I’ve said in previous posts that boundary crossing is important for tackling wicked problems. This can be boundaries between disciplines or boundaries between academic and other groups such as policy makers or businesses. How we think about boundaries is central to getting this right. One popular approach has been to think of these groups as distinct communities of practice with their own languages, norms, practices and values. That work has been valuable and influential but I think it’s not quite the right metaphor. Communities implies clearly defined and clearly bounded groups and I think the reality is more messy. I prefer the metaphor of landscapes of practice, which allows for woodland edges, estuaries, beaches and other liminal metaphors. That helps us see that there are often interesting in-between spaces where people are working out new forms of practice.

I and some lovely colleagues wrote about metaphors for movement across landscapes of practice recently. We thought that ‘bridging’ or ‘spanning’ were too tidy and could invoke empty gaps between communities. We prefered Richardson’s metaphor of a beach as a liminal space between land and ocean where the tides might move in from one academic discipline or seeds might blow across from another. We also liked the idea that people working on wicked problems might be engaged in ‘patching’ bringing together partly overlapping and contested knowledge practices to create a novel response to a wicked problem.

Photo by Shifaaz shamoon on Unsplash edited by Vel McCune