Dancing Backwards,Inching Forwards? A Partial Perspective on the Interdisciplinary Present

Introduction

There is an aphorism about the dancer Ginger Rogers that is often alluded to when describing the challenges faced by women striving for career success. ¹ The same metaphor could be applied a fortiori to the ‘dance’ between traditional and interdisciplinary research within academia. While the former is praised for its recognisable, monodisciplinary contributions, interdisciplinarians can indeed feel that they are expected to perform their academic lives while dancing backwards in high heels.

As interdisciplinarians, we grapple with reconciling the rhetoric and the reality of a science policy system where the benefits and future potentials of interdisciplinary research and education are extolled, yet those who seek to work in this way are held back by the very same institutional structures that promote it. At policy levels, we have been told repeatedly that the most exciting innovations required to tackle the world’s ‘grand challenges’ are happening at the intersection of disciplines ² . Yet for many, interdisciplinarity still remains ‘exotic’ and ‘other’ (Lindvig and Ulriksen 2019).

Do such ongoing contradictions represent a healthy interplay of perspectives that enrich the academy or are they detrimental to its flourishing? What might be the longer-term impact on a higher education sector that still, largely, appears to adopt the view that interdisciplinarity is ‘too soft for real tough minds’ (Weingart 2000, 29), where interdisciplinary knowledge is disparaged as ‘problem-driven knowledge’, incapable of creating ‘enduring, self-reproducing communities like disciplines’ (Abbott 2001, 135)?

A corollary of the policy rhetoric around interdisciplinary research being novel is that research funders and university leaders tend to promote their funding schemes as risky and innovative. Over the course of my university career, I have borne witness in various roles – as researcher, expert adviser, and evaluator – to many such ‘experiments’ in interdisciplinary research. This included an extended ‘apprentice phase’ (Laudel 2017) of postdoctoral employment in a grant-funded research centre that described its ethos as interdisciplinary but was a poor administrative fit within university governance structures and lacked methodological focus and self-reflexivity on interdisciplinary research practices and career impacts. Interdisciplinarity is not for everyone, but should it be in a well-functioning research system? Just as interdisciplinarity is not simply ‘anything goes’ but demands a conscious focus on methods, expertise, and skills development.

The Editor-in-Chief's generous remit for this interpretation of the interdisciplinary present was that it should provide a personal view, taking stock of what has happened from a science policy perspective and provide a critical and reflective account of ‘where we are’ and ‘how did we get here’. The phrase ‘science policy perspective’ is complex and potentially wide-ranging; not least whether we take a limited interpretation of ‘science’ or understand it as ‘knowledge’. In its narrowest sense, science policy deals with questions of resource allocation and priority setting. More broadly, the term can encompass the producers and users of research, introducing supply-side and demand-side issues in the management and delivery of research. The study of science policy may also address aspects of access to decision-making and equity, ushering in terms such as ‘research governance’ and ‘research culture’. My own 25-year perspective (rather than a 50-year span) will inevitably be a partial one, filtered through my UK-centric academic experiences. I embrace a broad view of science policy and take a ‘research on research’ approach to the practical realm of academic governance for interdisciplinarity.

So how did we get here and where is ‘here’ exactly? It would be impossible to summarise the full historical trajectory and current state-of-the-art of interdisciplinarity and to do so would merely replicate many of the excellent accounts that already exist. Introductory readers aiming to provide just such synopses have recently been published (Vienni-Baptista et al. 2024; Van der Tuin 2025). Instead, I will offer three snapshots from my own encounters with the UK science policy landscape to offer some highlights of ‘how we got here’.

I will use these vignettes to argue that the present grant-funded model for research leads to projectification and precarity (Cairns 2025) and consider how these aspects of current research governance disproportionately affect interdisciplinary research. I will discuss how moving forward requires us to:

consolidate existing knowledge about interdisciplinary practice

In summary, this requires greater ‘reflexivity’ (i.e., a closer reflection or examination) on interdisciplinary research practices and governance to engender a more accumulative approach to interdisciplinary knowledge. An enabling research system – one that allows us time to reflect, synthesise and learn, not merely to chase the next research grant or publication – is key. This is of particular significance in a resource-constrained system to ensure we can maximise the potential of the knowledge we already have. But before developing this discussion further I should first address the sometimes-problematic issue of how I am using this contested term ‘interdisciplinary’.

