By Zoë Sofoulis
Would a focus on ‘knowledge ecology’ provide a useful alternative to ‘knowledge integration’ in inter- and trans-disciplinary research?
My experience in bringing perspectives from the humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) to projects led by researchers from science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) has led me to agree with Sharp and colleagues (2011) that ‘knowledge integration’ is essentially a positivist concept, dependent on the idealist model of a unified field of scientific knowledge to which every bit of science contributed.