ABSTRACT
What happens when one puts a physicist and theoretical climate modeller, geographers of various bends, a team of anthropologists working on climate change in the Arctic, Africa, Asia, Andes and Polynesia, and a historian of climate science in the same room? Not only did they create a sense of conceptual laboratory, they were also being inventive about their means of communication and collaboration. They broke into smaller groups, where cross-cutting issues were defined and then presented back in plenum. At the last day of the workshop the participants visualized their thinking about climate modelling on posters, which were exhibited in plenum. The posters mapped different issues of climate modelling spanning from resolution, risk, authority, trust, scales, migrations, and public spectacle. These three days of workshopping for us at Waterworlds turned out to be a compelling experiment, carried by an ethos of mutual respect and recognition, which emerged as a model for a new transactional paradigm. This was not multi-disciplinarity, in the sense of scholars speaking from each of their discipline and corner of expertise; for us at Waterworlds this watershed event was indicative and exemplary of what Marilyn Strathern has defined as “generic interdisciplinarity” (Strathern 2005; Strathern 2006; see also Hastrup, Chapter 1, this volume).
