Interdisciplinarity (specific) – Integration and Implementation Insights

Recognize and value linguistic and conceptual pluralism!

February 24, 2026February 12, 2026

By Ulli Vilsmaier.

How can we best recognise and value linguistic and conceptual pluralism in naming what we do when we work in international environments? What are the limitations of descriptors such as transdisicplinarity, participatory action research and co-creation?

Terminology is really an issue when working across linguistic, disciplinary and professional boundaries. Working internationally we are now accustomed to using the hyper-centralized language, English; we tend to delegate translation more and more to machine-based algorithms; and we easily forget the consequences of working in a language that is not our mother tongue nor anchored in our cultural and social environment.

A hyper-centralized language has great benefits, but also major weaknesses.

The Möbius strip of knowledge: Rethinking the boundaries of knowing / Le ruban de Möbius du savoir : repenser les frontières de la connaissance

January 20, 2026January 13, 2026

By Frédéric Darbellay.

A French version of this post is available

frederic-darbellay_2023 — Frédéric Darbellay (biography)

How can we move beyond current definitions of disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, which reproduce a logic inherited from classificatory and cumulative thinking that rests on the principles of classical logic – identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded third? Instead how can we think about knowledge as mutually transforming, traversing, and reinventing itself in line with research processes that do not follow a linear progression but unfold through movements of torsion, resonance, and tension? How can we think about the dynamics of knowledge less as a trajectory than a living space in continuous transformation?

A self-assessment checklist to improve interdisciplinarity in research projects / Un questionnaire d’auto-évaluation pour améliorer les projets de recherche interdisciplinaire

December 2, 2025November 4, 2025

By Flore Nonchez.

A French version of this post is available

How can researchers improve the quality of their interdisciplinary proposals? What would help in clarifying project formulation, enriching description, maximizing relevance, facilitating workplan implementation (by anticipating possible difficulties) and enhancing impact?

The self-assessment checklist provided below aims to help project leaders and their research teams systematically consider the specific interdisciplinary aspects of an interdisciplinary research project, whatever their original discipline or experience of interdisciplinarity.

Three ways to design interdisciplinary collaborations

November 4, 2025October 7, 2025

By Benjamin Hofmann and Milena Wiget.

authors_benjamin-hofmann_milena-wiget — 1. Benjamin Hofmann (biography)
2. Milena Wiget (biography)

What options do researchers have in designing interdisciplinary collaborations? How can researchers understand the connections between their own discipline-based research and less familiar research in other disciplines?

Types of interdisciplinary research collaborations

Solving complex sustainability and other problems often requires the integration of different disciplinary perspectives, which is challenging. To address this challenge, we developed a simple typology that features three types of interdisciplinary research collaborations, which can be implemented at any stage of the research process, as described, and shown in the figure, below.

Common base (type I): Research from different disciplines is integrated at one stage of the research process and then separated into disciplinary research at the next stage.

Three social mechanisms leading to fake interdisciplinary collaborations / 形成伪跨学科合作的三种社会形成机制

August 13, 2025August 12, 2025

By Lianghao Dai.

A Chinese version of this post is available

What are fake interdisciplinary collaborations and how do they arise?

Fake interdisciplinary collaborations are a form of performative scientific behaviour that claims to be interdisciplinary but lacks knowledge integration across disciplines. There are three social mechanisms that can result in such fake collaborations.

1. Irresponsible project management

Irresponsible project management has two manifestations:

Why interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are not enough for addressing complex problems

April 29, 2025April 29, 2025

By Gabriele Bammer.

gabriele-bammer_nov-2021 — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

As the importance of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research approaches becomes more widely recognised, how can we overcome the danger that they are seen to be all that is needed for tackling complex problems? What are the limitations of these approaches? What else might be required?

My starting point is that improved understanding of, and action on, a complex societal or environmental problem usually requires a number of research questions to be addressed. Different questions require different kinds of research approaches. Let’s illustrate this by considering the following complex problem:

As effort goes into making cities more sustainable, how can we incorporate illicit drug users into a more sustainable city X?

Transforming and weaving knowledge in a complex world: The butterfly and the spider

February 11, 2025

By Frédéric Darbellay.

