Socializing Scientists into Interdisciplinarity by Placemaking in a Multi-sited Research Center

Abstract

The importance of physical place for interdisciplinary research collaborations is often taken for granted by scientists and policy makers. One result of this is a trend of funding interdisciplinary research centers where scientists are colocated in the same building. Previous research findings on the matter are, however, ambiguous and show that though geographical proximity clearly matters, proximity is insufficient to foster interdisciplinary collaboration. This paper is based on an ethnographic study of a multi-sited Norwegian biotechnology research center—the Centre for Digital Life Norway (DLN), funded in 2015 to stimulate a transition in biotechnology research toward inter- and transdisciplinarity and digitalization. The multi-sited character makes DLN different from the much-studied trend of colocation of research groups in research centers. The paper asks: how are scientists socialized into an interdisciplinary mentality in a multi-sited research center? The analysis focus on three aspects: place, socialization, and the role of affective features and experiences. The paper’s main contribution is to demonstrate the role of placemaking in motivating for inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration, in particular by allowing for development of affective relations among the participating scientists.

Introduction: Placed Scientific Collaborations

Place is believed to matter for interdisciplinary ¹ research collaborations. Examples abound of the underlying assumption that colocation—that is, gathering scientists in the same physical place—facilitates and improves collaboration across disciplinary borders (Palmer 2001; Frickel, Albert, and Prainsack 2017; Hackett et al. 2021). Nevertheless, previous findings on the importance of physical place for interdisciplinary collaboration are ambiguous. On the one hand, economic geography scholarship claims that “geographical proximity, or spatial colocation, increases the opportunity for frequent face-to-face interactions between partners” and that this is fundamental for establishing trust and to “reduce communication costs” (Rekers and Hansen 2015, 252). Livingstone (2003) argues that places influence knowledge creation, while places are shaped by knowledge.

On the other hand, scholars do not consider physical place and geographical proximity sufficient to foster interdisciplinary collaboration. They found that place may facilitate other processes relevant to interdisciplinary collaboration, such as other forms of proximities and sharing tacit knowledge (Boschma 2005; Hautala and Jauhiainen 2014; Jeffrey 2003). This scholarship often gives more attention to spaces than to places in science (Knorr-Cetina 1991; Vermeulen 2018; Palmer 2001; Felt 2009). The difference between the two is that place is “space filled up by people, practices, objects, and representations” (Gieryn 2000, 465). Although in practice physical place entails geographic location and physical proximity of—in this case—scientists, place must not be understood merely as physical buildings or architectural structures. Along these lines, placemaking involves efforts to transform spaces of encounter into places of social interaction and sensemaking.

This paper is based on an ethnographic study of a Norwegian biotechnology research center, the Centre for Digital Life Norway (DLN), which was initiated and funded by the Research Council of Norway (RCN) in 2015 to stimulate a transition in biotechnology research toward interdisciplinarity and digitalization. DLN is an interesting case because it departs from the much-studied trend of colocating research groups in research centers (Palmer 2001; Padberg 2014; Vermeulen 2018; Hackett et al. 2021). DLN is a multi-sited center, which means that its scientists, research groups, and management are located in several different buildings in various different Norwegian cities. There is not one physical center or building that is a natural meeting point for DLN members. The question thus arises: how are scientists socialized into an interdisciplinary mentality in a multi-sited research center?

My main finding is that placemaking played a prominent role in DLN to facilitate interdisciplinarity despite its multi-sited character. In this paper, I present three empirical vignettes from DLN’s practice that connect the issue of socialization into interdisciplinarity. Affective aspects emerged as an important dimension of placemaking. Yet affective aspects have traditionally not received much attention in scholarship on interdisciplinarity. This paper contributes to scholarship on interdisciplinarity in science and technology studies (STS) by showing the important role that affect plays in establishing new interdisciplinary collaborations.

Theory: What Is the Role of Place in Interdisciplinarity?

The notion of socialization may be useful to understand how a multi-sited research center works to foster an interdisciplinary mentality among its members. Scholars have shown the importance of socialization processes at universities and in higher education (Tierney 1997; Weidman, Twale, and Stein 2001; Maher et al. 2019; Boden, Borrego, and Newswander 2011), and Van Maanen (1978) argue that socialization strategies have enormous consequences for both individuals and organizations regardless of their intent.

The premise of socialization theory is that individuals acquire knowledge, skills, values, meanings, and norms through social interaction and societal context, making them effective members of their society (Mead 1972; Rabinow 1996; Weidman, Twale, and Stein 2001; Austin and McDaniels 2006). For example, if interdisciplinarity is a highly appreciated value in a funding policy for a biotechnology research center, the question is how researchers in such a research center learn this new norm and integrate it socially. Socialization should not be viewed as a one-way process where new members “acquire” an organization’s “culture,” but rather as an “interpretive process involved in the creation—rather than the transmittal—of meaning” (Tierney 1997, 6). The implication of this is that both individuals and organizations are affected by the socialization process.

The role of places of socialization in interdisciplinary collaboration has received little explicit attention. One exception is Boden, Borrego, and Newswander (2011), who suggest that place may be important to the growth of interdisciplinary communities and therefore emphasizing the importance of a shared place that encourages informal interactions and promotes student socialization. Thus, we might assume that places are important objects of study to understand socialization into interdisciplinarity, because they normatively integrate newcomers into social lives and customs. This is supported by the findings of Maher et al. (2019), who analyzed doctoral students’ experiences with laboratory rotations, showing the effects of socialization when the students rotated between different places, that is, between different laboratory communities. The role of place in socialization needs further study.