Defining ‘Interdisciplinarity’?

Disciplines are characterised by shared methods, research practices, theories and bodies of knowledge. This leads to a community of researchers with similar experiences and mindsets, the use of specialist terms that place knowledge beyond the reach of the uninitiated, and the creation of social networks of peers, the so-called ‘invisible colleges’ (Crane 1972). The expansion of the university system in the nineteenth century led to increasing specialisation, attributed by the Gulbenkian Commission (1996) to scholars carving out their own niches to define their individual academic identities. Over time, these niches have led to the proliferation of research ‘microtribes’ who police their academic boundaries and deter cross fertilisation (Alvesson, Gabriel and Paulsen 2017, 73). Yet there are great benefits in seeing disciplines not as fixed but mutable and the concept of crossing boundaries is not new:

We are not students of some subject matter, but students of problems. And problems may cut right across the borders of any subject matter or discipline. (Popper 1963)

The first Interdisciplinary Science Reviews editorial defined interdisciplinary work as:

originat[ing] from the joint and continuously integrated effort of two or more specialists having a different disciplinary background and training. The results resemble a chemical compound, where the individual constituent elements can no longer be recognized or physically separated. (Michaelis 1976)

At its simplest, interdisciplinarity can be ‘any form of dialogue or interaction between two or more disciplines’ (Moran 2010, 14) but most interdisciplinary scholars would expect that boundary crossing to be done explicitly; as a ‘self-conscious’ mixing of knowledge (Strathern 2004, 36). Klein (2010) highlights the differences between methodological and theoretical interdisciplinarity and describes a split in interdisciplinary research between ‘instrumental’ and ‘critical’ approaches within the field. In later work, Klein (2014) defined different modes of interdisciplinary research depending on their outcomes: transcendence; problem-solving and transgression. Others have contrasted ‘academically oriented’ and ‘problem focused’ versions of interdisciplinarity, reflecting the different epistemic value often ascribed to research that responds to endogenous, intellectual drivers versus more pragmatic, exogenous stimuli (Lyall et al. 2011). Barry, Born and Weszkalnys (2008) classified different drivers (‘logics’) of interdisciplinarity and identified specific ‘modes’ of interdisciplinarity (integrative-synthesis; subordination-service; and agonistic) reflecting on the resulting power imbalances between the contributing disciplines.

I favour the National Academies’ (2005) definition when introducing the term in my teaching, as it encompasses this pluralism and allows us to unpack some of the key points of variance:

Interdisciplinary research is a mode of research by teams or individuals that integrates information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts and/or theories from two or more disciplines…to advance fundamental understanding or to solve problems whose solutions are beyond the scope of a single discipline or area of research practice. (National Academies 2005)

In Europe (particularly in Germany, Switzerland and the Nordic countries), sustainability science researchers may describe these processes as ‘transdisciplinary’ (Bergmann, Klein and Faust 2012). Transdisciplinary research can be defined as research that transgresses boundaries between disciplinary knowledge or integrates different bodies of knowledge and actively co-designs and co-produces knowledge between academic and societal partners such as policy makers, business and community groups. ³

In the United States, the term ‘Team Science’ is used primarily by biomedical researchers to describe collaborative, cross-disciplinary activities (Hall, Vogel and Croyle 2019). There is also an influential Australian body of work being conducted under the name of Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) with the explicit aim of embedding interdisciplinarity in the academic mainstream by defining and recognising integration and implementation science as a new discipline (Bammer 2013, 1).