Inter- and transdisciplinarity is today increasingly recognized as a field of study in its own right, with its own theoretical and conceptual foundations, its methodological approaches, its national and international scientific communities and networks.

The field aims to meet the demand for the collaborative, integrated and forward-looking responses that are needed to address the complexity of global issues. Inter- and transdisciplinarity is establishing itself not only as a pioneering and transformative field of research, but also as an essential approach to rethinking the organization of knowledge in academic structures and beyond.

However, inter- and transdisciplinarity remains a diverse and constantly evolving field, shaped by various schools of thought and enriched by a global and intercultural perspective. This diversity constitutes its richness and calls for an inclusive approach, capable of representing the plurality of scientific communities, approaches and practices.

Why is it so hard to agree on definitions of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity?

May 28, 2025June 11, 2024

By Gabriele Bammer

As more and more researchers, educators, universities and research organisations, funders, and policy makers become interested in interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, the demand for clear unequivocal definitions of these terms grows. Why is agreeing on such definitions so hard? And what’s the way forward?

The late Julie Thompson Klein’s work tracking typologies of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity over time (Klein, 2017) is revealing and provides the basis for this i2Insights contribution.

Klein pointed out that in the latter half of the twentieth century, the classification of the Western intellectual tradition “into specialized domains within a larger system of disciplinarity” was “supplemented and challenged” by an increasing number of activities that involved disciplinary interactions.

Theory and process for interdisciplinary undergraduate course development

November 23, 2021

By Ana M. Corbacho

ana-corbacho — Ana M. Corbacho (biography)

How can interdisciplinary courses for undergraduates move from being intuitively designed to theoretically based? How can course design accommodate cohorts of teachers, not previously experienced in interdisciplinarity, from across a university?

Here I share how colleagues and I developed courses where teams of university faculty worked with undergraduate students to tackle interdisciplinary problems.

I first describe three useful theoretical perspectives for building an interdisciplinary undergraduate course, namely:

social constructivism and situated-learning theory
academic motivation
interdisciplinary education from a diversity perspective.

Acknowledging and responding to criticisms of interdisciplinarity / Reconnaître et répondre aux critiques de l’interdisciplinarité

August 3, 2023July 14, 2020

By Romain Sauzet

A French version of this post is available

author_romain-sauzet — Romain Sauzet (biography)

What are the core arguments that critics of interdisciplinarity employ? Which of these criticisms can help to clarify what interdisciplinarity is and what it isn’t?

While some of the criticisms of interdisciplinarity stem from a general misunderstanding of its purpose or from a bad experience, others seem well-founded. Thus, while some must be rejected, others should be accepted.

I outline five different types of criticisms drawn from three main sources:
(1) academic writings (see reference list), (2) an empirical survey on interdisciplinarity (Sauzet 2017), (3) informal discussions. These criticisms extend the ideas presented in an earlier blog post, Why We Should Not Ignore Interdisciplinarity’s Critics by Rick Szostak. I reflect on how interdisciplinarity could be improved by attending to key criticisms.

A manifesto of interdisciplinarity

October 29, 2021March 19, 2019

By Rick Szostak

Is there a shared understanding of what interdisciplinarity is and how (and why) it is best pursued that can be used by the international community of scholars of interdisciplinarity, to both advocate for and encourage interdisciplinary scholarship? Is there consensus on what we are trying to achieve and how this is best done that can form the basis of cogent advice to interdisciplinary teachers and researchers regarding strategies that have proven successful in the past?

I propose a ‘Manifesto of Interdisciplinarity’ with nine brief points, as listed below.

Tool-swapping in interdisciplinary research – a case study

January 9, 2026April 24, 2018

By Lindell Bromham

What can we learn from focussing on examples of interdisciplinary research where ideas or techniques from one field are imported to solve problems in another field? This may be in the context of interdisciplinary teams, or it may simply involve borrowing from one field to another by researchers embedded within a particular field. One of the major benefits of interdisciplinary research is the chance to swap tools between fields, to save having to reinvent the wheel.

The fields of evolutionary biology and language evolution have been swapping ideas and tools for over 150 years, so considering the way that ideas have flowed between these fields might provide an interesting case study.