Scholarship on socialization rarely distinguishes between place and space. We find a similar shortcoming in existing studies of scientific collaboration. For example, the concepts place and space tend to be used interchangeably, although the distinction between the two (see, e.g., Campbell 2018) is important—particularly for the question of socialization into unique meanings and values. In his review of the sociological literature on place, Gieryn (2000, 465) clearly distinguishes between place and space, arguing that:

place is not space—which is more properly conceived as abstract geometries (distance, direction, size, shape, volume) detached from material form and cultural interpretation. Space is what place becomes when the unique gathering of things, meanings, and values are sucked out.

Thus, place must be made. First when filled up with people, practices, objects, and representations, space becomes a place.

Placemaking is rarely discussed in studies of interdisciplinarity. For example, when Barry and Born (2013, 2) propose mending the “paucity of empirical studies of how interdisciplinarity unfolds in practice,” they mention place only briefly, without further discussion or explanation. For One example is when they write that “university-based salaried artists were able to achieve intensive collaborations with scientist colleagues through prolonged encounters with or immersion in scientific environments, thereby incorporating scientific problematics into their work to occasionally extraordinary synergistic effect” (p. 29).

The lack of attention to place may be due to space being considered a broader term that also could entail physical place: for example, Hautala and Jauhiainen 2014 distinguish between different spaces of knowledge. However, as Gieryn (2000, 466) reminds us,

A sensitivity to place must be more than using two “places” simply to get a comparative wedge. The strong form of the argument is this: place is not merely a setting or backdrop, but an agentic player in the game—a force with detectable and independent effects on social life.

If we accept that place is indeed an agent, we should investigate its role in socializing scientists into interdisciplinarity. A link between interdisciplinarity and place is often assumed. One example is Palmer’s (2001) ethnographic study of boundary work in an interdisciplinary research center, where the center was founded on the premise that “reducing the barriers between traditional scientific and technological disciplines through the architectural design of the building can yield research advances that more conventional approaches cannot” (p. 3). Another example is Vermeulen (2018), who argues that “putting system biologists together in buildings” in the form of dedicated research centers has “probably been the main achievement to centralise systems biology” (p. 1776).

In research policy, an underlying assumption is that disciplines work as silos—clearly a spatial metaphor—thereby hindering interdisciplinary collaboration (Frickel et al. 2017). This assumption has resulted in attempts to solve the perceived problem by creating organizations and processes to foster interdisciplinarity, which may take the form of placemaking:

Innovative organizational forms have been designed to promote epistemic integration, ranging from constant co-location of researchers in specifically designed centers or campuses to large-scale networks, such as the European Framework Programmes and COST networks, which bring researchers together over space and time. (Hackett et al. 2021, 2)

Studies of these organizations highlight the importance of providing for regular encounters when promoting epistemic integration (Cummings and Kiesler 2008; Hampton and Parker 2011; Vermeulen 2018; Hackett et al. 2021). Moreover, Allen and Henn (2007) suggest that the frequency of interaction within an organization depends “very heavily…[on] the physical location of the people and the structure of the physical space,” showing that “a mere 50 meters’ separation between people essentially results in the end of regular communication” (p. 63). Physical proximity seems to be important for establishing social connections:

[G]eographical proximity may be a necessity for some collaborations, as it allows for the creation of specific social relations and social proximity…. This is particularly likely to be important for collaborations in interdisciplinary research where the participants come from different backgrounds. (Rekers and Hansen 2015, 245)

Still, colocation does not necessarily need to be permanent or to happen daily. In so-called synthesis centers, researchers are not colocated in a single physical building every day. They work at several different universities, but the groups do occasionally meet at the center’s premises, where the scientists engage in intensive work over shorter periods of time during the year. This seems to create patterns of social interaction that promote collaboration (Hackett et al. 2021; Hampton and Parker 2011). Hackett et al. (2008) and Parker and Hackett (2014) observed that “[s]cientists emerge from these intense and successful research interactions with strongly favorable orientations towards research collaboration” (Hackett et al. 2008, 293).

To create synthesis centers is clearly a relevant placemaking effort that could have been an option when Digital Life Norway was founded. The experience of such centers also provides important insights regarding the social processes involved in placemaking. But is physical proximity the only proximity needed to achieve interdisciplinarity?

Indeed, placemaking involves more than a shared physical place or space. Palmer (2001) finds that epistemic proximity often is as important as physical proximity (p. 64). This is consistent with Jeffrey’s (2003, 539) argument that “substantive and meaningful cross-disciplinary collaboration will not miraculously ‘emerge’” from physical proximity. In other words, placemaking is not just facilitating face-to-face encounters but also motivating collaboration and developing shared identities of scientists and research groups (Schönbauer 2017, 2019; Hansen 2014).

