Passible polyphony: An extensive team-reflexivity process for hierarchical, transdisciplinary research teams

Abstract

This article showcases an extensive team-reflexivity process of an embarking transdisciplinary research team in psychiatry. It explores a multilayered tension between the authors, five Dutch researchers with different embodied positions, from diverse research traditions and at different stages of their careers. This article represents a meaningful collision between the rise of horizontalizing participatory research practices, and persistent traditional hierarchies in academic psychiatry. We show how this played out in a hierarchical, transdisciplinary research team, including its emotion work and power ambiguities. Such an intensive and shared reflexivity process is novel, that is, not typical of a responsive research design. The value of this article is that we show and analyze what we have come to call our ‘passible polyphony’: a thorough grappling with multiple perspectives in often disharmonious interactions.