Chapter 3

In interdisciplinary research the question of relevance is often placed in realities outside the walls of the university, within which I frequently find the cherished so called curiosity-driven research, which is supposed to find its relevant problem solving application in the future. Problem identification of known needs characterized FRN (the Swedish Council for Planning and Co-ordination of Research³⁵). This implied FRN to be a unique research council developing an advancing expertise in interdisciplinary research and support for its practice. I learned a lot about not only interdisciplinarity but also transdisciplinarity (a la Gibbons and Nowotny) during the years I was involved in FRN as a board member as well as in a research political assignment commissioned by the Swedish government, an assignment FRN coordinated. My reference frame, indicated in the introduction and upon which I anchor my thinking and research, goes in the direction of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches, which this chapter deals with.

From Interdisciplinarity to Transdisciplinarity

Interdisciplinary challenges

Until we can articulate an adequate response to the question of how “nature” interacts with “culture” in the production of scientific knowledge, until we find an adequate way of integrating the impact of multiple social and political forces, psychological predispositions, experimental constraints, and cognitive demands on the growth of science, working scientists will continue to find their more traditional mind-sets not only more comfortable, but far more adequate. And they will continue to view a mind-set that sometimes seems to grant force to beliefs and interests but not to “nature” as fundamentally incompatible, unintegrable, and laughable. (Evelyn Fox Keller 1992, p 36)

Production of new knowledge is largely a self-organizing process, following non-linear dynamics – difficult to foresee and synchronize knowledge coming from different disciplines. (Helga Nowotny 2005a)

Interdisciplinary research is commonly recognized as problem oriented³⁶. A project developed on the basis of an identification of the research problem - either from outside or from within the complex of science - is carried out by researchers from a number of different academic disciplines that may or may not be closely related. The “span” of the interdisciplinarity can vary quite considerably. There is what we can call short-span co-operation, between fields being fairly closely related, such as the disciplines of natural science, engineering and medicine, and at the other end of the scale there are wide-span projects ranging over distantly related or unrelated fields, for example co-operation between the disciplines of natural science and the humanities. In the latter case, we are dealing with a group of people who come together in some way or another, all carrying their different theoretical and methodological “baggage”, in terms of training and ontoepistemological positions. The group is formed with an expressed goal of carrying out research into a problem that requires perspectives, theories and methods from more than one discipline in order to be solved or for knowledge and understanding of it to be developed. However, interdisciplinary research can also be done by one scientist with a background in several different disciplines, or by a scholar who approaches the problem from one discipline initially and works her way into other disciplines. In this latter case, the likelihood of interdisciplinary research creating new and intertwined theoretical (and even methodological) practices is perhaps even greater than in the former.

One, however trivial, measure of the degree of interdisciplinarity of a project is to analyze the degree, to which the results of the project are presented in articles written jointly by the participating researchers. If this is not the case, then it might be more appropriate to refer to the project as multidisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary. Indeed, this seems to be the case more frequently than not, even though we blithely use the label of interdisciplinary research. I am quite aware of the hard work needed, not only to realize a joint interdisciplinary project based on creative and well-functioning collaboration between researchers from widely differing scientific backgrounds, but also to allow the interdisciplinary work to have an impact on the culture of the individual disciplines in form of theory development etc.

When discussing the processes of knowledge production in interdisciplinary research, members of the academy often place great emphasis on the importance of scientific education in one established and distinct discipline. A well-defined, codified and legitimate base of theory and method is needed in order to successfully be involved in interdisciplinary collaboration with partners from other disciplinary traditions. This opinion is opposed to other members trying to accomplish a system of education and research based on overarching “themes”. The discipline of technology is by its very constitution interdisciplinary - it is made up of “projects” based on knowledge from long and accepted academic traditions, although it is of course interdisciplinarity of the “short span” kind, in this case between mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer science, etc.

