I recently contributed to a special issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. As a witness to the journal’s birth, I had the opportunity to reflect on a topic that had long fascinated me and on which I subsequently wrote—scientific specialization (e.g., Chubin and Studer 1979).

Revisiting how new areas of research and scholarship arise and are sustained was prompted by the journal’s outgoing editor Ed Hackett (2012, p. 441), who noted that “ST&HV serves scholars who labor in the borderlands where the human desires to know, to make, and to do engage our sense of justice, fairness, and goodness.”

Borderlands—what an odd compound word. For me, borderlands have always represented spaces between disciplines (Porter et al. 1980), an interstice of intellectual discomfort, where borrowing ideas and rubbing them together could produce novelty and perhaps something at its core longer-lived. Little did I appreciate back then that the borderlands—a construct with real-world consequences—would become my professional home. I have since learned that the construct has stimulated a range of scholars and spawned literatures in, among others, geography (Azaryahu 2008), economics (Krugman 1991), and sociocultural theory (Chang 2000).

Hence the personal origin of this chapter—a reflection on disciplines in the context of science, and what emerges between them. The borderland can be viewed as a psychological space in which border-crossers struggle with their new-found bi- or multi-cultural identities. Researchers who find themselves beyond their home discipline, i.e., the one in which they have been credentialed, have tried to assign terms for their location and its psychological ramifications. But even the meanings of those terms—such as cross-, multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary—tend to be under-specified, violated, and contradicted. Their commonality, however, is the connotation of something more than working within an intellectual lane, a boundary that is constricted by a paradigm and a way of looking at and framing research problems. Campbell (1969, p. 328) famously called this the “ethnocentrism of disciplines,” exhibiting “the symptoms of tribalism or nationalism or in-group partisanship in the internal and external relations of university departments, national scientific organizations, and academic disciplines.” Contrast this with the concept of cross-disciplinary, which simply identifies research as featuring more than one disciplinary input such as method or analysis. Multidisciplinary suggests a cadre working together on a common problem, while interdisciplinary reflects an integration of perspectives that differ from other solutions. Transdisciplinary elevates the processes above into understanding that is intellectually compelling (Chubin and Porter 1986).

Admittedly, these nuances may be lost on those not laboring in borderlands. But to those who behold science as the subject of their analysis—mainly historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science—the nuances matter. For them, community norms and practices, what Thomas Gieryn (1983) referred to as the demarcation of science from non-science, or “boundary work,” define permissible knowledge. In the borderlands, such knowledge must be negotiated. For what is valued by other scholars may be the very alien perspectives that disrupt and represent claims to new knowledge.

Thomas Kuhn (1962) covered all of this a half-century ago. In so doing, he reminded us of Edward Shils’ (1975) dictum that scientific communities evolve an organization of center and periphery. And the periphery is where the dangerously intriguing ideas reside—in the borderlands. Once juxtaposed at a distance from disciplinary doctrine, such ideas appear untethered from what passes for orthodoxy, an orthodoxy defended by those in the center of the source disciplines. New context and new light is shed on established knowledge.

There is a risk to experimentation in a borderland. Stray too far, take liberty with meaning, challenge data, and someone with a reputation earned in a “mainland” will sense an attack, a kind of repudiation that cannot be resolved near the center or core, but must be negotiated at the periphery. This is why the borderland, at least initially, is sparsely populated. We are a communal species that craves validation and the rewards—in publication, funding, status, deference, and career prospects—that being a core scholar enjoys. How many are willing to put all that in jeopardy?

Most scholars cannot survive in the borderland. It is too isolated, its population too transient, and its climate hard to withstand as a career strategy. We label our peers and pigeonhole them to make their work predictable and assimilable. After all, we are building a corpus of knowledge for future generations. We have been trained to be original within bounds, but not to break molds. We are to be collegial combatants, not alien invaders who introduce concepts and tools that hardly resemble the ones we typically wield. This is the conservatism of science and of communities in which knowledge is embedded and defended, indeed archived for future generations. Scientists live through their publications, safely recorded, indexed, and memorialized.

If this sounds terribly cynical, consider how scholars join communities: They self-select, drawn by ideas, and steered by mentors and peers. They choose to interact by publishing in certain journals and attending certain conferences. They create their community by deciding where and how to practice professionally. For a minority, that space is in the borderlands. But one cannot dwell there indefinitely. A thriving borderland engenders its own center, gatekeepers, and intellectual leaders.

If we visualize a map, instead of annexing a borderland, it is carved out of adjacent disciplines—specialized pieces, not whole fields—to become a recognizable entity that generates new knowledge and rewards the researchers responsible for advances. This we define as progress—growth of a community, its visibility, its value as a problem solver, and its attractiveness to those socialized elsewhere. As they converge on a borderland, they bring the materials to construct a palette of words and concepts that look and sound different. It may not embody a full-blown paradigm, but it is distinguishable from prevailing disciplinary orthodoxies in formulating, studying, and interpreting some familiar, and not-so-familiar, research problems.

This occurs routinely within disciplines. But over time the palette there is more limited, the colors dulled, and the products—exhibited in mainstream journals by well-known authors—are christened as, in Kuhn’s words, “normal science.” In a borderland, the specialty is a combination of insights—both theoretical and empirical—derived from other places. The frameworks are different, the motivations more varied.