In this context, the role of emotions and feelings needs to be systematically analyzed (Parker and Hackett 2014, 551). Mansilla, Lamont, and Sato (2016) claim that successful interdisciplinary collaboration “pivots on the construction of a shared space for cognitive, social, and emotional transactions” (601, my italics). While their paper nicely shows how these three dimensions are intertwined in practice, place is not given much attention in the analysis, and none of the markers and indicators discussed show the role of place in the three dimensions. Parker and Hackett (2014, 24) state that emotions “are central elements of scientific collaborations …. Emotions spark creativity, tighten social bonds, and lower barriers to collaboration” and argue that “emotive and epistemic elements of collaborations are inseparable.” They use the concept of “island time” to describe the collective affectivity that occur when scientists meet to work together for shorter but intense periods of time. How to achieve the emotional or affective qualities that are crucial for well-functioning interdisciplinary collaboration needs further study. Kerr and Garforth (2016, 17) argue that the iconic STS laboratory studies “rarely show the patterns of affect and care for colleagues, careers and futures that, alongside work with materials and knowledge-objects, also constitute laboratories and their work.” Recent scholarship has given more attention to the role of affect in science (Swallow and Hillman 2019; Parker and Hackett 2014; Fitzgerald 2013; Kerr and Garforth 2016; Smolka, Fisher, and Hausstein 2020). My study draws inspiration from these recent works on affect, noticing with Parker and Hackett (2014, 549) that

[w]hat is odd is not that emotion shapes science—this has been known for almost a century—but rather that the vital role of emotion in science, so clearly seen early on, is only now re-emerging as a cumulative area of sociological research.

Therefore, I investigate efforts to provide a climate conducive to interdisciplinarity. My specific research question is this: how do the socialization efforts in DLN involve placemaking—that is, how do efforts to transform spaces of encounter into places of social interaction and sense-making that motivate further collaboration across disciplines and projects in a biotechnology center dispersed across various cities in Norway? I expected the socialization efforts to involve community building with shared norms and values as well as developing interest in interdisciplinary collaboration. Thus, my analysis will focus on three aspects: place, socialization, and the role of affective features and experiences in socializing into interdisciplinarity.

Method

I began my ethnographic research into interdisciplinarity with anthropological fieldwork and participant observation in the laboratory of one DLN research project in a department of biotechnology at a Norwegian university. In addition to helping and observing in the lab, I attended meetings, workshops, and other activities at the department, taking extensive field notes in the office I shared with five early-career researchers in biotechnology.

After a first round of fieldwork for about 1.5 months at the biotechnology department, I continued my empirical exploration through a round of interviews with researchers attached to the project that had previously hosted me in the lab, followed by interviews in two more DLN projects in other Norwegian cities, to be able to compare. In total, I conducted twenty-six semi-structured interviews and two focus group interviews with scientists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds and positions, including PhD students, postdocs, lab technicians, associate professors, and professors. The interviews afforded greater understanding of the interdisciplinary processes, both within the research projects and within the center more generally.

In parallel, I followed the interdisciplinary movements in DLN by participating in conferences, meetings, workshops, center evaluations, and courses. I also took part in organizing the second annual research school conference, and a DLN walkshop (see Wickson, Strand, and Kjølberg 2015) on value creation in Norwegian biotechnology.

In the last quarter of 2020, I did participatory observation in the Networking Project, the leadership group of DLN, at a time when it was drafting a report on transdisciplinarity. ² During these three months, I conducted several informal interviews with the DLN leader and others in the Networking Project and attended weekly group meetings and discussions regarding the everyday operations of the center. This fieldwork provided insights into priorities and decision-making.

All participant observation was documented by field notes. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed in NVivo. I coded for organizational or intellectual challenges and barriers, interdisciplinary interactions, and conflicts within the research group and with the home university, with DLN, or with RCN. Furthermore, I coded situations of emotion, scientists’ affective expressions when talking about people or situations, also noting when emotion and affect were not expressed. At the same time, I analyzed relevant policy documents and scientific papers from the landscape that DLN was a part of. The different kinds of data thus complement each other. They were analyzed together and cover different aspects of the center—the individual experiences of scientists, the research projects, the project-transcending work in the Networking Project, and the policy strategy behind the Digital Life initiative—together making up an assemblage of the interdisciplinary efforts DLN engaged in.

Data from my fieldwork are indicated here by the date and context of the field notes. Interview data are labeled with the discipline and career stage of the interviewee. The Norwegian biotechnology community is small, and to ensure anonymity, gender is not always indicated. Documents are referred to where they are used.

A Short Presentation of Digital Life Norway (DLN)

DLN is a multi-sited national center for biotechnology research established in 2015 by the RCN; it represents a substantial public investment of approximately 50 million EUR. DLN’s mandate is to “create economic, societal and environmental value in Norway from biotechnological research and innovation,” by encouraging interdisciplinary research (RCN 2014, 4).

Interdisciplinarity is thus a clear norm that the DLN scientists should be socialized into. Yet the norms, values, and meanings that DLN scientists were attempted socialized into related not only to interdisciplinarity. DLN scientists should also be integrated into a more comprehensive way of thinking about their own research, that is, into unique values and meanings related to societal relevance, innovation, and utility-oriented research, where the scientists become change agents in a transformation of Norwegian biotechnology.

DLN consists of a Networking Project hosted by several Norwegian university institutions and a gradually increasing research portfolio that in 2021 included thirty-five research projects spread across these institutions. The research projects were funded so as to combine life sciences, mathematics, informatics, and engineering throughout biotechnological innovation (RCN 2014, 8). The multi-sited structure was an attempt to avoid favoring one biotechnology community and to include and merge communities in all the university cities in Norway instead (personal communication with DLN leader and DLN coordinator, July 8, 2020, and February 23, 2021).

