Author Archives: Zoe Boudart

Anthropology MD-PhD student at the University of Michigan. Interested in STS, crit medanth, care, institutions, reproduction, opioids, and the American Midwest.
A digitized notebook sketch of the two different research processes of anthropology and epidemiology, with the former looping and the latter linear, in a graphic that shows time on the x-axis and lists the mediation techniques that allowed the interdisciplinary team to progress, such as a shared reading list.

Making Bioethnographic Teams Work: Disciplinary Destabilization, Generative Friction, and the Role of Mediators

Increasingly, scholars across the life and social sciences recognize the necessity of multi-method, interdisciplinary research for its ability to adequately understand the world’s complex problems. However, the process of designing and executing these projects can be challenging. Interdisciplinary endeavors often risk privileging one discipline/methodological paradigm with others incorporated in a more consultative manner (i.e. quantitative versus qualitative), or, they run in-parallel without integrating epistemologies and methodologies (Lewis 2021). Examples of symmetric and integrative projects which unsettle disciplinary boundaries to afford new kinds of knowledge remain few and far between. (read more...)