The British Academy Early Career Researcher Network brings together ECRs across the humanities and social sciences disciplines, regardless of their funding source or background.

Event Organiser: British Academy ECRN Interdisciplinary ThinkIn Group.

Many contemporary problems, such as climate change, public health, and social inequality, are complex and multifaceted. Interdisciplinary research brings together insights and methods from different disciplines to develop more comprehensive solutions that a single-discipline approach might not be able to address. As such, learning to work across different disciplines is a vital skill in our modern society.

This in person event, held at the British Academy in London aims to break down three main questions that surround interdisciplinary work to inform and inspire ECRs:

• Exploring the challenges of bringing in different perspectives and methodologies into different disciplines, and how to these perspectives offer a depth of thought.
• The dissemination of interdisciplinary research- in what ways and where can interdisciplinary research be published/communicated?
• How can interdisciplinary research speak to disciplinary bound audiences and how can the potential for this be realised? What is this potential?

Programme

10:30-11:00 Arrival and Registration with refreshments

11:00-11:15 Event Opening, Ken Emond (Head of Research Funding at the British Academy)

11:15-11:30 First Lightning talk, Dr Bridget Menyeh (Robert Gordon University) and Dr Stephen Tatlow (University of Gloucestershire).

11:30-12:30 Panel 1: Method, Chaired by Claire Sedgwick (Teesside University). Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith (University of Oxford), Dr Olaya Moldes Andrés (Cardiff University) and Dr Abiodun Egbetokun (De Montfort University) will explore the challenges in interdisciplinary research around bringing in different perspectives and methodologies into various disciplines.

12:30-13:30 Lunch (provided)

13:30-13:45 Second lightning talk, Dr Ed McKeon (Birmingham City University and Science Museum Group) and Dr Eun Sun Godwin (University of Wolverhampton).

We've been collaborating on an article exploring the orchestral conductor as a figure of time discipline with the rise of industrial modernity, and the implications for time regulation in today’s network environment. As a cultural theorist / music philosopher and a Critical Management Studies scholar, we have been navigating our respective methodological investments and the potential this piece has to reach quite different academics and non-academics.

13:45-14:45 Panel 2: Dissemination, Chaired by Una McGlone (University of Edinburgh). Panelists Dr Gareth Johnson (Editor of Exchanges Journal, University of Warwick) and Professor Tia de Nora FBA (University of Exeter) to explore in what ways and where interdisciplinary research can be published/communicated.

14:45-15:00 Tea and Coffee break

15:00-15:15 Lightning group discussion in tables

15:15-16:15 Panel 3: Audience/Implementation, Chaired by Dr Aikaterini Tavoulari (University of Bath). Panelits Parisa Wright (CEO of Greener and Cleaner), Dr Kartika Bhatia (Coventry University) and Stephen RG Bennett (UK Policy Lab) to explore how interdisciplinary research can speak to disciplinary bound audiences and how the potential for this can be realised.

16:15-16:30 Feedback/Closing session, (Ken Emond Head of Research Funding at the British Academy).

Event Speakers

Dr Bridget Menyeh

Dr Bridget Menyeh is an energy economist and global development practitioner with research interests in energy, sustainability and consumer behaviour. As a strategy and international business lecturer at Aberdeen Business School, Robert Gordon University, she integrates sustainability into business education, emphasizing its crucial role in shaping the future of global markets.

Throughout her career, Bridget has been actively involved in several interdisciplinary projects and programs within the international development sector. Notably, she contributed to a donor-funded initiative that co-designed a new appliance in collaboration with experts and local communities. Her recent publication on crowdfunding for renewable energy was inspired by her involvement in the interdisciplinary EU-funded project CrowdFundRes. Presently, she is working on public perception of hydrogen-fuelled cars. Bridget holds a PhD in Energy Economics from the University of Dundee and an MSc in Energy and the Environment from Lancaster University, UK.