What distinguished DLN from regular project funding streams was that the center, by means of a networking project, also did cross-cutting, project-transgressing work. The Networking Project was a socialization agent whose task was to manage the center’s links among research groups and between science and society. It consisted of the DLN director, group leaders, and coordinators divided into six work groups that reflect the center’s focus areas: governance, responsible research, and innovation (RRI); innovation and industry involvement; training and recruitment; competence and infrastructure network; and communication (DLN 2020). DLN also had a research school for early-career researchers, a board, and an international advisory board. I will return to the Networking Project and the Research School in the last part of the paper.

How did DLN set off to accomplish its mission? During the first five years of activity, the DLN organized a variety of events and initiatives: conferences, meetings, courses, committees, forums, and workshops. Such events and structures have a long tradition in the sciences (see, e.g., Mullins 1972). ³

The Digital Life Research School offered courses for early-career researchers on broader topics, such as transdisciplinary life science and RRI, as well as more specialized science-oriented courses. All in all, the Networking Project made considerable effort to get the scientists in the center to meet face to face at physical locations.

What did this placemaking entail, beyond creating physical meeting places? What happened in these spaces, and why were they considered important? I begin by analyzing three DLN placemaking initiatives. I then do a cross-cutting analysis of the initiatives, emphasizing the affective aspects of placemaking. The three initiatives analyzed are the socializing agents in the Networking Project and its project-transgressing work, the Digital Life Norway Annual Conference, as well as the Digital Life Norway Research School. I have selected these initiatives because they were core activities of the center and because they illustrate what placemaking entails and implies in a multi-sited research center.

Initiative 1: The DLN Coordinating Group

Most of the DLN work was done within the center by working with existing research projects and with scientists in the center. This work was oriented toward placemaking, that is, bringing the scientists in the center together for meetings, conferences, and workshops. These were held in hotels, conference rooms, and sometimes meeting rooms at different Norwegian universities. This placemaking was always grounded in DLN values, with topics related to interdisciplinarity/making new acquaintances, innovation, societal relevance, and/or reflections on the meanings and outcomes of DLN.

Interviews with scientists and observation in the center showed that participating scientists considered the DLN meeting places valuable for creating new interdisciplinary collaboration. They described meeting other scientists by attending center events, which had resulted in new partnerships. These placemaking efforts created opportunities to meet new people, but also, more importantly, they created opportunities to “get to know” others and to build personal professional relations. We see here that affective aspects of collaboration were at play, insofar as personal professional relations were considered important. “Getting to know” others was considered difficult to achieve by other means than through face-to-face encounters.

But what I think was good—in the beginning [of the center’s activities] at least, it was that we were also forced to meet with the other projects and get together for a bit … we had at least one or two project manager meetings that those of us who were in the first round [of funded DLN projects] participated in. … These project manager meetings slipped [ceased] a bit at one stage or another. And I don’t think it was so wise that it slipped. But it could have [been helpful], and at least for me it did something to be in these meetings. These cross-project activities that we have started were due to, among other things, the contacts we established there. (Professor)

When asked further about cross-project collaboration, the professor emphasized that she or he did not know the scientists involved in the other projects before they became participants in DLN and met in person at DLN initiatives. She or he doubted that they would otherwise have met and collaborated, and she or he considered the project manager meetings to be particularly important professionally—as well as an opportunity to meet nice people relevant for future collaboration. The affective aspects of placemaking in this case were understated by the scientist but nevertheless seemed to matter in the actual collaboration that resulted from the project manager meetings: being nice was clearly seen as a valuable trait. Ironically—and as indicated in the quote—only one or two project manager meetings were held by the Networking Project before they ceased. Thus, an important place where project managers could meet disappeared. Consequently, new research projects struggled with identifying potentially relevant partners, especially when joining the center during the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions:

We are a brand-new project in the Digital Life Norway format, so, so far, we have initiated collaboration with one other project, but both of us did, like, cell work, so it wasn’t like collaboration between a wet lab and computational science. However, for some months already, we were thinking that we really needed a partnership with some bioinformaticians and computational biologists, and we do know that this kind of expertise is available in Digital Life Norway. However, we haven’t found the right platform or the right approach to find these people in this consortium, because, like, we don’t know many people in the consortium so far, and we can’t just say “hey, you, who can do this computational biology stuff for us?” (Senior scientist)

The lack of place as agentic force became even more evident during the pandemic in 2020, when scientists could no longer meet physically. During this period, scientists described challenges in making new interdisciplinary project groups run smoothly because there were no face-to-face meetings:

Scientist 1: I have a question for all of you. Is there any way you can stimulate cross-disciplinary communication in Corona times? Cause you cannot be colocated. Now they write that you cannot go to work anymore.

Scientist 2: Yeah, I think it’s extremely difficult to initiate if you haven’t had any physical connection before and then to initiate novel close collaboration on Zoom, at least I am really bad at it. But if I know you from before it’s easier.

The quotes above show how collective affectivity is difficult to achieve when people cannot meet in person. Conversations with scientists during field work suggested that digital platforms provided insufficient opportunities for affective relations; the scientists often described how digital meetings gave no opportunities for small talk by the coffee machine, and how the digital format made it difficult to build personal connections and relationships with persons they had not previously met.