Inhibiting movement to a borderland is what physicist-cum-sociologist John Ziman (1987) called problem choice. There is a necessity to seek new research problems, including resources to maintain one’s research program. Long ago, we abandoned the myth that curiosity alone motivates scientists to pursue a research career. Extrinsic rewards, notably funding, become the manna feeding the publishing–citing–honoring cycle. So, in a sense, borderlands result from both push and pull factors in scientific communities, organizations, and careers. We may initially be lured to them, but just as likely be propelled toward them by disciplinary stasis and a sense that a change, e.g., in problem choice, would be productively good. Have tools—plus courage, self-esteem, and a single-mindedness about one’s goals—will travel.

Arguably, routines in the mainland over time are reproduced in the borderland. With an ever-changing cast of characters entering and exiting, there is a fluidity of membership and abundant claims of novelty. But hierarchy takes over, and original sparks fade into risk-averse normalcy. Therefore, we posit that borderlands have their own life cycle as extra-disciplinary enclaves, which is one way of adding to the earlier nomenclature. Borderlands may survive for many years, but not as a site for a specialty rich in the prospect of merging the knowledge and research skills of other disciplines.

While many core practitioners stay within the borderlands, those on the periphery move on to new enchantments and opportunities; again, motivations matter. Historically, examples of borderland specialties abound. Out of biology and organic chemistry came enzymology; from physics, physical chemistry, and biology came resonance imaging. And the list goes on—bioinformatics, neuroscience, genomics, and nanotechnology to name just a few. Interdisciplinary fields are constantly being invented and identified, from artificial intelligence to forensics to systems biology (O’Neill 2011).

Consider the authors of this collection: we have formed a borderland, a departure from what we usually study and write about. But this community—more a network of contacts than a collaborative—is temporary unless others can be recruited or wooed by what we write or how we impact one another’s scholarship in a durable way. Scientific fields require a continuous flow of new Ph.D.’s, arcane journals, and other organizational imperatives.

My biography offers another example. Understanding Interventions (UI), a shorthand for “Understanding Interventions That Broaden Participation in Science,” was instigated by a question posed by NIH: Why are more African Americans not earning PhDs in biomedical fields? From a National Research Council (2007) committee assembled to organize a workshop on this topic grew, 14 years later, or nearly a generation, into a national community focused on minority education in STEM fields. As founding co-chair, I helped to develop UI as a resource for a diverse, mostly academic movement. Researchers, administrators, and federal agency representatives meet annually virtually and in person, attend expert-directed professional development workshops and seminars, access an online searchable repository of materials, and contribute to an open-access peer-reviewed journal (Understanding Interventions 2022) that publishes student-centered research informing program directors and scholars alike.

UI began as a diversion for life scientists, social psychologists, and policy mavens. It remains a borderland amidst multiple mainland, still supported by NIH among other federal sponsors. It is a case study in intensifying a focus on a chronic problem facing all of science by innovating the relationship between researchers and practitioners. Call it an outgrowth. Applaud its breadth. But is it an oddity? Will it survive as a borderlands venture or morph into a discipline in its own right?

The answers to such questions remind us that we control some, but not all terms of our existence in a borderland. We are assured no rewards other than the intrinsic ones of being creative together about the meanings and significance of borderlands. Put another way, we have day jobs that preoccupy our scholarship. Those jobs are dominated by sponsors, administrators, and students anchored in institutionalized departments and disciplines. The borderlands is more an obsession, an intellectual space meant to distract and reignite imagination. For many, committing to the borderland is tantamount to a fling, a leap of faith that pursuing ideas there among new peers from foreign disciplines will yield what cannot be squeezed out of one’s own discipline.

Few can convert borderlands energy into professional gain. The inherent conservatism of communities demands emulation of the production cycle described above. I liken this to the need of emerging areas of research, or “small ponds,” to nurture a few “big fish.” They provide legitimacy to the new specialty that attracts others, but eventually transforms it into a familiar territory sapped of what made it different.

The trappings of twenty-first century science, a steady progression from post-World War II government-enabled science (U.S. Congress 1991), manifest in the borderland as much as the mainland. If one is fortunate enough to drift into, or be beckoned by, the promise of borderland science, then a few years of excitement may be in store. But it will be short-lived. The mechanisms that regulate how knowledge accumulates and careers are built ensure fleeting excitement.

As I have observed elsewhere (Chubin 2020):

I insist that marginality—not staying too long in a community—is an analytical imperative. . . To become too enmeshed is to become beholden, to bend perspective in ways that veer from the empirical to the rhetorical and cloud the analytical eye. But my leeriness about community goes deeper. Communities are inherently centripetal—they look inward and demand that its members do the same. With psychic investment, it is easy to engage in the aggrandizement of actions that benefit the community—a kind of all-for-one, one-for-all calculus. So, while I applaud growing any community that advances knowledge and practice, I eschew the leaders of the effort who sooner or later self-aggrandize. (pp. 101-02)

If my cynicism has not given way to pessimism, I would conclude that the borderland can be a respite, a vacation, and a veritable time-out from the day-to-day routines of the mainland. But it is not tension-free and cannot last for long—at least as a vibrant alternative to where we must spend most of our professional time preserving our existence, if not our vitality. If anything, my diagnosis prescribes that scientists maintain ties with multiple communities simultaneously. Keep the embers burning somewhere by feeling discomfort. Indeed, siphon it to fuel the more radical, experimental, and contagious aspects of one’s research program.

What this chapter has suggested is that the borderland is more than a state-of-mind. It is a space that is bound by bigger, richer, and more established mainland known as disciplines with several of their own bounded specialties. Whether they are normal, ethnocentric, or ossified, as the aforementioned analysts of science have asserted, they can be tapped, shared, and recombined to form other communities where researchers can collectively rethink, challenge, bond, and concoct something not possible before. For this reason alone, the borderland is worth visiting and investing in, however transitory and incomplete it may be.