This article examines how researchers who study inter- and transdisciplinary research practices conceptualise and navigate methodological choices. Drawing on science, technology and society (STS), we combined a meta-ethnography and semi-structured interviews with scholars engaged in investigating inter- and transdisciplinary research. Our analysis identifies four interrelated dynamic pairs: familiarity/exploration, systematisation/adaptability, transferability/contextualisation, and reflection/action, that shape methodological decision-making. Rather than viewing these as tensions, we argue they function as productive dualities guiding reflexive and context-sensitive research inquiry. The study underscores the importance of methodological awareness, documentation, and collaborative engagement in advancing the study of inter- and transdisciplinary research. There has, to date, been no systematised understanding of how methodological practices influence the investigation and support of inter- and transdisciplinary research and their impact. The article then contributes to STS and inter- and transdisciplinary scholarships, by offering a systematised understanding of how methodological practices influence the investigation and support of collaborative research and its impact.
Scientific research, particularly in international collaborations, operates within a complex web of expert-driven practices, legal regulations, and ethical considerations that are often distanced from local and regional participation. While ethical, legal and social initiatives to govern science have attempted to bridge this gap, the good governance of science, especially in cases marked by historical power imbalances, remains a significant challenge. Existing governance structures, often influenced by national or supranational legal frameworks and cosmopolitan ideals, may not adequately address the nuances of international, privately funded, or postcolonial research landscapes. This paper addresses relating limitations, particularly in the case of international scientific collaborations involving the Global South. It argues that current governance models, while aspiring to universalism, can inadvertently perpetuate injustices and overlook local values and needs. Using the case of a German-Ethiopian research collaboration on Coccinia abyssinica, an endemic Ethiopian plant, this paper illustrates the tensions arising from differing sociotechnical imaginaries, research repertoires, and power relationships to decision making processes. As a corrective, this paper proposes the development and adoption of virtue-based ethics. This perspective emphasizes virtues and responsibilities for actors within the scientific and bioethical ecosystem, aiming to foster more equitable, culturally sensitive, and fair international research collaborations. By integrating postcolonial critiques of epistemology and STS insights to bioethics, this approach seeks to reconfigure bioethical governance to better navigate the complexities of global science and promote genuine epistemic inclusion.
Gear cultures are a novel kind of social formation around specific kinds of fetishised objects (e.g., recording studio equipment, digital cameras, guitar pedals, espresso machines, synthesisers, overclocked computers, mechanical keyboards). Gear typically represents technologies that nominally were made obsolete by software simulations or mass market commodities but that gained new meanings, uses and practices through transnational networks of online/offline users. After surveying proto-gear culture literature within several fields, this article presents a flexible but generalisable multi-mode, multi-sited methodology for the ethnographic study of ‘intra-action’ and ‘agential realism’ (Barad, 2007) and the ‘agency configurations’ concept (Erofeeva, 2019). Gear cultures research has raised salient questions about how we study agency and gendered social formations while attending to the irreducible materiality of gear—within multi-platform social media engagement and a YouTube influencer economy, in trade shows, and in local/regional meetups and gear societies.
