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Today’s societal challenges, such as climate change and global pandemics, are increasingly complex and require collaboration across scientific disciplines to address. Scientific teams bring together individuals of varying backgrounds and expertise to work collaboratively on creating new knowledge to address these challenges. Within a scientific team, there is inherent diversity in disciplinary cultures and preferences for interpersonal collaboration. Such diversity contributes to the potential strength of the created knowledge but can also impede progress when teams struggle to collaborate productively. Facilitation is a professional practice-based form of interpersonal expertise that supports group members to do their best thinking. Although facilitation has been demonstrated to support group functioning in a wide range of contexts, its role in supporting scientific teams has been largely overlooked. This essay defines scientific facilitation as a form of interactional expertise and explains how facilitating scientific teams requires skills in managing interpersonal interactions as well as understanding how different types of disciplinary knowledge integrate in the creation of new knowledge. Next, it explains how this science facilitation expertise may be developed through metacognition. Finally, it provides examples of how scientific facilitation could be more widely incorporated into research by describing three pathways to expand the use of facilitation theory and techniques in collaborative scientific research: developing facilitation skills among scientists leading teams, using broadly trained facilitators, and using specialised science facilitators. The strengths and risks of each path are discussed, and criteria are suggested for selecting the right approach for a given team science project.

The present study explored the experience and understanding of gender for gay and queer men who perform drag. It is part of a 20-year program of research focused on how LGBTQ gender identities arise, why they coalesce, and how they are enacted within their social contexts. Interviewers on this topic involving 18 participants were subjected to a grounded theory analysis. Drag genders were tied to common experiences of overcoming social messages that maligned femininity within men, an appreciation of performance arts, and a desire to use social power to confront issues of sexism, genderism, and/or heterosexism. At the same time, participants reported differences in experiencing gender as binary or fluid and in whether they experienced their gender as shifting when engaged in performance. The study contributes to the program of research on LGBTQ genders by examining how drag gender is both essential and constructed, and how it resist sets of oppressive values and is eroticized. It examines how gendered communication functions when performed for audiences and how the social position of these men is both elevated and stigmatized within LGBTQ community. Drag gender’s multiple meanings are credited to its position between gay and transgender politics within this socially transformative moment in time.