The talk will focus on Dr Lisa's collaborative work with Nancy Nersessian that focuses on understanding the processes, outcomes, and implications of interdisciplinary inquiry. Lisa will present a brief overview of their multi-year ethnographic study of innovation-seeking interdisciplinary laboratories and a recent analysis of interviews with interdisciplinary scholars across a wide range of disciplines. She will focus on our analysis of “epistemic identities” to explore the complex reciprocal relations among identity and epistemic aims and values in interdisciplinary practice. Discussion will concern the implications of epistemic identity for the practice of psychology, including its internal divisions and relation with other disciplines. 

Dr Lisa Osbeck is Professor of Psychology at the University of West Georgia.  She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, and a past-president of the Society for General Psychology. Her works include Ever not Quite: Pluralism(s) in William James and Contemporary Psychology with Saulo Araujo (Cambridge, 2023); Psychological Studies of Science and Technology, co-edited with Kieran. O’Doherty, Ernst Schraube, and Jeffrey Yen (2019, Palgrave); Values in Psychological Science (2018, Cambridge); and Rational Intuition, co-edited with Barbara Held (2014, Cambridge). Her co-authored the book Science as Psychology: Sense-Making and Identity in Science Practice (with Nancy Nersessian, Kareen. Malone, and Wendy Newstetter, 2010) received the 2012 William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association.

This talk is mandatory for the students of PSYC 236: Psychology as a Human Science, and recommended for the students of PSYC 208 (Section A): Qualitative Approaches to Psychology.