Dr Stephen Tatlow

Dr Stephen Tatlow is a post-doctoral research fellow on the UKRI / MRC-funded project 'Sound, Environment and Ageing: Bringing the Outside into Care Homes' (SAGE). He was awarded his Ph.D. from Royal Holloway, University of London in September 2023, where his research focused on the way in which user-centred perspectives can inform the design, implementation, and analysis of sound and music for virtual experience. He is an editor for The International Journal of Music, Health and Wellbeing. He also researches immersive audio, sound and music for interactive media, digital cultures, and accessibility in music education.

Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith

Naomi Waltham-Smith is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and Douglas Algar Tutorial Fellow at Merton College. An interdisciplinary scholar interested in the politics of listening, she works at the intersection of sound studies with continental philosophy, decolonial theory, and Black radical thought. She is the author of Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford UP, 2017), Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham UP, 2021), Mapping (Post)colonial Paris by Ear (Cambridge UP, 2023), and Free Listening (Nebraska UP, 2024). Thanks to funding from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, over the last two years she has been conducting research for a project entitled “Listening, Democracy, and Nationalism: Unheard Echoes in the Archives of Recent French Philosophy.”

Dr Olaya Moldes Andrés

Olaya is a Lecturer in Marketing and Strategy at Cardiff Business School. She has a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Sussex. Her research explores the intersection of marketing and psychology, focusing on how consumer culture impacts individual well-being and interacts with interpersonal relationships. Her work has been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, including Psychology & Marketing and the Journal of Economic Psychology, among others.

Dr Abiodun Egbetokun

Abiodun Egbetokun possesses a multidisciplinary background in engineering, management and economics. His research focuses on the microfoundations and complex interplay of innovation, entrepreneurship, structural change and economic development. He has published extensively on these topics and regularly consults for international organizations including UNIDO, GIZ, and the African Union Commission. Before joining De Montfort University in the UK, he served as Deputy Director of Research at Nigeria’s National Centre for Technology Management, where he helped develop and evaluate government policies and programmes. He has held visiting research fellowships at the University of Oxford and the United Nations University (UNU-MERIT) in Maastricht, in addition to a Science Policy Fellowship from the US National Science Foundation. Abiodun is a Fellow of the Nigerian Young Academy and a member of the Development Studies Association, the British Academy of Management, the Chartered Management Institute, and the African Network for the Economics of Learning, Innovation, and Competence-Building Systems (AfricaLICS). He is currently an Innovation and Research Associate at the Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria, an International Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (CeSTII) in Cape Town, South Africa and a Research Fellow at the Academy of International Affairs in Bonn, Germany.

Dr Gareth (Gaz) J Johnson

Based at the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS, Warwick), Gareth has been the interdisciplinary Exchanges journal’s Editor-in-Chief since 2018. He holds a doctorate in cultural academic publishing practices, alongside other degrees in the science and social sciences. His varied career includes running regional and national professional bodies, managing academic libraries alongside various applied research roles. He is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy, frequent podcaster as well as a director of a property management company.

• Mail: gareth.johnson@warwick.ac.uk 
• Twitter: https://x.com/ExchangesIAS
• Bliesky: https://bsky.app/profile/exchangesjournal.bsky.social
• Blog: https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/exchangesias/
• Podcast: https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/exchanges/podcast

Professor Tia de Nora FBA

Tia DeNora is Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter. Her current project considers cultures of death and dying in and around a hospice on the Isle of Wight. She is also a team member of the IMAGINE project at the University of Bergen directed by Professor Wolfgang Schmid which is devoted to rethinking end of life care. She is the author of Hope: The dream we carry (Palgrave MacMillan 2021) and with Gary Ansdell is co-editor of the Routledge Series in Music & Change.

Dr Ed McKeon

Ed McKeon is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Birmingham City University concerned with curatorial theory and musicality, untangling relations between gallery arts and post-experimental musics. As a curatorial producer, he operates at the points where music indisciplines others—theatre, book, installation, or performance—collaborating with artists from Pauline Oliveros to Jennifer Walshe, and Shiva Feshareki to Brian Eno. His book Heiner Goebbels and Curatorial Composing After Cage was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.

