Will Barley on "Collaborative Work: How Acknowledging the Labor of Interdisciplinarity Can Facilitate Science Teams"

Event Type

Seminar/Symposium

Sponsor

The Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA), the Center for Research on Programmable Plant Systems (CROPPS), and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

Location

NCSA (1205 W. Clark St. Urbana, IL, 61801) | Room: 1040

Date

Nov 4, 2025   12:00 - 1:00 pm  

Speaker

William C.Barley, Associate Professor of Communication, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Registration

Register here

Contact

Center for Digital Agriculture

E-Mail

digitalag@illinois.edu

Views

8

Originating Calendar

Center for Digital Agriculture Events

Abstract

Interdisciplinary team science has long been lauded by policy-makers and practitioners as a wellspring for discovery. Yet, science organizations continually struggle to facilitate interdisciplinary work. In this talk, I will present data from multiple field studies to argue that these struggles can stem from mismatches in how scientists and administrators conceptualize the nature of collaborative work. I will show how, in practice, successful collaborations depend upon intricate communicative labor performed by a constellation of professionals, but organizational policies and investments often undermine this labor. I will then share data from an interdisciplinary institute whose policies and resources incentivized collaborative labor. Comparing qualitative accounts of worker experiences alongside multiple analyses of communication network structures at this institute, I show how acknowledging collaborative work can shape the landscape of collaboration to facilitate interdisciplinarity success. We will close with a discussion of how acknowledging collaborative work can inform team science in terms of professional development opportunities, acknowledging the important role of staff and administrative expertise, and motivating specific science policies and resources.

Register to attend here

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About Will Barley

William C. Barley is an associate professor of communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research examines the labor involved in building and maintaining cross-boundary relationships in diverse scientific and technical contexts, including natural science teams, weather modeling, large-scale scientific computing, automobile engineering,  and children’s hospital emergency rooms.