In addition to providing physical meeting spaces, the placemaking of the coordinating group involved targeted processes to encourage interdisciplinarity. Funding for cross-project activities was one such example. Constructing a place where scientists could harvest “synergies between projects and exchange of competence” (DLN 2021b) was considered important by the coordinator group, as they saw it as one of the benefits of being part of DLN for the research projects.

To stimulate such interdisciplinarity, the center offered limited funding for cross-project activities that projects could access through an online application (DLN 2021b). These were the cross-project activities mentioned by the professor in the first quote of this section.

From 2018 to 2020, DLN placemaking efforts related to funded cross-project activities were found in eleven cross-project activities, including collaborative workshops, exchanges regarding methods, and a pilot testing of antibodies with another DLN-project prototype system. At first glance, such initiatives might not seem to require physical encounters. However, in practice, participants found cross-project activities were highly dependent on face-to-face encounters. Firstly, the scientists claimed that they needed such encounters to become acquainted before they began collaborating. This had to do with the affective aspects of getting to know one another. Secondly, interdisciplinary collaboration almost always led to physical meetings to discuss scientific matters and/or for working together in the lab.

Initiative 2: The Digital Life Norway Annual Conference

The Digital Life Norway Annual Conference was another instance of placemaking. Articulating norms and values at the events was one of the ways of promoting DLN’s mission and therefore to socialize scientists into an interdisciplinary mentality. The extent to which such socialization happened is unclear, but the annual conferences show the importance of placemaking for the initiation of interdisciplinary collaboration in DLN.

The DLN Annual Conference had been arranged by the Networking Project annually since 2017. The intention was to create a sense of belonging, engagement, community feeling, and trust in the center (personal communication with center director and coordinators 2018, 2020). All DLN research projects, partner projects, and DLN research school members were invited to attend, together with members of the DLN international scientific advisory board, international scientists, and actors from the biotechnology industry. The conference was held at a hotel, the location alternating each year between different Norwegian university cities. As the largest meeting place of the center, the annual conference was an opportunity for the Networking Project to attempt to socialize its members into interdisciplinarity in line with the DLN mission.

An important part of this socializing consisted of addressing and demonstrating interdisciplinarity in the center, always emphasizing its value and importance. This was done both implicitly and explicitly. The DLN director and RCN representatives addressed interdisciplinary issues explicitly in their presentations. Not only disciplinary transgression was addressed this way but also other cross-cutting features of DLN: innovation, digitalization, and RRI. This can be interpreted as an attempt to normatively integrate newcomers into customs and to promote specific norms and values. In 2018, in his opening speech at the conference, the DLN director spoke about DLN and what changing the Norwegian biotechnology landscape meant more broadly:

And this is about transdisciplinary biotechnology research, digitalization and modelling, more and better collaboration in Norway, taking into account the FAIRDOM principles for data storage, data sharing, open access, training of young researchers, career development—not only for academia but also elsewhere, more innovation out of the excellent research that is going on, and also fully taking advantage of the unique platform that has been created for responsible research and innovation. (DLN 2018)

A representative from the RCN who had been deeply involved in the DLN initiative also gave a normative, value-laden presentation. In his talk, he considered DLN important because it was a big investment in a policy experiment that was considered a “change-oriented,” “highly strategic effort” that would be “transforming the [biotechnology] landscape” as well as providing opportunities to “meet the full range of [the research program’s] goals” and to create “political attention and impact beyond biotechnology.” This use of strongly normative and value-laden language made it explicit to the audience why the center was important and what the audience should identify with. We see that the unique meanings and values that the DLN scientists should be socialized into thus are related not only to interdisciplinarity but also to impact, relevance and to becoming a change agent.

Efforts to provide a mentality for interdisciplinarity were also implicit, often tacit. The conference program exemplifies this. The conference was traditionally structured, with two days of presentations of scientific results and of cross-cutting topics.

The scientific presentations dominated the conferences, especially the first year. However, gradually more time was devoted to presentations that addressed cross-cutting topics, on topics such as “Realizing the Future Together” and “Digital Life Innovation Day.” Again, we see efforts to socialize participants into a change and impact-oriented way of thinking about science. The Networking Project invited speakers to address topics such as the importance of the digital biotech economy in Norway, how digitalization is transforming the biotech sector, how to make industry–university partnerships work, and value creation and the public good in research. By participating in the annual conference, individuals can learn values, meanings, and norms through social interactions.

A session from the DLN (2018) conference illustrates in greater detail the normative and value-laden aspects of the conference’s placemaking features (field notes, March 21, 2018). One of the presenters of a session on “Trust and Accountability” was a professor of research communication with a background in biotechnology. He discussed trust, asking “how to come in contact with the people biotechnology earlier have excluded?” and “how to ask the relevant questions in research?” In the round of questions after his talk, members of the audience raised critical issues. For example, a scientist in their mid-thirties stated their disagreement with the idea of creating trust at all costs because “we [as scientists] are right” and the public “cannot disagree with the science.” The professor responded by saying that “perhaps we are right, but continuing to insist that we are right is a bad way to convince someone. Humility and understanding other perspectives are extremely valuable.”

This illustrates how some of the cross-cutting presentations challenged the biotechnology audience by raising topics that addressed wider aspects of scientific work relating to the values and meaning of DLN’s mission. Challenging norms and values of scientific practice became an integral part of the placemaking.