If the need for interdisciplinary research is rooted in recognition that single-discipline-based research is insufficient to solve the problem at hand or produce the required knowledge, then generating interaction between the participating disciplines suddenly takes on certain urgency. The “risk” associated with this kind of interaction is that it may well bring about changes in the theoretical and methodological norms of the single discipline. We all know what kind of fear, prejudice and protective behaviour such border-crossing processes may entail. If the majority of academics still harbour such fears and behavioural patterns, then a minimum requirement must be the introduction of a focus on the development of epistemological competence in graduate and post-graduate education for the system (discipline) that is to foster interdisciplinary education and knowledge production. In the humanities and social sciences it might not be necessary to focus on this kind of competence, since it is already part of the curriculum. However, I have experience enough in the natural sciences and engineering to maintain that we are faced with widespread epistemological illiteracy in these fields. By taking myself as an example, I want to emphasize that developing interdisciplinary practice is hard work - not only with regard to the interdisciplinary project itself, but also with regard to the scientists’ own intellectual and scientific prerequisites for this.

My and my colleagues experience of interdisciplinary work emphasise the disciplinary boundary crossing functions as a catalyst for getting in touch with trunks of informal and tacit knowledge. This knowledge is either too obvious to be noticed or so intimately connected to our sense of self, experience of self or disciplining and therefore not available for reflection and transformation in our ‘normal’ everyday research activities. Trying interdisciplinary transformations thus become both means and ends, which gives a character of process to my work.

Helga Nowotny (2005a) gives five arguments for the interdisciplinary research she finds easy to argue for but still difficult to realize. The headings and short comments on the arguments cited below are rather strictly situated in the context of academy, which should be kept in mind when comparing with her way of arguing for transdisciplinarity that follows further below;

• The world has problems the university has departments – but how to translate ‘real world’ problems into scientifically feasible as well as scientifically attractive problems?
• The whole is more than the sum of its parts – but how to arrive at a timely synthesis of different specialized bodies of knowledge?
• Knowledge, skills, methods and instrumentation often cut across disciplinary boundaries – but how to know which knowledge, skills, methods and instrumentation are useful and can be transferred from one field to another?
• Serendipity and the new discoveries often occur at the borders of established research fields and / or disciplines – yes, but if we only knew in advance where it will happen
• Industrial research exemplifies that it is possible to work in an interdisciplinary way with good results – but industry is mainly engaged in development (applying already available knowledge) and universities do not work like industry.

An interesting position is given in a noteworthy report from the prestigious Academy of Finland on a study from 2004 of the approaches towards and practice of promoting interdisciplinary research at the Academy (Bruun et al. 2005). The report is interesting because the authors thoroughly discuss Gibbon’s and Nowotny’s way of identifying knowledge production in mode 1 and mode 2 in a whole chapter named the rhizome model of scientific knowledge production. This pushes the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary question some steps further. One general conclusion (p 59) not specific for the Academy though is that “interdisciplinarity is more or less everywhere, in and between all disciplines, even if the distribution is uneven. A sign of this change is the huge literature on interdisciplinarity, research collaboration, analogy, networks, innovation and so on, that has been produced in the past decade. The implications of the transition towards a more rhizomatic science are not obvious yet, but they are certainly a worthy object of future research.” A clear recognition of the importance of interdisciplinarity is there but at the same time a guarded adjustment to the strong disciplinary norm of the Academy by for instance stating that “one should be careful not to emphasize the importance of integration too much.” (p. 68).