In the United Kingdom, boundary crossing collaborations are typically labelled ‘interdisciplinary’ and the term transdisciplinary seldom used (Lyall, Meagher and Bruce 2015). Instead, UK science policy (manifested through the national research assessment process, known as REF, Research Excellence Framework) ⁴ places the emphasis on ‘impact’ (Smith et al. 2021). Despite modifications in recent REF cycles to be more accommodating to interdisciplinarity, for the British research system to fully embrace the benefits of transdisciplinarity would require a move away from this language of ‘impact’ (Lyall 2022). Shifting focus to the process, by including those affected by the research in the problem definition (co-design) and conduct of the research (co-production), could facilitate more durable outcomes, in contrast to the retro-fit approach the UK sector currently has. The societal benefits of the transdisciplinary approach would be further realised if the literature also embraced wider fields beyond sustainability science (e.g., such as the social and policy implications of the life sciences).

Funders, in the United Kingdom and internationally, are encouraging researchers into interdisciplinary, solution-oriented projects to tackle increasingly complex global challenges, at a time when universities are losing their monopoly on knowledge production (Frodeman 2014). Universities are being forced to adapt and re-shape their curricula in order to produce the people and research that society needs (Foray and Sors 2014). Yet within many research-intensive universities the emphasis is still on the production of knowledge for society, rather than the co-production of knowledge with other societal actors.

The current research governance system promotes the production of new knowledge resulting in university cultures that reify and reward the accumulation of new grants, new research institutes and new publications (Alvesson, Gabriel and Paulsen 2017): this fetishisation of novelty reflects the preoccupation with measurable outputs. It focuses less on research processes nor does it promote what Frodeman (2013) has termed ‘sustainable knowledge’, doing more with the knowledge we already have. Yet this is often what societal groups require – the practical application of existing knowledge adapted to their specific context.

A quotation that still stalks me is the assertion that the problem-based nature of interdisciplinary limits its transferability:

[P]roblem-based knowledge is insufficiently abstract to survive in competition with problem-portable knowledge… interdisciplinary studies are ultimately dependent on specialized disciplines to develop new theories and methods. (Abbott 2001, 135)

A Repeated Refrain: Vignettes from the Science Policy Landscape

The choreography of my own dance with interdisciplinarity takes the form of a ‘rondo’ ⁵ : a repeating ‘refrain’ (encouraged by national and international science policy) that returns multiple times, interspersed with different ‘episodes’ (also termed ‘digressions’ by musicologists) as research funders try to develop their own approach.

Near the start of my university career, I contributed to a study (Tait and Lyall 2001) commissioned by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to investigate how they funded interdisciplinary research, to determine the extent to which the research council's practices inhibited or encouraged interdisciplinary grant applications, and ultimately, the successful funding of interdisciplinary research. The study analysed interdisciplinary projects conducted within three ESRC-funded research programmes that encompassed the social and natural sciences. While we found no overt evidence of research council practices inhibiting interdisciplinary applications or the successful funding of interdisciplinary research, the overall impression was one of slow and faltering progress with no clear sense of direction in its encouragement. The main barriers to interdisciplinary research were seen to lie in universities themselves and with the UK Research Assessment Exercise ⁶ , but the research council was not seen as being particularly proactive in countering these. While interdisciplinary approaches were recommended in policy documents and in research programme specifications, no formal guidance was given to programme directors and managers on how these recommendations should be implemented or their progress monitored. The strength of the interdisciplinary message was very weak and also confused by the time it reached researchers and reviewers.

Our recommendations suggested ways in which the research council could begin to develop a stronger interdisciplinary culture whereby researchers and grant reviewers were encouraged to think more deeply about a project, the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach, the appropriate disciplines to involve, the extent of integration required and how this integration would be achieved.

Concurrently with my part-time university role, I was able to pursue other interests as a professional research evaluator and was fortunate to work with Technology Development Group on several evaluations of the UK’s long-running Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme ⁷ . At its inception it was considered ‘vital’ that this programme did not focus solely on the production of new knowledge, instead research would be part of a greater whole that integrated research, capacity building and knowledge transfer within and across projects (RELU mechanism document, no date). This intention reflected experience from the previous Joint Agricultural and Environment Programme sponsored by the same three Research Councils or their precursors, in the late 1980s, which was widely regarded as having failed to meet its ambitious objectives to foster genuine interdisciplinarity or generate practical solutions (Harvey 2006).