Other examples of tacit socialization efforts at the annual conferences include the emphasis on poster sessions (with refreshments), which enabled mingling and networking and thus opportunities for exploring epistemic proximity. The care taken to orchestrate the conference dinner was notable in its aim to facilitate interdisciplinary encounters through allocated table seating. The conference dinner, with after-dinner drinks and mingling, was considered important for networking across disciplines that could result in new partnerships (field notes 2018 and 2019, and interviews). The latter is illustrated by the following excerpt from my field notes:

At the conference dinner, the conference participants were seated at different tables, about eight at each table. The conference organizers had decided the seating to make sure that we met new persons. During dinner, I observed two scientists started talking about their respective research projects [here I call them project A and B]. The scientist from project A was a female postdoc and coordinator of her project, and the scientist from project B was a female early-career researcher. They were sitting next to each other, and during their conversation they realized that they had a lot to talk about scientifically. They started out discussing the work done in project B with viability in cells in alginate, as project A might be interested in testing this out. As the evening continued and the participants at other tables finished their dinners and moved on into the lounge area, another scientist from project B, who was also one of the developers of the project, passed by our table. She initially stopped only to have a brief chat with us, but when she realized the conversation was about the two projects, she stayed and joined the discussion. The three scientists became increasingly engaged in the discussion and started to talk about the possibilities for a collaboration between the projects or a side project. After some time, the project coordinator from project A invited the scientist from project B with her to meet “the others,” meaning the project manager of project A for further discussion about a possible collaboration. (Field notes, September 6, 2019).

A partnership was thus initiated, which later resulted in a collaborative effort where one of the postdocs from project B traveled to project A’s lab in another city to see whether project A could use the techniques of project B.

This example demonstrates the effects of placemaking in practice, highlighting the importance of physical encounters at the annual conferences to foster interdisciplinarity. This initial contact, combined with available funding, allowed for the two projects to collaborate and shows that collaboration does not happen out of nowhere. Establishing new interdisciplinary collaboration seems to benefit from personal knowledge of potential partners. Note that the scientists had other things in common than their research and that the conversation was guided by affective aspects that influenced the scientists’ decision to collaborate. I elaborate on the affective aspects in this example in the discussion.

Initiative 3: The Digital Life Norway Research School (DLNRS)

The DLNRS represents a third example of placemaking efforts in DLN. The research school was considered instrumental in creating an interdisciplinary digital life community consistent with the DLN mission (RCN 2014). For this reason, it was a priority of the Networking Project. The placemaking efforts in DLNRS aimed to socialize early-career researchers into a set of shared norms and values, such as increased interdisciplinarity, an innovation culture, and societal relevance and responsibility—all considered important for the future of biotechnology.

The research school was open to all early-career researchers within the field of biotechnology in Norway (not limited to participants in DLN-funded projects), so scientists from a variety of disciplines within the natural sciences participated. This may in itself be interpreted as a placemaking effort to support interdisciplinarity. In September 2020, the school had 237 members, of whom 150 were postdocs (RCN 2020, 39-41).

The research school realized the DLN mission primarily by offering dedicated physical spaces where early-career scientists could meet and network. The research school provided members with a variety of events and initiatives, around twenty per year, including, for example, an annual conference, scientific and more general courses, travel grants, networking opportunities, reading groups, and industry internships.

A distinctive feature of DLNRS’s placemaking was socializing participants into an interdisciplinary mindset, that is, making interdisciplinarity an integral part of early-career scientists’ practices. Compared to the two previous initiatives discussed in this paper, the research school offered more explicit socialization, as the training aspect allowed discretion regarding the values, meanings, and norms that early-career scientists should learn. Thus, the activities were guided by the DLN cross-cutting topics: interdisciplinarity, innovation, digitalization, and RRI. DLN was from the outset made up by a set of unclear intentions regarding what interdisciplinarity, innovation, digitalization, and RRI should mean in practice. As previously noted, socialization into interdisciplinarity was not the only socialization effort in DLN. It was one of several normative demands. DLN scientists should be integrated into a more comprehensive way of thinking about their own research, that is, into unique values and meanings related to societal relevance, innovation, and utility-oriented research, where the scientists are change agents. Furthermore, socialization into interdisciplinarity did not replace other socialization efforts or identities but was an addition to scientists’ existing identities, mindset, and practices. One result was an unclear identity, both for DLN and for the early-career scientists in the center, which led to early-career scientists upholding other—sometimes competing—identities (Bock von Wülfingen 2021; Felt et al. 2013).

The RRI efforts of the research school are illustrative of socialization efforts that seek to encourage scientists to concern themselves with societal relevance and include a variety of fields in knowledge production. From the very beginning, RRI was a topic at several research school initiatives, for example, at its annual conference and at its signature course, “Transdisciplinary Life Science.” My field notes from these events suggest that the ensuing socialization efforts managed to change participants’ values and ways of thinking (Hesjedal et al. 2020). In 2017, at the first annual meeting of the research school, none of the participants was familiar with the concept of RRI. Later, however, participants demonstrated greater familiarity and understanding of RRI.

The DLN considered the research school as a great success in creating a collective team spirit and community among the early-career researchers (interview DLN leader October 5, 2020, interview DLN coordinator October 23, 2020). Many of the scientists and participants in the Networking Project considered it as the place in the center where one could most clearly observe a sense of belonging and community feeling (field notes 2018 and 2019).