The interdisciplinary question as an epistemological project

My reflections about interdisciplinarity are firmly rooted in my position as a feminist technoscientist. Among feminist researchers there seems to be a general consensus that feminist research is interdisciplinary. Why is this? On what grounds is this statement based? One obvious reason for this claim of interdisciplinarity is the way in which feminist research entered the academy in Sweden. The development of feminist research within the universities started at the end of the 1970’s. Centres for women’s studies and female researchers, as it was called in those days, were established at the main universities³⁷. These centres brought together feminist researchers from different disciplines and in that sense created an interdisciplinary environment having various and important impacts. The Swedish government recognized³⁸ the centres as independent but co-operating authorities with an interdisciplinary focus of importance to feminist researchers and female scientists alike. Many of the activities conducted at these centres concern education. The courses they provide³⁹ were and still are based on predominantly interdisciplinary approaches. An example from Denmark shows that the Danish centres for women’s studies organized a joint interdisciplinary PhD programme called “The meaning of gender in an interdisciplinary perspective”. The courses offered in this programme of study considered epistemology, theory and methodology as well as specific subjects. The PhD programme was approved by the Research Council of Humanities and the Danish Research Academy as part of the established research education in the country. It was followed by a Nordic Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies starting in 2004. Another example is the consortium and research school on interdisciplinary gender Studies called InterGender⁴⁰ coordinated by Tema Genus at Linköping University, Sweden. The background to the consortium is the Swedish-International Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, InterGender, funded by the Swedish Research Council with 12,5 million SEK, 2008-2014. This research school organized 27 international PhD courses in intersectional gender studies as well as three international conferences with a main focus on PhD students’ participation and training.

However, I am not convinced the feminist researchers themselves are doing interdisciplinary research. Most of the researchers I have met in these autonomous centres and departments for gender studies are working on more discipline-based projects. In a Nordic context, Solveig Bergman (1995, pp. 120, 121) states that

most of the gender researchers have their activities located in the traditional academic fields and disciplines. At the same time a distinct infrastructure of interdisciplinarity has evolved for gender research. This infrastructure consists of gender research units (centres for women’s studies), national co-ordination, scientific journals, national scientific organizations, seminars and conferences.

A common feature of all feminist researchers seems to be an interest in and practice of feminist theories development together with methodological considerations⁴¹. And this is more or less a reciprocal interdisciplinary “project”⁴².

What we are seeing here then is an interdisciplinary “project” situated in a cross-section of a very rare kind. It is an epistemological project and as such it spans over the borders between all the disciplines. Feminist research works in quite an informal manner and can be applied wherever you need it. You can pick and choose according to your own preferences and context, and you contribute to its ongoing development by participating in all kind of academic and non academic activities.

Above I stated interdisciplinary research to be commonly recognized as problem-oriented. The feminist research I have encountered at faculties of technology is generally motivated by means of identification of a number of serious problem areas, especially when we consider issues such as information technology and biotechnology and its multidimensional potential and capacity from global and environmental perspectives. In technology, the complex of problems is concerned more with production of knowledge about the realities of everyday life, than knowledge production as a base for creating material and immaterial goods. In order to develop complex understandings and to be an intervening partner in the production of knowledge in question, you have to be able to become answerable for what you learn how to see ⁴³. This ambition is correlated to the view of science as cultural practices and in this respect it is necessary to raise accountability both within and about it. Elisabeth Gulbrandsen has placed the “accountability challenge” in our research-dependent society explicitly on the agenda in Nordic feminist research. She writes (Gulbrandsen 1995)

In the aftermath of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Wolfgang Sachs presented a fresh image of our predicament as a research dependent culture. We are no longer driving like mad towards the edge, Sachs contends; we are driving at full speed along the edge, equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance gear, as well as expertise in risk calculation and environmental management. According to Sachs there is no reason to receive this “news” with relief. He expresses grave doubts whether such later generations of environmental technologies are adequate responses to hazards created by earlier generations of technoscience products.

To those of us who have invested our efforts in struggles to further research informed by environmental and developmental concerns, Sachs’ image is highly disturbing, suggesting that all our hard work is rapidly being converted into the new growth-industry of environmental management⁴⁴ and losing its transformative power. The impotence of our critiques of science seems glaringly exposed - yet again?*

In the same text she refers to Donna Haraway, saying (1991, p. 201) “Perhaps our hopes for accountability, for politics, for ecofeminism, turn on revisioning the world as a coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse”.

The impact of the indicated problem identifications having motivated feminist research is not the creation of interdisciplinary alliances and projects to solve the concrete problem as such, but the focusing on the fundaments of the phenomena / factors creating the problem in the complex of knowledge production. This is why the specific cross-section of interdisciplinarity is of an epistemological nature gathering a number of feminist researchers from different traditional disciplines to undertake the self-reflection necessary within the research complex.

