4.2. Creating Community

For the full version of the original text go to The Economy of Interdisciplinary Knowledge Transfer by Vannina Hofman, Jara Rocha and Josep Perelló.

“Community” here refers to the agents who participate in a specific interdisciplinary knowledge production program. It may be useful or even necessary to include both humans and non-humans in the notion of “community” that emerges in a project. It is important to carry out the research action through the creation of a community (ideally, not a pre-existing community).

The community itself defines new inside-outsides, different to the inside-outsides of its component parts, which may be more or less permeable and may vary over time (thinking in terms of connection-disconnection). As such, the idea is to create a diverse community that is prepared to share, and to reach consensus through action. The community must negotiate its own shared code of ethics, which can be renegotiated in the course of the project. This code of ethics should be appropriate to an interdisciplinary project, and may even end up becoming one of the outcomes of the project itself, rather than just a tool. A code of ethics will generate trust and safe spaces in which to take on and share the risks of any ambitious research project.

Communities may be temporary and circumstantial, but it may be interesting to consider how a particular community can continue to exist as such beyond the occasional convergence mediated by a shared interest in a specific project. Different types of capital will come into play within the community, and the expected benefits should be explicitly stated and negotiated.

A community may also come up with frameworks and tools for negotiating competencies with other parties, such as funding bodies for example. If we start thinking in terms of zones instead of disciplines, and instead of extitutionalisation instead of institutions, we can also appraise how these funding bodies, to continue with the same example, could become an “inside”, “connected”.

In terms of economy and transfer, community poses challenges such as:

- How to produce and sustain, with changes, the ethical ties that sustain it, with a view to developing a project and communicating it, or even going beyond this.

- Increasing the number of (heterogeneous) agents that make up the community, taking into account the expectations and potentialities of each.

Minkalab is an example of a community with continuity created through an interdisciplinary project. Minkalab is based in Columbia and connects very different types of knowledge from indigenous groups, farmers, Afro-Colombian communities, and creative young people in order to develop a stable social network to create opportunities and tackle issues of local priorities in areas such as traditional and contemporary technologies, sustainable agriculture, and others that emerge in the meetings. Minkalab began in 2013 and held its third meeting this year, which was funded through a series of crowdfunding campaigns. All its activities are recorded and distributed online, in video, text, and audio format. This means that the community has flexible boundaries, and includes those who physically attend the Minkalab meetings, participants in other parts of the worlds, crowdfunding patrons, and sponsors (such as the University of Caldas).