Being a ‘Good Researcher’ in Transdisciplinary Research: Choreographies of Identity Work Beyond Community

Abstract

Abstract Different contemporary developments are challenging the notion of a rather exclusive and lasting belonging of individual researchers to the one disciplinary community into which they had been socialised, to which they subsequently contribute, and which they reproduce. In turn, the very meaning of community is challenged when there is a perpetual exchange of community members. This chapter deals with how researchers with diverse and dynamic relations to different collectives develop a self-understanding of what it means to be a good researcher, i.e. what the normative ideals are that they should strive for. It is empirically analysed how researchers who engage in transdisciplinary research occasionally or regularly narrate, adopt, translate, resist, and combine the different imaginations of being a good researcher that they encounter. The sensitizing concept of ‘choreography’ is proposed to analyse the identity work done under conditions of multiple and flexible belongings that is held together by a certain style, rhythm, and pattern. In this sense, a specific way of moving constitutes an identity in the first place by aligning otherwise separate belongings.

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