UniOulu Science Day 2024

The University of Oulu's  Science Day event on April 17, 2024 focused on interdisciplinarity. Kirsi Cheas, founder and president of Finterdis, had the honor to give the second keynote of the event, after the opening remarks by Prof. Taina Pihlajaniemi, Vice Rector for Research at the University of Oulu, and the keynote speech by Prof. Tuula Linna, Chair of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. In her speech, Kirsi described the development, stages and purpose of FINTERDIS. Kirsi's speech is copied in full below:

Transcending institutional, professional, and geopolitical boundaries: 

Revisiting standards for inter- and transdisciplinary research

Dear colleagues at the University of Oulu and the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters,

I'm truly honored and grateful for the opportunity to speak at this magnificent event, celebrating interdisciplinarity in its many forms. It is also a bit nerve-wracking to stand on this platform as a postdoc, right after wonderful speeches by the Vice rector for research of this University and the President of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. Again, I really appreciate the invitation to speak here as an early-career researcher.

My talk today builds on, first of all, my affiliation with the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, known for its abbreviation AIS. This organization was founded in the United States in 1979. Since then, AIS has promoted the interchange of ideas between scholars, teachers, students, administrators, artists, and different sectors of society to foster creative and integrative thought across borders.

What I most appreciate about AIS is its commitment to low hierarchies and open intergenerational dialogue. Through AIS, I have had the opportunity to meet and engage closely with a number of incredibly kind and talented people, including some of the world's most esteemed specialists in interdisciplinarity, such as William Newell, Julie Thompson Klein, and Rich Szostak. I was still a student when I joined AIS, but this didn't stop these mentors from eagerly approaching me, revealing the limits of their own knowledge, and wanting to learn from my ideas and experiences. Through their positive example, I have come to believe that humility is the most important precondition for genuine interdisciplinarity.

Many of you here today are already very familiar with AIS, given that next year, in June 2025, the University of Oulu is going to host the 47th AIS Conference in these very premises. This is only the second time in AIS's remarkable history that its conference will be held outside of North America, and first time in Finland. This process not only demonstrates that interdisciplinarity is becoming a more global practice. It also shows that the University of Oulu, along with the Oulu University of Applied Sciences, is open to the world and at the forefront of welcoming new ideas and people to the Finnish academic debate and discussion. Thank you, Oulu!

In addition to my experience at AIS, my talk today builds on my postdoctoral research, and the struggles and processes that led me to this project. My research focuses on collaborative investigative journalism across the US-Mexico border, exposing abuses against asylum-seekers.

Investigative journalism interrogates the use and misuse of power, fulfilling the watchdog function of journalism. Investigative journalism is the most expensive, ambitious, and slowest genre of journalism, characterized by highly sophisticated research methods, strict commitment to factual accuracy, and often large and versatile data. Investigative journalism often requires specialization on the topic, and a single investigation can take months or even years to complete. Moreover, investigative journalism is usually concerned with complex problems and producing new knowledge of public significance and societal impact. Does any of this sound familiar? Indeed, the challenges and goals of investigative journalism are quite similar to those of interdisciplinarity.

Interdisciplinarity was a struggle for me. During my doctoral degree at the University of Helsinki, which I completed in 2018, my efforts to integrate media and journalism studies with interdisciplinary area and cultural studies were frustrating, to say the very least: Professors, administrators, and funders were constantly pushing me to pick one side or the other: was I doing research in area studies or media studies, the social sciences or the humanities, was I doing quantitative or qualitative research, was I specializing in Latin America or North America, and so forth. My original ideas were getting lost in this process of imposed fragmentation.

I kept turning to AIS for support and advice. My beloved mentor, Professor Julie Thompson Klein, would always insist: Never allow anyone to define you as an either-or person. Always insist on the both+and approach that's necessary for your important questions.

I was not the only person in Finland feeling frustrated by the rigid structures of academia. In 2018, I founded Finterdis - the Finnish Interdisciplinary Society, to create a safe space for Finnish interdisciplinary thinkers, where we could exchange ideas and experiences and receive peer support from one another.

