Interdisciplinary group process as an indeterminate zone for collaboration and technical communication: A case study of proposal writing for an immune building and test bed

For my dissertation on interdisciplinary collaboration and technical communication, I explore how communication in a non-corporate setting influences collaboration and the preparation of written discourse. I conducted ethnographic observations of experts in disciplines such as electrical engineering, architecture, neuroscience, and mathematics as they wrote a project proposal for countermeasures to biological and chemical terrorist threats. Problems as complex as biological and chemical terrorism require collaborative solutions and interdisciplinary communication, and these experts bring different disciplinary literacies to the collaborative writing situation. I have found that Bakhtin's centripetal forces, which create cohesion within a group, and centrifugal forces, which disrupt group process, are present in this collaborative writing situation. Geoffrey Cross has indeed used these Bakhtinian concepts in his research of writers within an insurance corporation; however, these findings and subsequent conclusions expand the scope of Cross's study to address writing in non-corporate contexts as well as implications for pedagogy.; Effective interdisciplinary collaboration can share three basic characteristics. First, the different disciplinary professionals use mediating artifacts to focus the task and define goals. These artifacts can include diagrams, graphics, and pictures as well as previous documents that help create a new document. Second, they must work to overcome sometimes competing disciplinary perspectives. At times, the architect and the engineer do not see things the same way because they both use a different approach to problem solving. Third, a strong leader should emerge to unify the group and manage the various disciplinary points of view. For this case study, the leader of the group created stability for the group so that they could effectively complete the proposal writing task.