The RELU programme's Directorate utilised their position as participants in, and observers of, the programme process to develop insights into interdisciplinary working. The Director's Office provided intellectual leadership on interdisciplinary perspectives and in methodological innovations, raising the profile and significance of interdisciplinary work and experience in the disciplinary communities. The RELU programme overall, and the Directorate in particular, had a significant and widespread impact on understanding of the conduct of interdisciplinary research in the United Kingdom and sought to catalyse a culture change in outlook among key research funders and other public agencies. This included demonstrating the institutional obstacles and requirements for effective interdisciplinary research programmes and policies (Lowe Phillipson and Liddon 2013).

The RELU programme established a strong reputation, especially across its three sponsoring research councils and set a benchmark for the research councils to pursue in subsequent initiatives (RELU 2011). All the participating research councils claimed to have learned lessons from the programme's interdisciplinary approach (ibid.), for example:

We have used many of the lessons learned in RELU to commission subsequent interdisciplinary programmes and are now starting to home in on “best practice”.—Head of Research, Natural Environment Research Council

Ten years on, I again found myself acting as a consultant to the UK's national funding body ⁸ , this time training the first Interdisciplinary Assessment College of peer reviewers for the pilot Cross Research Council Responsive Mode programme (CRCRM) ⁹ and trying to implement good practice in review processes (Klein 2006; Pohl and Perrig-Chiello 2011; Lyall and King 2013; Lyall et al., 2013).

A UK government review (BEIS 2022) had found that the recently formed UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) was failing to exploit the full potential for interdisciplinary research or transform the collective UK approach to this beyond specific grant schemes. The CRCRM scheme sought to address issues raised by the earlier Nurse Review (Nurse 2015), which expressed concerns over the ability of the research council system to fairly assess interdisciplinary applications, citing difficulties in obtaining high quality peer review as a major factor. To address these problems, Nobel Laureate Sir Paul Nurse recommended improvements to allow the better identification and selection of referees with the experience and ability to review interdisciplinary proposals effectively and the provision of good guidance and training for referees.

Despite its long gestation, the CRCRM scheme became one of the UK national research funder's flagships for increasing harmonisation across the research councils under the leadership of its immediate past Chief Executive. Previous strategic research council programmes were seen as having focused on solving a specific problem through an interdisciplinary approach, without defining what that approach would be. This tended to perpetuate confusion between multi- and inter-disciplinarity. In marked contrast, the CRCRM was explicit about interdisciplinarity. Whether or to what extent prior experience through the research councils’ past interdisciplinary schemes informed the development of this latest funding vehicle is less apparent.

What is undeniable it that this latest research funding scheme developed a cadre of researchers and other professionals more familiar with the challenges of interdisciplinary evaluation. This scheme's explicit focus on interdisciplinarity is the first time in the 25 years that I have been studying UK research policy that the research councils tackled specific scheme criteria for interdisciplinary assessment in depth. The training that was delivered to members of the Interdisciplinary Assessment College – supported by an archive of training materials and other resources – could finally allow us to make progress on the evaluation of interdisciplinary research and, in theory, engender greater familiarity among the UK research councils to commission future interdisciplinary programmes.

While the latest UKRI budget allocation (under the remit of a new Chief Executive) has opted not to continue funding this scheme, UKRI have stated that they will be integrating the learning from this approach across its research grant programmes after the pilot's conclusion ¹⁰ . Feedback and surveys indicate that the pilot has unquestionably developed a cohort of researchers and other professionals more familiar with the well-known challenges of interdisciplinary evaluation. A key question now is how effectively the seven individual research councils that comprise UKRI will absorb this learning to the benefit of future interdisciplinary research. And so, the dance continues.

