“Can you overlap here?”: A question for an interdisciplinary team

Interdisciplinary teams sometimes view overlapping roles as problematic. In this article, a 1‐min, 7‐s segment of team conversation in which “overlap” is discussed is subjected to a microanalysis. The analysis includes an expansion of the meaning of the text (cf. Labov & Fanshel, 1977) and reveals participants’ territoriality in the face of an ideology of interdisciplinary collaboration. The larger ethnographic study of which this is a part, as well as interviews with participants in the conversation, supports the interpretation of the text that is presented.