Platforms for generating interdisciplinary practice

How then do interdisciplinary practices within feminist research evolve? By what means can we proceed from the imaginary space in which our mutual, interdisciplinary, epistemological “project” takes place, to create a space within everyday life for concrete interdisciplinary work?

Case 1 One experiment has taken place at Luleå University of Technology. There was a research department at the university called Gender and Technology, which was established as a department at the beginning of 1994⁴⁵. During a relatively short period of time, this theme attracted a group of researchers and PhD students with very different disciplinary backgrounds, ranging from human work science, computer science, chemistry, the history of ideas, medicine to environmental planning and design - in other words a very broad-span research group.

The research projects at the department in the late 90a were divided into four broad areas, namely

• Information technology
• Processes of research, knowledge and learning within technoscience
• Work and health
• Technology and the Third World

It was crucial to find forms that paved the way for a joint development of theory and method, and work was initiated in a joint research program with the title “(Techno)scientific challenges in feminist research” and encompassing the themes:

• Technoscience / the concept of technology
• Feminist research perspectives
• The research complex

These topics constituted important cornerstones for the various individual research projects within the program. The joint program consisted of work seminars with invited guest researchers and text seminars, and less formal forms of work in terms of the constant discussions about experiences gained from the different assignments performed by the members and which could be related to one of the three sub-themes.

The results of the experiment included:

• recognition of a degree of epistemological competence in the group of researchers far more substantial than normally identified in a department of engineering
• a general capacity for reflection on science in a way that contributed to the construction of bases for interdisciplinary understanding among students both within the department and elsewhere
• motivation among members of the research group to draw attention to their contributions to the development of methodologies and theory and for these to be recognized as a scientific competence in academic theses
• members of the research group (both individuals and groups in a variety of different constellations) was invited to run external interdisciplinary projects

Case 2 Another interdisciplinary platform requiring a deep interest in and concern about “what we learn how to see” in our positions as researchers at technical faculties was the Graduate School for Women at the Technical Faculty at Luleå University of Technology (Trojer 1999).

The Graduate School for Women was the first graduate school for women in Sweden, as well as the first one specifically located within a technical faculty. It was launched 1 September 1995 and was set to run for three years. The explicit aim behind the Graduate School was to increase the number of female research supervisors, teachers and managers within the technoscience sector, and also to support the recruitment of women to higher technical education and research. The project was expected to contribute to the ongoing process at the University of developing a new model for a form of research education, well functioning and able to take into account the preconditions and needs of each individual research student.

The 15 participants in the Graduate School scheme were selected from among female graduate civil engineers and female research students at the faculty of technology – research students who had not been engaged in research for longer than one year. The recruitment included the supervisors of the female research students (all male). The research students represent nine different departments at Luleå University of Technology namely; Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Civil and Mining Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Human Work Science, Mathematics, Environmental Planning and Design, Materials and Manufacturing Engineering, Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering, Business Administration and Social Sciences.

The Graduate School program was included in the study plan for each individual research student and contained mainly faculty courses, higher seminars and different development projects. Successful research supervisors must have a great interest in research, education and leadership, and this was reflected in the programme for the Graduate School, which focused in particular on communication, pedagogics, processes of research, theory of science, project planning and financing, organization, personal development and leadership in research organizations.

Although the Graduate School for Women was not an explicitly interdisciplinary project, the curriculum of the Graduate School included competence building with parts vital also for interdisciplinary practice. The latter can be characterized by epistemological awareness and reflection as well as communication competence at several levels. The participants in the Graduate School project created a strong network among themselves. All the different meeting situations evolved in this network contributed to increase the participants’ curiosity in each other’s field of research, ways of doing research and identification of scientific needs. The co-workers in the Graduate School were also able to satisfy each other’s needs to a certain extent, as this network promoted questions, discussions and openness. Interdisciplinary collaboration occurred spontaneously - although it arose most easily between people with closely related disciplinary starting points.

