Interdisciplinary research has become a buzzword in academia: celebrated, encouraged, and often expected. Yet, despite its appeal, most attempts at interdisciplinarity seem to fail. In the experience of HESCOR researcher Shumon T. Hussain that’s because it’s still treated as a simple act of combining existing disciplines, as if each field were a puzzle piece that only needs to be fitted together to form a bigger picture.
But true interdisciplinarity is not additive, it is transformative. It challenges each of us to rethink our assumptions, methods, and even our identities as researchers. It asks us to leave behind disciplinary comfort zones, to rethink our assumptions, and to learn to speak, think, and work across intellectual cultures respectfully.
Interdisciplinary literacy is called for and it is difficult work: the ability to understand and translate between different research traditions, to engage with their vocabularies, and to adopt some of their insights into one’s own practice takes time. Such literacy cannot be taught in a single workshop; it grows through long-term curiosity, humility, and openness that can be accomplished through attending talks or engaging with other fields’ academic texts. It requires active and continual pursual of interdisciplinary knowledge by researchers across disciplines.
Interdisciplinary literacy also requires us to check ourselves for double standards. We need to ensure that we are asking of others that which we are also capable of committing to them in return. Often in interdisciplinary work, the standardized methods and data of the sciences become an integral part of the methodologies and goals of the research team, leaving much of the critical reflection of the concept-driven humanities in the background. But questioning of assumptions in classic humanities style can greatly add to discussions within the sciences, benefiting and advancing those fields as well. If we can accomplish more genuine and on-a-par collaboration – what Shumon T. Hussain calls the parity principle – can come to fruition where, in the aforementioned example, the humanities may become more data-aware, but also the sciences become more concept-aware. Only then can disciplines meet on an equal footing, and therefore participate in real, productive and therefore transformative interdisciplinarity.
If we were to take this seriously, Shumon T. Hussain argues, we would move away from mere integration, but instead cherish transgression of research standards, protocols and guiding assumptions – a mode of research where different disciplines do not just mingle and mix, but rather reshape one another. When done well, interdisciplinary transgression would create something new and unprecedented: forms of knowledge, practices, and even “disciplines” that did not exist before. Interdisciplinarity, in this view, is really about research that has not found its proper discipline(s) yet.
The HESCOR project can take advantage of this potential by exploring a) how an Earth system perspective changes how we look at human agency (“science-induced” humanities); b) what we consider planetary-scale human data in the first place (“humanities-induced” Earth system science), and c) what, as a consequence, is evidence for human-Earth system coupling. While an exciting endeavor, success in such work would thus depend on cross-disciplinary diplomacy: the readiness to take each other’s differences seriously and to develop the willingness and resources necessary to change together in the process.
Interdisciplinarity, then, is not so much about filling gaps between disciplines. It’s about reimagining the landscape of knowledge itself. It is demanding, unsettling, and transformative — and precisely because of that, it is worth doing.
Figure 1: Graphical summary of differences between disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity and some key conditions to achieve the latter.