An analysis of accounts from early-career scientists addressing their participation in the research school from 2017 to 2021 supports these notions, indicating that the research school had been an important place for many (field notes, 2017-2021). Several PhD students described feeling more at home in DLNRS and DLN than at their university department, and/or pointing to DLN as crucial for their development of a network with scientists with similar interests. One reported that “DLN, or really the [DLN] research school is where I have my network, and where I feel I belong. I don’t have a large network in my department, and I feel much more at home in the research school” (field notes from a conversation with a systems biology PhD candidate in 2018).

Another PhD student, participating at the DLNRS annual conference in 2019 for the first time and not knowing anyone in advance, said: “I’m so happy that I decided to come here! In my daily work no one, not even my supervisor, knows what I’m doing,” explaining that she or he had met several people engaging with similar research, who she or he could now contact “when I need to discuss my work” (field notes, Annual Conference 06 June 2019).

But what was the reason for this? In what way did the research school differ from the other DLN initiatives? Could other aspects of the placemaking in the research school contribute to a greater understanding of the research school’s success? The research school’s main networking event (the DLNRS Annual Conference) illustrates some of them. The DLNRS was organized by members of the research school, together with an administrative coordinator, and the conference was promoted as a “great opportunity to build your network, exchange research ideas, share your experiences, and have a lot of fun!” (DLN 2021a). The conference was an overnight event held at a hotel.

The program consisted of a mix of scientific presentations and “soft skills.” Another integral part, “having fun,” consisted of icebreakers, group work, hiking, Kahoot quizzes, stand-up shows, scientific speed dating, and social team activities such as outdoor Viking games and obstacle courses, and lunches and dinners with quizzes and mingling. The interviews with early-career scientists at the annual conferences highlight the affective and relational aspects rather than the professional program. Before and after the conferences, the early-career scientists always highlighted “the social” aspect: getting to know new people, hanging out in the evenings and nights, making friends, and catching up with people they knew from other DLN events (field notes, 2018, 2019, and 2020). For example, in 2019, every evening of the conference a group of fifteen to twenty scientists went to the beach to light a fire, drink beer, and talk. The first night, a PhD student who was part of the organizing committee said: “I’ve missed hanging out with you guys! I see you talking, and having fun, and all I want is to join you. But I have responsibilities,” explaining that she or he looked forward to conclude the responsibilities the next day so she or he could “fully commit to just having fun” (field note, June 6, 2019).

The affective aspects were also evident in the feedback to the research school during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the pandemic, all physical meetings were cancelled. Early-career scientists expressed their sadness at this: they felt isolated and alone, missed the activities, and hoped that some events might still happen (interview with DLN coordinator, June 2020). The annual conference was the last in a series of research school events that was shifted to a digital platform in 2020. The research school leaders, the organizing committee, and many of the members expressed disappointment about the change, saying things like “I am so disappointed that I cannot go to [the place of the conference],” “It sucks” [that it was cancelled], “I had really looked forward to [the conference] and to finally meet people,” and “I’m sick of not meeting anyone, and really hoped that the this [conference] would happen” (field notes, August 2020).

These accounts from early-career scientists suggest that the DLNRS placemaking afforded a construction of relevant shared places for cognitive, social, and emotional transactions between research school members. We see that place here is an agent that contributes to transfer of values, meanings, and norms through social interaction. The examples above show that filling DLNRS places with people, practices, values, and representations created patterns of social interaction that promoted both an interdisciplinarity mindset, as well as RRI and increased attention toward societal relevance in research. The affective aspects of placemaking dominated in the accounts and must be considered an important reason for the research school’s success in creating a community of early-career scientists across disciplines.

Discussion: Affective Aspects of Interdisciplinarity

In the theory section, we saw that placemaking involves more than just a physical place to meet. The three cases analyzed above show how attempts of DLN placemaking involved socialization of scientists into membership in and appreciation of an interdisciplinary community through shared norms and values. We also saw that networking aspects such as “getting to know each other” and “having fun” represented a significant part of placemaking.

The cases bring two main aspects of placemaking into focus. First, placemaking facilitated community building and establishing new interdisciplinary partnerships in DLN. Second, this achievement depended on cultivating affective features through the placemaking that facilitated relations between the scientists in the center. I will now elaborate on the second point.

First, consider the previously described encounter at the Digital Life Annual Conference dinner in 2018 (Initiative 2 section). The importance of physical proximity of scientists is clear, in this case for its role in building of professional friendships that can lead to establishing new collaborative relations. The two scientists from projects A and B, though they might not have known it when they first met, had much in common. Both were women scientists around thirty-five to forty years in leading positions within their research groups. Both were passionate about their work, had given birth to several children while getting their scientific degrees, and had studied in the same city. They got along well immediately, and their conversation was a mix of deep scientific exchange and a lot of laughing.

The affective aspects of scientists’ personal relations at work, such as liking each other and forming friendships, seem an important stepping stone toward scientific collaboration. The conversation at the conference dinner is one example where both placemaking and affective aspects enabled a new collaboration. Another example is the professor who described how encountering other DLN project managers had resulted in side-projects (Initiative 1 section). However, the affective aspects of science and collaboration were seldom discussed openly among the scientists in DLN as far as I could observe during my fieldwork, and it is not emphasized in the scholarship on interdisciplinarity. Nevertheless, the affective features of interdisciplinary collaboration were quite evident from my fieldwork and interviews.