Perhaps the most adventurous co-operative constellation was that between the students of the Graduate School and students from Luleå Theatre Acadmey, which belongs to the same university. This collaboration occurred in connection with the course in Leadership in Research Organizations. One of the central issues in this course concerned the prerequisites of and conditions necessary for creative work and knowledge production in leadership perspectives. The angle of knowledge in the body as well as in the intellect was also addressed from this interdisciplinary perspective. This coming together between culture and technology yielded a wealth of undreamed-of possibilities.

Attempted transformations

Above I briefly mentioned the “risk” of changes in disciplinary norms entailed by interdisciplinary research. What are the views of the researcher herself and her colleagues in the receiving discipline about interference caused by and integration of the results of interdisciplinary research into the disciplinary traditions of the mother subject? Here we touch upon the fundamental issue of the possibilities for and obstacles impeding the movement of theoretical and methodological traditions within a single discipline. Creating new knowledge means changing discourses - an old discourse is to a certain degree replaced by or transformed into an altered one. We can imagine many varieties of inertia and unwillingness to create new discourses. However, knowledge production cannot be recognized as research if new discourses are allowed not to evolve. The new discourses are always negotiated in the research complex⁴⁶. The discourses of interdisciplinarity - the transformed theories and methods that emerge from the impact of real interdisciplinary work - are issues controversial at many levels. They are not the least the subject of debate on the level of research policy, nationally as well as internationally.

Transdisciplinarity

Nobody has anywhere succeeded for very long in containing knowledge. Knowledge seeps through institutions and structures like water through the pores of a membrane. Knowledge seeps in both directions, from science to society as well as from society to science. It seeps through institutions and from academia to and from the outside world. Transdisciplinarity is therefore about transgressing boundaries. Institutions still exist and have a function. Disciplines still exist and new ones arise continuously from interdisciplinary work. Therefore: beware! (Helga Nowotny 2006)

Every now and again I have come across the concept “transdisciplinary” in a scientific text. On such occasions, I tend to get excited and anxious to know what the author(s) are intending by using this term. To me, it calls to mind immediately an image of epistemological thinking that is directed towards the problems and challenges we face in our complex society and in future-oriented competence building for transformative research and knowledge production. In Gibbons et al. (1994) transdisciplinary research is characterized by the final solution normally being beyond that of any one of the contributing disciplines. The authors identify four features of transdisciplinarity⁴⁷:

• It develops a distinct but evolving framework to guide problem-solving efforts. This is generated and sustained in the context of application.
• It develops its own distinct theoretical structures, research methods and modes of practice, though they may not be located on the prevailing disciplinary map.
• The diffusion of the results is initially accomplished in the process of their production. Subsequent diffusion occurs primarily as the original practitioners move to new problem contexts rather than through reporting results in professional journals or at conferences.
• It is very dynamic. A particular solution can become the cognitive site from which further advances can be made, but where this knowledge will be used next and how it will be developed are as difficult to predict as the applications that might arise from single-discipline-based research.

The relevance of using a concept like transdisciplinarity proceeds, when we recognize knowledge production to take place increasingly in open and distributed systems, see Part IV. A characteristic of the concept is transdisciplinarity to create and maintain its own problem solving framework, methodologically as well as theoretically, in the context of application. Nowotny et al (2001, s. 223) state ”…transdisciplinarity is achieved by focusing on research problems as they emerge in contexts of application and where the heterogeneity of knowledge producers introduces additional criteria of assessment apart from scientific quality”. Transdisciplinarity is thus not only an issue of converging and go beyond established disciplines. It is an advanced cooperation between the academy and a heterogeneous group of knowledge producers outside. The constellation of participating actors is specific for each case of problem solving.

Platforms for generating transdisciplinary practice

Case 1 One experiment of raising transformative competence in an interdisciplinary or more likely transdisciplinary research project is given by a project concerning water and sanitation technology also including strong environmental and feminist research connections⁴⁸.

The goal was production of knowledge, primarily of a specific situation in an urban area in South Africa. But situated knowledge⁴⁹ was also developed by certain involved authorities in Sweden. One of the cornerstones in the project was to explore the advantages of participatory methods⁵⁰ and their use in feminist engineering (Rydhagen 2002).

