📚 Save Big on Books! Enjoy 10% off when you spend £100 and 20% off when you spend £200 (or the equivalent in supported currencies)—discount automatically applied when you add books to your cart before checkout! 🛒

Copyright

Stuart N. Lane; Rebecca Lave;

Published On

2025-02-25

Page Range

pp. 15–38

Language

  • English

Print Length

24 pages

3. Framing, disciplines and mixing methods in environmental research

Chapter of: The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research(pp. 15–38)
The academy is built upon disciplines which both enable and constrain what we do, so defining the methods we choose to use and how we use them; and in turn determining the knowledge produced by our research. In this Chapter, we define this process as one of framing and illustrate different kinds of framing using examples from Section 2 of The Field Guide. We describe how frames can be mixed in four different ways, in cross-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary settings. The mixing of methods in each of these may allow research questions to be answered in different ways. Across them, the extent to which methods are modified, how they are combined and who is involved in combining them will change. But behind them all is a single theme which is where what is mixed and how is framed by what is being researched rather than how disciplines say it should be researched. This can make mixing methods a challenge as it may sit uncomfortably with disciplinary norms; but also because mixing methods may challenge the traditional and supposed separation of the researcher and what is being researched.

Contributors

Stuart Lane

(author)
Professor of Geomorphology at University of Lausanne
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6077-6076

Stuart N. Lane is Professor of Geomorphology at the University of Lausanne. He is a geographer and civil engineer by training who has held posts at the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Durham in the U.K. and Lausanne in Switzerland. His work has sought to bring a geographical perspective to contemporary environmental concerns such as flooding and pollution. The primary focus of his current work is the environments created by disappearing glaciers in terms of ice, water, sediment and ecosystems and the consequences of these changes for environmental management. An important thread through his most recent research criticizes the current alignment of geography as a discipline with the ever more neo-liberal academy; and then argues for the rediscovery of a more scientific geographical science better able to cope with the crises the world is experiencing today.

Rebecca Lave

(author)
Professor of Geography at Indiana University
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5335-9058

Rebecca Lave is Professor of Geography at Indiana University and the 2022-2025 American Association of Geographers Vice-President/President/Past-President. Her research takes a Critical Physical Geography approach, combining political economy, STS, and fluvial geomorphology to analyze stream restoration, the politics of environmental expertise, and community-based responses to flooding. She has published in journals ranging from Science to Social Studies of Science and is the author of two monographs: Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science (2012, University of Georgia Press) and Streams of Revenues: The Restoration Economy and the Ecosystems it Creates (2021 MIT Press; co-written with Martin Doyle). She has co-edited four volumes, including the Handbook of Critical Physical Geography (2018, with Christine Biermann and Stuart N. Lane).