15. ‘A hydrologist and a rhetorician walk into a workshop,’ or How we learned to collaborate on a decade of mixed-methods river research across the humanities and biophysical sciences

We share our story of collaboration with each other and with communities in southwestern Wisconsin's Driftless Area to better understand the social-ecological processes that enhance resilience to flooding. Our mixed methods approach – including semi-structured interviews and biophysical monitoring and modelling – emphasizes open communication, draws on complementary (but not duplicative) skill sets, is grounded in ethics and care, is advanced through shared and sensible risk-taking, and responds flexibly and creatively to changing conditions in the landscape. We argue that 1) community-engaged interdisciplinary research is essential to working towards better community outcomes, 2) interdisciplinarity involves, honors, and emerges from not just different disciplines but different epistemologies, and 3) the best mixed methods work is synthetic in that it is greater than the sum of its parts and flexibly adapts to emerging problems and ethical connections to community members.