non-scientists is pursued in the context of the project. We explore how the rather fuzzy presentation of the transdisciplinary approach in the project proposal opens the door to interpretation and appropriation by scientists and practitioners alike. We describe a number of ad hoc solutions that were deployed to overcome specific dissonances during the collaborative production of knowledge (e.g. substituting common group learning for the single-handed elaboration of concepts by one project partner, or substituting the consultation of external experts for the mere gathering of information). Finally, we show how the interdisciplinary research environment at UFZ enhances the ability of the project team to resolve dissonances, improves collaboration between partners, and increases the innovative potential of project outputs.