As one of the most crucial prerequisites for survival, water is of pivotal interest for this kind of study. The infrastructures for water supply and sanitation for the poorer sections of society are seldom adequate, and the emphasis on community involvement in the improvement of these conditions is increasingly being recognized as a central part of the solution to the problem. The unbalanced concentration on piped water and sewage systems is concurrently giving way to a variety of in-situ solutions with simple, low-cost technology. Methods for successful community involvement and low-cost, in-situ solutions for water and sanitation are still under development.

Much research has been undertaken concerning the relationship between water, sanitation facilities and health in developing countries. As this relation is very complex, it would be naive to expect to find a universal explanation to the problem of water-related diseases, and advice on effective disease prevention is far from unambiguous. Studies indicate that water quantity is at least as important as water quality in the determination of health standards in individual households. Thus, the time and effort spent on water collection and the responsibility for this activity are of great relevance, and domestic water and sanitation activities are of course highly gender marked.

The aim of this project was to move gender issues from their minor role within the evaluation process into the heart of technology development and research. During the research process it became increasingly clear there is a lack of cross-fertilization between feminist theory and what is called “gender awareness” in development work and assessments. Feminist theories can often be rather abstract, discussing hierarchical relations in society in general terms. Development workers working on concrete projects, on the other hand, talk about gender roles in the specific situation without drawing any connection to larger sociopolitical and cultural structures. Although gender is most frequently mentioned in connection with water and sanitation projects, the issue of how exactly gender awareness is supposed to influence the projects as such is seldom discussed in depth. Feminist research is rarely not brought in at any stage of technology development as a source of knowledge and competence.

The research goal of the project was to explore how gender / feminist theory and gender awareness can inform sanitary engineering in a way that will benefit as large a group of society as possible. By asking the engineering question in feminism, this project tried to move “gender” from the evaluation process into the very place where technology is actually developed. This is seen as a very urgent step, as it is becoming ever more obvious that the diffusion of technologies can be considered successful while at the same time it can have very detrimental consequences for people and the environment. The location of feminist research in a technical context is rather rare, and this project was an important element in the attempt to foster the inter- and transdisciplinary feminist and technology research praxis.

With this kind of study other agents enter the processes of research - both in form of people directly involved in the local technology development (PRA) and in the form of new theoretical perspectives (feminist theories and not just gender as variable). This in turn necessitates discussions and reassessment of traditional academic mindset. By traditional academic mindset I am not referring to a literal evaluation of our scholarly traditions, but rather of the kinds of appraisals performed in the everyday processes of the academy - in teaching, discussions with colleagues, in seminars and conferences or in per review situations (evaluation of articles, books, theses, appointments, applications for grants). The experiences gained both from the research as such and from the discussions constitute a basis on which the kind of research transforming competence necessary for creating the new discourses we need can then be developed.

Case 2 With the acknowledgment of academic praxis in a transdisciplinary context, that is daily work as researchers and teachers in a distributed system of knowledge processes, I want to make visible the research division of Technoscience studies at a Swedish, profile university focusing applied ICT, Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH).

The main academic aim of Technoscience Studies is to develop complex understandings of information and communication technology (ICT) as reality-producing technology as well as of the dominant transformations that follow in its wake from the perspective of gender research within technoscience. This presupposes participation in the appurtenant processes of transformation and knowledge production. Seeing ICT as reality-producing technology rests on the idea that all of us, researchers in the field included, are enmeshed in development processes, where an innocent position does not exist. Information technology intervenes in and creates people’s everyday lives. On the other hand, information technology is something developed and interpreted by people. The work of Technoscience Studies is aimed to create a theoretical basis as well as praxis for developmental processes in ICT-related disciplines as well as in the context of IT politics.

In international feminist research with strong links to the dominant technological fields of our age – information technology, biotechnology and material technology – there is a widespread understanding of the production of knowledge and technology as processes that take place in distributed systems. In other words, in this day and age knowledge is generated in the overlapping borderland of universities, companies and other regional, national and international actors. These processes are not least apparent in the region of BTH and affect the way in which BTH carries out R&D work. The term technoscience connotes this understanding of the production of knowledge and technology. The way in which technoscience is defined by internationally leading researchers such as Donna Haraway raises interesting questions about boundaries and the transgression of the boundaries between science, technology, politics and society, and between humans and non-humans, the processes of hybridisation between people and machines (cyborg theories), etc.