Specifically, Finterdis was designed to be independent from any faculty, department, discipline, or university. This mimicked the idea of AIS: the purpose was to serve as a central facilitator; an open place at a crossroads, equally accessible for all the students, scholars, faculty, staff, administrators, in different universities, instead of being dominated by any particular entity or approach.

Finterdis attracted quite many students, postdocs, and advanced scholars at this point, who agreed about the importance of having this open, shared space.

However, some scholars insisted on attaching Finterdis into their own institution or field, while expecting us to stop collaborating with those institutions or people that they did not appreciate. In other words, some people wanted to convert the effort to increase cooperation into just another means for competition, while claiming ownership of interdisciplinarity in the process.

Some people also constantly reminded me about the increasing number of interdisciplinary units, funding, and training programs that already exist in our country, suggesting that there is no need for a support organization such as Finterdis. This increasing number of programs, funding, and interest is a wonderful reality that I do not wish to deny. But I have also learned to be aware of scholars and institutions who would boldly advertise themselves as interdisciplinarians, only to make fun of someone in the very next sentence, just because their approach or status differs from their own. I learned the hard way that interdisciplinarity is not a magic word - just pronouncing it does not make anyone open-minded or kind. True interdisciplinarians are those whose words align with their actions. Sometimes, they don't even call themselves interdisciplinary - they just are.

Some scholars told me that Finterdis is a waste of time, because the energy devoted to activism is away from publishing. We've all heard it: publish or perish - the only way to survive in academia. While the academics around me have been divided about which discipline and journal is superior, most seem to agree on one thing: the only valuable publication is an academic peer-reviewed journal. However, in his chapter on the Future of interdisciplinarity, Robert Frodeman observed that through the ongoing revolution in information and communication technologies, the university is being displaced from the center of knowledge production. This is also the core idea of transdisciplinarity: stepping outside the academic ivory tower and engaging in co-production of knowledge with a range of societal actors. This means that academics also need to rethink their narrow perceptions about publishing.

Meanwhile, investigative journalists have realized that by sharing newsroom resources with non-media organizations such as universities and NGOs, they can save on expenses, gain in knowledge, and reach larger audiences to amplify an investigative story's impact. Collaborative investigative journalism across the globe is becoming more and more common, even if this transition still remains understudied.

When I learned about collaborative investigative journalism, I knew - I wanted to learn what investigative journalists, activists, and academics with different backgrounds could accomplish and learn from each other by working together. Because of my experience in Latin American Studies, the US-Mexico border was a natural choice for a case study.

This border also marks the geopolitical boundary between the Global North and the South. I specifically study how US, Mexican, and Central American journalists, activists, and academic researchers with different backgrounds are exposing abuses against underprivileged populations affected by violence and seeking to cross the border from the South to the North.

While I was planning this postdoc project, some people told me again that I was trying to connect too many different angles and regions, and this project was too ambitious for an early-career researcher, and I would never be able to get any funding for this project.

To anyone in this room, if you have a big idea, don't let anyone convince you it can't be done. You will never know if you don't give it a try.

Thanks to the generous funding, I moved to the United States for two years to examine investigative collaboration across the US-Mexico border. The study is still a work in progress, but has already produced quite a few fascinating findings.

It is impossible for me to share many findings in this short time. Hence, I will limit myself to just one finding, which I perceive to be of core relevance for the global practice and future of inter- and transdisciplinarity. If you are interested in my research questions, sample, methods, findings, and future goals, please approach me later and I'll be glad to share more.

Namely, my key finding is that the work by the investigators from the Southern side of the Mexico border stands out for its extraordinary quality: the Central American and Mexican investigators creatively integrate ideas, methods, data, and formats of journalism, activism, and different academic disciplines, all the while remaining committed to transparency, careful verification of facts, and protection of their vulnerable sources.

