Contesting Disciplinary Confines in Times of Fast Science

This commentary engages with The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research (Lave and Lane, 2025) in the context of neoliberal pressures shaping environmental research. I argue that mixed methods are often instrumentalized within logics of productivity and disciplinary legibility. The book instead treats methodological mixing as a situated and political practice, showing how disciplines shape what counts as knowledge and who gets to produce it. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's notion of the politics of “use,” I suggest that the volume helps reclaim methods as contesting research practices that challenge both the structures of disciplinarity and the processes of disciplining in academia.

The fast-paced demands of neoliberal academic production have increasingly shaped environmental research. Researchers face pressure to publish intensively while demonstrating relevance to policy and public debates, often under growing institutional pressures and with reduced time. Universities and funding agencies call for innovation, collaboration, and interdisciplinarity, but only if these come packaged in ways that align with disciplinary and institutional expectations often defined by logics of knowledge commodification. These shifts, driven by performance metrics and funding priorities, have intensified the ‘strain on scientific publishing,’ while narrowing the space for slower, more reflective modes of inquiry, particularly for those in more vulnerable positions (Mountz et al. 2015; Hanson et al., 2024; Fung 2025).

Against this background, The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research offers a timely and necessary intervention, serving as a pause for reflection. Rather than framing mixed methods as a technical toolkit to boost innovation or impact, as I have seen in other similar projects, the book departs from a different standpoint. Lave, Lane, and colleagues are guided by a concern with how disciplines shape what is considered valid knowledge, and with the challenges that arise when we attempt to work beyond those disciplinary boundaries. The Field Guide pays attention to the theoretical, empirical, and positional struggles that arise when confronting disciplines, and insists that meaningful methodological mixing involves more than a mere combination of tools. It means grappling with how research problems are framed, how disciplines (de)authorize particular forms of knowledge, and how disciplinary power operates in academic and professional spaces.

The book opens by arguing that working across social and biophysical methods is not only desirable but necessary for addressing complex environmental problems. However, the editors also emphasize that this kind of work is not necessarily straightforward. Disciplines do more than define methods; they offer validation, networks, scholarly identity, and clear career paths. When researchers step outside their disciplinary confines, they often face a lack of recognition or even active rejection from journals, reviewers, hiring committees, or colleagues. The Field Guide frames these experiences not as individual shortcomings, but as structural issues embedded in the way academia operates.

This resonates strongly with my own experience as a so-called “early-career scholar”. When I entered academia after nearly a decade of work at the intersection of water, pesticides, and plantations, I found that my professional background was often viewed as irrelevant to the field, and I was treated as if I had started from zero. Despite paying lip service to the value of having experience outside academia or interdisciplinary training, institutional structures usually reward narrow specialization and linear academic trajectories. Similarly, having a multidisciplinary background or publishing outside disciplinary journals can be treated as a misstep rather than a contribution. In that sense, my personal experience has been contradictory, as I would not have reached the depth I did in my research if it were not for integrating environmental science and social science research, combining methods as diverse as ecotoxicology, ethnography, and regulatory analysis. However, this has come with consequences, as I have, like many others, faced academic pressures and disapproval for a perceived lack of “loyalty” to a narrow disciplinary terrain. The Field Guide does not aim to offer solutions to these challenges, but by acknowledging them at their core, it creates space for an open conversation about what it means to contest disciplines.

The book is organized into three parts. The first section lays the conceptual groundwork, focusing on how disciplines frame methods and problems. The opening chapters argue that to mix methods meaningfully, researchers need to think critically about the assumptions inherent to their research questions, about how methods travel between disciplines, and about the practical and institutional conditions that support or limit methodological flexibility. This means recognizing that methods are never neutral or interchangeable, “or produced in a vacuum (11).” They are bound up with specific perspectives, and with the histories and politics of the disciplines in which they are used. Simply adding methods together, as mainstream environmental science often does by mixing methods, does not guarantee better or more comprehensive research. Instead, the book suggests that methodological integration requires attention to how knowledge is produced and legitimized. In that sense, Chapter Three provides detailed guidance on working through disciplines in cross-disciplinary, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research.

The second section presents a series of living examples, called “recipes,” where researchers reflect on their own experiences of working across methodological divides, whether planned or not. These empirically robust contributions illustrate how their recipes evolved and the lessons they learned along the way. By sharing a slow and situated research perspective, the chapters in Section Two show how to approach the same question from different lenses, while exploring some of the ethical challenges that might emerge along the way. Many of these chapters emphasize the need to be flexible and responsive, allowing the field, context, and research relationships to shape how methods are chosen and adapted. While most of the authors emphasize the importance of adaptation, Malone, in Chapter 16, also reminds us of the need to defend our research designs against institutional pushback or epistemic gaslighting, especially when working with or for marginalized communities. I find this an especially important call to stay close to those questions that matter, beyond research driven by knowledge gaps, trends, or even methods, even as external pressures may divert us from our personal and collective commitments towards systemic transformation. The third section offers brief, practical entries on specific methods. These “ingredients” provide brief introductions that situate each method within its disciplinary background, discuss when and how it might be applied, and point to additional resources.

A core idea that recurs throughout the book, developed in more depth in Chapter 4, is the importance of “paying attention to the tension (54).” Rather than seeking to eliminate frictions between methods, disciplines, or ways of knowing, the contributors suggest making tension visible. Tension can highlight assumptions, open new questions, or shift projects and work dynamics. This is particularly relevant in environmental research, where scholars often work across social and ecological systems, and where the complexity of problems extends beyond disciplinary divisions. By staying with the tension, rather than trying to evade or resolve it quickly, the book calls for more responsive and engaged forms of research.

In a context where interdisciplinary research is often encouraged rhetorically but constrained in practice, The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods is both critical and ‘useful’ for those committed to transformative research. As Sara Ahmed argues (2019), institutional structures often reproduce themselves through the language of usefulness: what counts as useful, who gets to decide, and whose work is deemed valuable. Use becomes a tool of sorting and control: methods, disciplines, and even scholars themselves are judged by whether they serve established pathways. Ahmed reminds us that histories of inclusion and exclusion shape use, but also insists that use can be reappropriated. Those of us challenging disciplinary confines and/or institutional expectations can reclaim use as a political strategy, redefining what counts as relevant within and against neoliberal academia. In this light, The Field Guide invites a revaluation of usefulness as shaped by reflexivity, commitments of care, solidarity, and epistemic justice. It opens space to consider methods not just as tools for solving predefined problems, but as relational and political practices that challenge both the structures of disciplinarity and the processes of disciplining in academia. In doing so, the book reclaims the use of methods themselves.