Moving Targets in Collaborative Science: Boundary Spanning in Transdisciplinary Iterative Problem Formation

While there is a great deal of excitement and concern around the prospects of transdisciplinary collaboration in the sciences, there has been little attention to the collaborative problems of nascence that such transdisciplinary visions entail. When working across disciplines or domains, the frameworks and ways of working that typically shape research and knowledge production are often not mutually understood or are under contest or negotiation. In this paper we draw on ethnographic work on a transdisciplinary scientific project spanning a number of subfields of oceanography, examining processes by which researchers give shape to a nascent transdisciplinary research project. We highlight two coordinative practices by which they accomplished this: data prioritization and pitching. These findings extend our understanding of coordinative practices in the contexts of nascence that are increasingly common to transdisciplinary science.