Dr Eun Sun Godwin

Eun Sun Godwin is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton Business School. She has diverse research interests in issues bordering on firms’ internationalisation and sustainability. She is also interested in equality, diversity and inclusion in the workplace, as well as digitalization in society. She has been involved in various interdisciplinary projects including those on inclusive digitalisation funded by InterAct, an ESRC-led hub and inclusive growth in createive industry funded by Policy Evidence Center, NESTA.

Dr Kartika Bhatia

Dr. Bhatia is an applied economist and international development professional with research and policy expertise in Economics of Education, Political Economy, Conflict Studies, and Development Economics. Currently, she serves as an Assistant Professor (Research) at the Centre for Global Learning (GLEA) at Coventry University and is a Research Affiliate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Previously, she served as Director of Research at ASPIRE, a prominent education non-profit in India, collaborating with practitioners, academics, policymakers, donors, and administrators to address educational challenges in rural areas. Dr. Bhatia also worked as an Economist at The World Bank in Washington, DC, where she authored influential papers and reports on peace, resilience, and reconstruction in the Middle East-North Africa. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Toulouse School of Economics, France, and an M.A. in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, India.

Stephen RG Bennett

Stephen RG Bennett is an artist, researcher and Co-Head of the UK’s Policy Lab. His hybrid practice includes bringing art into policymaking spaces and working with scientists to co-create visceral manifestations of evidence. Stephen has a long-held fascination in the visual organisation of society, from spatial plans to data charts to organograms. He brings this together through techniques like layering, collage, and convening, to create and explore unexpected terrains of knowledge and power.

Stephen has exhibited widely including at the Tate, Tobacco Dock, Royal Geographical Society and Terre Verte Gallery, Cornwall. Stephen often develops work and projects in partnership with other organisations; previously this has included the Royal Society, CERN, Nesta and the Government Art Collection. He’s an Industry Champion for the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre and a Clore 16 Fellow, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust. Stephen has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Oxford, UCL and the University of the Arts London. He has articles published in Nature, the SciArt Magazine and Inter Alia.

The Policy Lab, which Stephen co-leads with Camilla Buchanan, is a multidisciplinary unit at the heart of government, with 10 years' experience working on the UK's most high-profile policy challenges and a portfolio of 250+ projects. From Windrush to AI to multiple disadvantage, Policy Lab has engaged many thousands of members of the public to understand how policies affect their daily lives, and trained thousands of policy professionals in innovation approaches.

Parisa Wright 

Parisa Wright is the founder, and Chief Vision & Strategic Partnerships Officer of inclusive sustainability charity Greener & Cleaner, based in South East London. She is also an Iranian/English mother of 2, lawyer and human rights advocate. Born and raised in the boroughs of Bromley & Lewisham and having returned to raise her family, she has passionately, inclusively and strategically worked with other local people to drive positive change. In 2022 she left her legal career of 20 years to focus on the wider implications for the UK of her charity's Community Hub pilot for prominent vacant units of shopping centers and high streets, in terms of the potential for it as:

- a key research space (work undertaken with Imperial, UCL, Bath);

- an active collaboration, resource, skills and service delivery space for the community;

- an evolving pilot testing solutions to common challenges faced by UK community sustainability projects and Hubs;

..all with the aim of actively sharing learnings, evolving templates and working towards a flexible Blueprint to empower other communities.

Working to help engage and empower residents to address the impacts of Climate Change and share key heritage/sustainability life skills in their local communities, intergenerationally and inter culturally, Greener & Cleaner brings people together to make simple but impactful green changes at a local level.

• 2 min video: https://youtu.be/imp_sV4MnWU
• 4 min video: https://youtu.be/mI4TPUL0jY4
• ITV News piece: https://youtu.be/pzx5NRl5dYM?si=3jA3xXIQBo2QveM2
• Parisa's 2023 TEDx talk on the subject can be found here: https://youtu.be/onrmvMQcjhg?si=R8IwaurrdZNZaoBL
• Further information/support: www.greenerandcleaner.co.uk and parisa@greenerandcleaner.co.uk 

Thank you for your interest. We understand that plans may change. If you sign up and can no longer attend let us know by emailing ecr_network@thebritishacademy.ac.uk and your ticket can be offered to someone else

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