This transdisciplinary trying of Technoscience studies⁵¹, which started in 1998 supported by the Swedish Government, became the base for undergraduate education in media technology. In the time window of 2016 its PhD program had awarded 16 doctor degrees.

Ontology of resistance

Although the results presented above can be – at least temporarily - satisfying for the development of an academic room for transdisciplinarity and even for feminist transdisciplinary environments, there are hard earned experiences of developing conditions that have to be fulfilled. One important condition is research political signals and support at a national level. This is further elaborated upon in Part III. Earmarked money, either from Government or other authorities, for these local trying transformations in a transformation rigid body like the academy means you don’t have to put all your energy in fighting for resources at the boards of decision at your university. Instead you can focus on building alliances with the constructive forces within and outside the university that always exist somewhere and to some extent.

The condition I want to discuss is the willingness, strength, patience and understanding to encounter all the forms of resistance always occurring in transformation processes (Ahrenfelt 2001). One of my colleagues Peter Ekdahl has substantial experiences of this matter and has in his doctoral thesis (Ekdahl 2005) written about resistance in a faculty of technology, when establishing media technology as an inter- and transdisciplinary academic field for graduate and postgraduate education.

On the web page of ACT Lab (Advanced Communication Technology Lab, University of Texas), where Sandy Stone has been active, you could read⁵²

You can’t analyze New Media with old disciplinary tools (…) you can try, and you will evince data, but you won’t really learn anything worthwhile. You need new tools, new methods, new disciplinary languages, and you won’t find them waiting inside traditional disciplinary forms.

Peter Ekdahl uses Bo Ahrenfelt to discuss transformation processes and the resistance following in the wake. Ahrenfelt emphasizes the need for – what he calls - a second order transformation and thus put established models for organisational change on the head. The organisation transformation he is referring to is highly relevant for the academy.

At transformations of a first order you don’t change mindsets or behaviours in the organisation. What is actually happening is a recombination of old patterns keeping the organisation within the old tradition. The system is still intact and unchanged. However, at transformations of a second order mindsets are changing both as interpretation of reality and in acting, which means the whole system has changed. We recognize reality in a new light and with a different understanding… Everything is altered and reality looks different. Ahrenfelt (2001 p 23)

Ekdahl identifies the two quotes above considering transformations as a trying to break up prevalent mind and acting patterns and thus as an issue of changing the prerequisite of the system. The impact implies that the view of the self understanding, of humans and of life is put into question. This in turn affects the values within the system and interacting with other systems. Accordingly, transformations of a second order can’t be predicted on beforehand. Predictions exist only in transformations of a first order, where the fundamental values are unchanged. The system of first order doesn’t encounter the altered demands in the forms of needs and relations in our and future times. No wonder you have to face resistance in the academic organisation, and quite strong and unpleasant ones.

The last example for reflecting upon the ontology of resistance is a research political one. Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research (FRN) was the research funding authority with a mission to support and foster interdisciplinary research and started its activities in 1977. FRN also managed research on problems of vital importance for society identified either by the Swedish Government or by themselves - problems which no other research financing authority paid attention to. FRN was a strong support to the Swedish universities with substantial ambitions to conduct interdisciplinary research as well as develop academic competences for the same. It also had a special assignment from the Government for supporting feminist research.

The monodiscipline oriented research councils never acknowledged the importance and relevance of FRN. In a turbulent research political period in the second half of the 1990s⁵³ strong (monodisciplinary) academic forces managed to have the Government deciding to discontinue the existence of FRN. We were in Sweden back to a research political situation of the 1950s. This was a real backlash for interdisciplinarity and beginning support for transdisciplinarity.

The transformation initiatives taken by FRN in order to encounter present day’s demand of knowledge production met in the door a figure of resistance provoked in its most inner core.