Evolving Collaborations

A self-referential case-study of a social/natural sciences collaborative project

Abstract

In this paper we aim to study the workings of a cross-disciplinary project in practice, and to relate our approach to other ways of achieving similar goals. By reference to our experience of a project to involve volunteer research subjects more actively in research on developing a new health technology, we explore the dynamics and evolution of the collaborative relationship between the medical physicists and social scientists as the project matured over a number of years. We discuss the tensions within the relationship and the capacity of a collaborative mode of working to sustain or constrain agendas relevant to science and society issues. We conclude by suggesting that we may be evolving towards a new mode of collaboration, similar to that starting to be institutionalised in some other natural science fields (nanotechnology, for example) and stimulated by shared aspirations towards embedding societal concerns in science.