Tracés (Dec 2022)
Tes problèmes seront les miens. Patience et longueur de temps dans l’engagement interdisciplinaire en études environnementales
Abstract
Interdisciplinarity is often seen as an axiological and practical imperative by researchers studying the contemporary environmental crisis, whether this involves describing its manifestations, identifying its causes, or questioning its implications. It is generally accepted that the complexity of environmental problems requires collaboration between different academic disciplines, particularly social sciences and humanities (SSH) and biological and physical sciences. Based on a ten-year participant observation study in research groups on nonpoint source pollution of agricultural origin in Brittany (France), this contribution discusses one of the hidden ways in which the environmental crisis acts as an driver of change in academic collaborations. I will consider the environmental crisis as the creator of a specific horizon of expectation (Koselleck, 1990), which changes the relationship to time of the researchers involved, destabilises their relationship with their research topics, and raises additional concerns as to the validity, completeness and legitimacy of the routine knowledge they produce. In this perspective, interdisciplinarity with the SSH is expressed more as a desire (now largely normalised) than an appropriate a priori Anthropocenic academic action, since the real prospects of linkage between objectification and inter-subjectification that such collaborations involve remain hard to imagine and justify within the framework of formal research.
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