UNDERSTAND YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES - Facilitation
Our experience: we decided on a project facilitation role from early on. Rather than have someone who was in charge of project admin, we instead employed a social science research associate to essentially become our very own ‘embedded project ethnographer’. Originally, the primary aim of this role was to observe, participate, document and discuss the workings of the project – in other words what happened between the research team. However, over time this role evolved to the ethnographer becoming responsible for evaluating interdisciplinarity within the project and for encouraging reflexive thought about the process. In many ways this role has been the glue which has held the team together, and it has been crucial for understanding and making sense of interdisciplinarity.
Why?
Many larger research projects often employ a project manager or administrator – someone who will deal with all of the finance, admin and resource issues; organise meetings; and aim to push the project along to meet milestones. Having someone to do all of this ‘extra’ work is invaluable. However, there is definitely space in interdisciplinary projects for another facilitation role and that is someone responsible for evaluating and encouraging interdisciplinarity. This might be part of the project manager’s role or, as in our case, it was a specific role assigned to a social science research associate.
How?
Depending on the level of social science understanding this role offers the potential to have someone as a ‘neutral’ participant observer. Someone whose job is devoted to providing the right circumstances to enable interdisciplinarity, perhaps using elements of this toolkit –holding reflexive meetings (see Regular reflexive meetings & interviews), dealing with conflict, helping the team to produce some ‘terms of agreement’ (see relevant section) and so on. Having such a role means that there is less pressure on the research team to be constantly thinking about interdisciplinarity and if it is taking place, or how they are going to account for it in the end of project report or other outputs.
Similarly, having someone in this role alleviates the PI from having to always be aware of issues and conflicts amongst team members. It means that there is always someone analysing the process, trying to improve it and ensuring that team relationships remain strong and focused.
For futher information on facilitation – please also see Mierlo et al. 2010 ‘Reflexive Monitoring in Action’ on the reading list