This blog emerged from joint reflections on conducting fieldwork during early 2026 as part of the inSALSA project.
It has become increasingly common for large research funding agencies to require scientists from different disciplinary backgrounds to collaborate in the consortia they fund. In principle, this should foster interdisciplinary exchange and new insights. In practice, natural and social scientists often work within their respective work packages, and hopefully there is some cross-pollination of concepts, ideas and approaches along the way in publications and other project outputs, but this is by no means a given. Scientists tend to fall into the comfort of their disciplinary norms when it comes to data collection and analysis. And the often messy and difficult part of bringing our respective insights together in joint publications can end up being so fraught with challenges that the idea is abandoned altogether.
The inSALSA project is one such interdisciplinary project involving nine countries across the Global North and South, and scientists from a range of disciplines spanning the natural and social sciences. I am a postdoctoral researcher in this project, with a background in social science, and my colleague Kahsay Mawcha, is a plant pathologist. We happened upon a surprisingly productive way of bridging our disciplinary divides during a recent fieldwork trip. This was partly through luck and circumstance. It began as a practical arrangement—conducting our separate fieldwork together in order to facilitate logistics and for safety reasons— but this evolved into an unexpectedly strong collaboration. I was in South Africa to collect data on farmers’ current knowledge and practices regarding pest management. This was meant to provide important socio-economic and environmental context to better understand smallholders’ potential receptiveness to using biopesticides and other biological products to manage pests. Kahsay was planning to collect data from farmers on their knowledge and experience with agrobiologicals, using a structured questionnaire.
I naively suggested we combine our respective research questions into one document, as it didn’t seem reasonable to ask farmers for two separate interviews. However, when I saw Kahsay’s structured questionnaire with predefined response options largely focused on their current knowledge and experience with biologicals, I was immediately concerned. These questions all assumed farmers have the same understanding we have of what an agrobiological is. But what if they understand something else by this term? How are we to draw valid conclusions from their responses? In a similar vein, Kahsay took one look at my open-ended questionnaire with diverse socio-economic and ecological themes and said: “but this is so broad, and why do we need all these questions about land tenure and security if our project is about biologicals and pests?” And “what does it matter if it’s a man or a woman who is applying the pesticides; we need to gather data on farmers’ knowledge and practices”. And “how will we code and analyse such open-ended questions?”
Our respective disciplinary backgrounds and the related data collection methods that we were each familiar with suddenly needed to be explained and justified. Considering we did not want to take more than an hour of any given farmer’s time for our questions, some serious compromises needed to be made on both sides. We laboured over what questions to ask, what terms to use, in what order, and at the end of the day it was a compromise on both sides to arrive at a carefully designed questionnaire that would hopefully capture the data we both needed.
But as it often happens, somewhere between the carefully designed questionnaire and farmers’ fields, the questions were opening doors to answers we had not anticipated. It was not in the intricate boxes accompanying the closed-ended questions or the carefully worded open questions that we arrived at the stories that really shed light on farmers’ experiences, knowledge and ways of dealing with pests. It was after having completed the questionnaire and put away all our papers that farmers walked with us through their farms, and we were shown what farmers deemed worthy of showing and telling us without our prompting. This was the time when we often stumbled upon the most interesting and potentially most significant insights.
In our questionnaire, by asking separately about formal and informal knowledge, and about chemical and biological pest management, our questionnaire tended to present these as distinct—and sometimes opposing—categories. It was during these walking conversations that this neat distinction began to unravel. We came to see farming decisions as situated, ongoing and often improvised—shaped by multiple forms of knowledge, experience, resources and circumstances that rarely fit neatly into one category or another. What appeared as distinct or opposing practices in our questionnaire were, in the field, often entangled.
It was during these walking conversations that Kahsay would often point out native species that we encountered in and around farmers’ fields that could be used as pest repellents. This was particularly appreciated by farmers, and it created a sense of reciprocity. I have often felt confronted and somewhat ashamed when questions about pest management or production practices are asked of me. I would somewhat sheepishly field such questions with the disclaimer that I am a social scientist with little knowledge of plant pests and diseases. Kahsay could easily engage with farmers’ questions and also identify many of the traditional remedies farmers used alongside the chemicals they had been advised to use by agrodealers.
Our long car journeys between farms provided space for reflecting through our respective disciplinary lenses on what we had heard and seen. Surprisingly, these were often very different things. Kahsay focused on farmers’ knowledge of botanical extracts, while I was more fascinated by the different ways in which farmers acquired knowledge and made sense of different knowledge systems (traditional remedies and agrochemicals) and how, in turn, these different systems were integrated in their farming practices.
We now have a better understanding of each other’s disciplinary lenses and the insights this brings. Kahsay now sees the value of understanding farmers’ relationship to land, as tenure security influences farmers’ willingness and ability to build up the ecological base and thereby plant resilience. Likewise, I have learned much from seeing through the eyes of a plant pathologist, and have developed a new vocabulary for insects and their mechanisms of action, and what features of the plant to ask farmers about when it comes to disease management.
With this shared experience from the field, it makes it much easier for us to engage in joint writing activities and publications, as we have developed a sensitivity for each other’s concepts and language, our respective ideas have already cross-pollinated, and the seed for truly interdisciplinary collaboration has started to germinate. Our experience suggests that interdisciplinary collaboration can be easier if not left to the later stages of joint analysis and writing: it can begin in the field, with joint data collection.
Written by Malin Olofsson with contributions from Kahsay Mawcha. Main photo by Malin Olofsson.