When over the course of my fieldwork I became aware of the importance of friendship and emotions, I invited scientists to talk about their relationships with their project partners. I asked why they chose to collaborate with this or that person, how the collaboration started, and if they ever met with their project collaborators outside of the university. All my attempts at prompting disclosures along these lines failed. Only when I asked directly about the importance of friendship and getting along when starting a new partnership did the scientists address the issues, but often in quite general terms:

Yes, [personality] is important [to create well-functioning collaboration groups]. I do think it’s nice to work with people who are positive and enthusiastic rather than the opposite. (Professor)

This hesitation was especially evident among the more senior scientists. On a more general level, and as the quote above shows, many readily admitted that personality was important in interdisciplinarity groups and teams. However, when asked directly about their own relationships with collaborators—for example, if they knew their collaborators prior to initiating the project—most answered vaguely that they knew some of them and were not at all eager to talk about it.

I interpreted this as indicating that the scientists were concerned that their scientific endeavors would become less prestigious if others believed they collaborated only with “old friends.” For example, a professor told during an interview when asked if she or he already knew the other project managers in the project: “Yes, well, I knew of them, I probably knew [name] better since we were down here [at the department] together, while I had probably only met [name] a few times.” Later, I found out that the professor was a close friend of one of the group managers, and that they in fact had known each other for more than twenty years. In contrast, when talking about recent collaborators, the interviewees offered more information.

The early-career scientists were less careful and often emphasized the importance of becoming friends and having fun to ensure good collaboration. When informally asked why they wanted to collaborate with others, they offered reasons such as: “We just wanted to do something together because we thought it would be fun,” “He’s great guy,” and “I met her at the annual conference.” In more formal settings and during interviews, however, the early-career researchers also only talked about the scientific reasons to collaborate.

When establishing a new group of early-career researchers in the research school, one of the coordinators wrote to me that “I’m not the one who is going to lead it, but I’ll have a lot of contact with it—and need GOOD people,” following up with “It MUST be a pleasant bunch if it’s going to work!” When later asked about what “good people” meant, she or he said it was people she or he knew and liked. “And of course, I want people that I know are going to contribute so that we get things done.”

Affective aspects are important in interdisciplinary collaboration. In DLN, such aspects are realized through placemaking through the DLN events and initiatives for the members. These places are crucial also for DLN’s socializing of scientists into an interdisciplinary mindset. Drawing on Parker and Hackett (2014), we may say that some of the DLN placemaking efforts were attempts to create “hot spots,” that is, brief but intense periods of collaboration undertaken in remote and isolated settings. Furthermore, facilitating “island time” seemed also to be considered important. This was most noticeable in the research school, where traveling to someplace outside of the universities was considered crucial for deep concentration, engagement, and creating and tightening social bonds. In sum, the three vignettes above show that place, socialization, and affective aspects were intertwined in DLN’s initiatives to promote interdisciplinarity in a multi-sited research center.

The importance of affective aspects in interdisciplinarity appears in the empirical accounts from scientists during the pandemic, who described challenges of collaborating with scientists they had not met in person before. Furthermore, it has implications for organization of science and knowledge production. Though digital platforms provide new opportunities for collaboration across the world, face-to-face encounters prior to collaboration—even if only once—is considered crucial for well-functioning interdisciplinary research. This is largely due to the affective, and often tacit, processes at play when scientists meet by the coffee machine, talk informally in breaks and before meetings or go out together for drinks after seminars and workshops. This shows that place is indeed an influential agent in this context. These findings show some of the limitations of relying mainly on digital communication in scientific collaboration.

Presumably, placemaking and affective aspects are important in most forms of research collaboration (interdisciplinary as well as disciplinary), because of the need for trust and appreciation when sharing knowledge and data. Still, it may be of greater significance in interdisciplinary teams where collaborators may lack the competence to assess the efforts of partners from other disciplines, so trust-based affective relations are key to be able to work effectively together. As placemaking involves people getting to know each other and affords the building of a personal-scientific base for mutual trust, placemaking is of particular importance in interdisciplinary collaborations.

In this paper, I have shown that the significance of placemaking and affective aspects were appreciated by both senior and early-career researchers in DLN, because trust is equally important to them. On the socialization of scientists into an interdisciplinary mindset, the analysis suggests that it was more apparent and influential in the accounts of the early-career scientists in the research school compared to more senior scholars. This may be due to the fact that many early career researchers were part of education programs where interdisciplinarity was explicitly addressed as a choice to make, while senior researchers often saw interdisciplinarity as required to get grants.

Conclusion

This paper has shown that placemaking matters for interdisciplinary collaboration in science. When facilitating for interdisciplinarity, the DLN created meeting places for scientists, hoping that these places would in themselves initiate new collaborations. I argue that the spaces created by the Networking Project initially were just that: spaces. To work, the spaces must, however, be transformed into places where proximity and affectivity can occur. Placemaking thus transforms general spaces such as hotels and conference rooms to local places by filling them with norms, values, affects, people, meaning, and content. This is how places may become meaningful to scientists and help develop the potential to create community feeling and new collaborations across scientific disciplines. The DLN Networking Project used placemaking as what I consider as efforts to socializing scientists into a mentality of interdisciplinarity. This worked largely due to the affective aspects at play in DLN placemaking. Though often tacit and under-communicated, affective aspects such as personality and good chemistry between scientists, played a fundamental role when the scientists decided to establish new interdisciplinary research projects.