By W Alex Webb
Strong Coasts — June 2019
“Kathleen?” “Kristalina?” “Kaleesha!” “yes, Kaleesha!”. Our interdisciplinary team of eight is sweating profusely in a scorching open-air bus station in Belmopan, the capital of Belize, waiting for our 4 pm bus to arrive. We’re “guessing” the middle name of one of our esteemed PIs, anthropologist Dr. Rebecca K. Zarger. She eventually tells us, but there are references to ‘Kaleesha’ over a month later during our weekly meeting. Small spontaneous moments build relationships.
In June 2019, our Strong Coasts cohort of three anthropologists and five environmental engineers from the University of South Florida spent two weeks in Belize studying relationships between water, food, and energy. The Strong Coasts program is an exercise in many things: community-based research, global competency, and interdisciplinary training.
The need for interdisciplinary training as a means of navigating the complex challenges of our day is a common refrain in academia. But interdisciplinary work typically requires more than one person. Sure, there are polymaths out there that can do the academic equivalent of spinning plates while riding a unicycle and juggling one-handed. But for the rest of us mere mortals, understanding a discipline well enough to pass the Ph.D. finish line is challenging enough. To get to the heart of interdisciplinary training, you must have teams of people. You need to have meaningful relationships.
When researchers study interdisciplinary teams, the same relationship challenges crop up. The big three seem to be: communication (1,2), negotiating identities (3–5), and institutional support (6–8). Our program takes these obstacles head-on through a community-based problem-solving approach, pairing us off into interdisciplinary teams for specific research projects. An engineer and I look at wastewater treatment on small islands off the coast; other groups look at farming practices, gender and tourism, and seaweed farming. Each project has a stakeholder collaborator who defines the problem. Although we have group projects, we all participate in each other’s research trips. Over our time in Belize, we lived together, or at least in a string of bungalows next to each other, sharing most meals and beachside chats.
Learning Through Shared Experiences
One of the consequences of specialization is becoming entrenched in esoteric language. Analyzing the social history of the concentration of wealth and power becomes a political economy, the way that organisms break down biological material without oxygen becomes anaerobic digestion. The words might share similar etymologies, but they seem like different languages. See what I did there? Navigating different vocabularies can be a struggle. But sharing problems with colleagues from different disciplines is like live streaming on-demand YouTube tutorials. Two examples highlight how.
During a trip to the island of Hunting Caye, I found myself staring at a series of white pipes and black tanks, skin sticky from an earlier snorkel. As an anthropologist with no environmental engineering training, staring does not reveal any secrets. But as my engineering colleagues patiently walk me through the wastewater treatment system, it becomes clearer. There are four septic tanks (2×2) that filter the solids as the remaining wastewater funnels into a digester that converts some of the nitrogen into a gas. Iteratively, as they describe systems on each of the eight islands we visited, communication gets easier. I understand their shorthand; they anticipate some of my questions. I begin to understand how the availability of water, land, and economics influences what type of wastewater treatment is possible.
Another story involves a local fisher who runs a seaweed farm. He sells most of his seaweed to local restaurants and consumers who mix it into smoothies. Recently he has begun shipping some to Texas to become a value-added product in cosmetics. He currently only sells one species of seaweed but raises three. After discussions with him and another Placencia resident, who is also developing processed seaweed products, members of our team agreed to run tests for inorganic elemental properties, like the presence of lead and arsenic, among others. A WhatsApp thread shared among the cohort keeps me in the loop. I passively participate as they decided which tests to run and explain why. Since we collectively approached our problems, these bits of knowledge stay attached to a tangible set of circumstances, people, and challenges. The training is more than the sum of knowledge. It is a peer support network and vividly drawn applications.
The Human Side of Collaboration
Our program is especially ambitious as it crosses the aisle from engineering all the way to anthropology. Traversing this intellectual divide is not a short distance. Although taking a community-based approach shortens it. By starting from the resident’s perspectives, social science becomes an inherent part of the process. It flattens the hierarchy between the disciplines. We all represent multiple entry points into the problem. Plus, nothing is a better barometer of your weaknesses than working with a group of differently skilled people.
Engineering, like anthropology, is applicable to almost any facet of life. Consequently, we have members with skillsets in community-based approaches to urban environmental justice, coral reefs, water quality monitoring technology, wastewater treatment and reuse, grassroots entrepreneurship, agriculture, and chemical analysis. But working with others, you don’t just benefit from their technical knowledge; you get the whole person. To say my interdisciplinary colleagues only bring their discipline to the table would be a great disservice to them. Technical expertise is just the tips of a pyramid founded on a lifetime of experiences influencing how we perceive and talk about the problems we are trying to understand.
When advising an engineer about how to perform interviews, I leaned on my years of experience both as a social scientist and living in the Caribbean to try to help them understand how to use interviewing techniques. We had bonded previously on a few shared values. Sitting in wooden beach chairs, awaiting sunset, we bounced between the specifics of the shared problem we were approaching and our personal experiences until we reached a mutual understanding.
For our group of three men and five women, these experiences come from diverse backgrounds. We hail from different geographic places, mellow Southern Californians to less mellow upstate New Yorkers, some Midwesterners, and even a Scandinavian. Our religious beliefs range from the devoutly Christian to the mildly hedonistic. We embody a spectrum of skin tones, so much so at one point, we lined up for a photo like a color swatch. I, with my Irish and poltergeist heritage, was at the back of the line. It takes a great deal of trust to navigate all these differences. Trust that we built singing Karaoke, playing two truths and a lie on the beach, through the shared suffering of long uncomfortable bus rides, mutual interests in understanding social justice in context, and bearing through necessary but uncomfortable conversations with each other.
We’re all back at the University of South Florida now, moving in different directions based on our dissertation interests. It is not uncommon for this to happen on interdisciplinary projects; over time, they become more parallel than integrated. The value of our experiences so far isn’t just learning the ins and outs of wastewater treatment or how solutions emerge within cultural contexts. It is in learning to be part of a diverse team. Given that future problems will involve different stakeholders, with different needs, the ability to have relationships and collaborate with other people might be the most useful interdisciplinary skills of all.
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About the Author. W. Alex Webb is a cultural anthropologist currently interested in the relationship between critical infrastructure transitions and rapid tourism development in the Caribbean. His research emphasizes human-environment relationships, economic anthropology, systems thinking, and the study of science and technology.
Alex’s previous research focused on natural resource management in St Thomas, USVI, tourism development in Southern Utah, and socio-technical systems transitions in Belize. He is currently a student in the Applied Anthropology Ph.D. program at the University of South Florida. He received his BS in Psychology from Westminster College and MS in Marine and Environmental Science from the University of the Virgin Islands.
STRONG COASTS is supported by a National Science Foundation Collaborative Research Traineeship (NRT) award (#1735320) led by the University of South Florida (USF) and the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI) to develop a community-engaged training and research program in systems thinking to better manage complex and interconnected food, energy, and water systems in coastal locations. The views expressed here do not reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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