The journalists, activists, and academics on the US side of the border are not doing a bad job, either. However, the US investigators clearly fell short of the level of integrative ambition, transparency, and factual accuracy manifested by their partners on the Southern side of the border.

This finding tends to raise eyebrows. After all, most models of collaborative journalism, as well as models of inter- and transdisciplinarity, are based on empirical data and concepts of the Global North.

But my findings suggest that to develop and improve these models, we can just look to the Global South for future lessons, rather than reinventing the wheel. More specifically, we have a lot to learn about Integrative research from investigative journalists and activists in the Global South, and not just academics. We have to be humble enough to accept that there is valuable knowledge outside of our academic ivory tower and outside of our own region that can make us better researchers and educators, if we choose to learn from it.

The obvious question at this point is: WHY are Central American and Mexican investigators so good at integrative research?

The reality is that Central America and Mexico are among the world's most dangerous regions for critical journalists, activists, and academic researchers alike. Investigators exposing human rights violations, crime, corruption, and pollution have been beaten, threatened, jailed, disappeared, or killed across the region, while their abusers are almost never punished for these violent acts.

Security is an important reason for investigative collaboration: if one investigator is killed, their colleagues in other institutions and countries continue reporting on the story. Reporting in other countries and regions also attracts international attention to the issue, which might push the perpetrators to step back and act less violently.

To put it simple, these investigators are creatively integrating ideas, methods, data, and publishing formats and working together across borders, because they have to. They don't have time or energy to downplay someone just because they studied in a different faculty or publish investigative journalism rather than academic articles, as long as this person knows how to do rigorous research. Their attention is focused on the problem per se, and the societal impact in the real world - exposing abuses and protecting vulnerable people under their very eyes, rather than just checking a box about impact in a funding application.

Either they collaborate, or they die. They don't have a choice.

Here, in countries like Finland, or the US, we think we still have a choice. It is easy to think that interdisciplinarity is just another game or concept we can use to boost our own career, while dismissing anyone who we don't really wish to engage with or learn from.

But if we look at the world around us, it is evident that the complex problems - polycrises - that have been mostly affecting regions of the South, such as wars, extreme violence, climate change, forced migration, inequality and poverty, pandemics, etcetera. are increasingly affecting us here in the North too. At the same time, our freedom of expression is increasingly threatened.

It makes all the sense in the world to learn about collaboration and integration from people who are already experts in doing that, because they have been seriously affected by such crises this whole time, and learned to navigate in those difficult circumstances. And we need to learn before it's too late.

To wrap up: we need to raise our standards for inter- and transdisciplinary research, and be more open towards the possibility of transcending boundaries between different institutions, professions, and regions, rather than trying to "own" inter- or transdisciplinarity or impose its definitions and boundaries from where we are currently positioned. We need to create more open spaces where inter- and transdisciplinarity can be collectively accessed, developed, and evaluated.

To prepare for the future of inter- and transdisciplinarity, we need to accept that the university is no longer the unique center for knowledge production. We need to figure out how universities can work with different societal actors in the most fruitful way, to ensure the continued production of factual and accurate information in the world.

As an example, this presentation has raised the possibility of learning lessons from Latin American collaborative investigative journalism to develop models of integration in inter- and transdisciplinary research.

I am absolutely thrilled to see that in the UniOulu Science Day's program today, we have an incredible and exemplary diversity of interdisciplinary workshops ranging from finding new angles about research to reach international media, exploring how artistic creativity can inspire science communication, citizen science on nature connectedness, bringing together senior and junior scholars of migrant background to discuss how higher education institutions integrate professionals, generating future-oriented solutions to save biodiversity, combining different disciplines to advance medical research and solutions, working at the intersection between art and artificial intelligence, and more.

I want to most sincerely thank the University of Oulu for making the choice to organize this event, a choice to organize the AIS conference and welcome new ideas to this country. I look forward to learning from everyone here today, I wish I could clone myself to participate in all your workshops at the same time. Thank you!