Consolidating Interdisciplinary Knowledge

Over the past 25 years, we have certainly moved on from discussions about why to do interdisciplinary research to how to do it (Lindvig 2024). This has spawned a burgeoning literature of ‘N = 1’ case studies where authors describe their experiences of participating in collaborative, boundary crossing work. While this adds piecemeal to our body of knowledge, the dispersed nature of these publications makes it harder for newcomers to gauge the state of the art. Oftentimes, these papers are written, not by scholars who have spent their careers studying boundary crossing and are steeped in the preexisting literature but by researchers who regard interdisciplinarity as something of an epiphenomenon, an adjunct to their ‘real’ research.

So interdisciplinarity is still less than the sum of its parts; we have accumulated a lot of knowledge about its practice with beacons of excellence and deep understanding but still significant entry barriers and a great deal of re-learning. Now the question for our time is how to do interdisciplinarity well and indeed how to do it better.

This raises questions such as: what needs to change to accord interdisciplinary knowledge the same kudos as ‘problem portable knowledge’? How do we professionalise and consolidate in a way that garners recognition but does not become dogmatic and respects heterogeneity? Is it possible (or desirable) to elevate interdisciplinarity to the prestige of a discipline yet avoid enforcing a ‘One ring to rule them all’ approach (with apologies to Tolkein)?

Since the publication of the first issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, inter- and transdisciplinary scholars and practitioners have developed dedicated academic conferences and journals, professional societies, research centres and teaching programmes, but much of the academic literature on inter- and transdisciplinary practice is published across different domain specific journals by a variety of research communities, who likely do not read each other's writing. Lindvig and Ulriksen (2019) associate this constant ‘reinvention of the wheel’ with the ‘othering’ of interdisciplinarity as those new to interdisciplinarity do not know that a literature or established practices exist. Another factor is undoubtedly science policy's tendency to focus on ‘collaboration’ which puts the emphasis on disciplines coming together for a specific project, rather than individuals developing interdisciplinary expertise as I discuss later. Doing inter- and transdisciplinarity well therefore means focusing more on consolidation and comparison so that we go beyond publishing descriptive accounts of interdisciplinary research and education and provide critical reflection on what works, in a way that systematically compares authors’ own efforts to existing knowledge.

As a community, we are doing this. The late Julie Thompson Klein was our historian, typologist and bibliographer, the doyenne of our craft. Julie's encyclopaedic knowledge and unstinting mentorship anchored many inter- and transdisciplinary careers, my own included. More recently, a flourishing of synthesis publications in the form of handbooks, anthologies and encyclopaedias (Lawrence 2023; Vienni-Baptista, Fletcher and Lyall 2023; Szostak 2024; Darbellay 2024; Van der Tuin 2025) complements Gabriele Bammer's unstinting efforts to promote greater cohesion through the Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) blog ¹¹ and earlier methodological reference works (e.g., Lury et al. 2018; Bergmann, Klein and Faust 2012; Hadorn et al. 2008) to contribute to this consolidation.

Particularly relevant for the communication of inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge to new generations is the growing number of textbooks (e.g., Lyall et al. 2011; Repko and Szostak 2016; Keestra, Uilhoorn and Zandveld 2022), a recent highlight being the ‘crowd-sourced’ text on interdisciplinary higher education that shares the experiences of nearly 40 established and emerging teaching and learning practitioners (Vienni-Baptista et al. 2022). The many early and mid-career voices in that volume pay tribute to how the inter- and transdisciplinary community of practice has grown since the first edition of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews or the first conference of the Association of Interdisciplinary (then Integrative) Studies ¹² held in 1979. Over my own career span, attendance at ITD (formerly td-net) conferences has quadrupled and similar evidence of growth can be seen in the td-net's annual publications analysis ¹³ . This shows steady growth in Web of Science publications citing interdisciplinarity as a topic from almost 0 to 14,000 publications per annum over the past 50 years.

In their citation analyses of the recent Encyclopaedia of Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity and The Handbook of Interdisciplinary Teaching and Administration, Szostak and Smiraglia (2025) note that within these two volumes there are very few citations to papers in conference proceedings, implying that inter- and transdisciplinarity is a domain that is already well founded through existing theoretical writing in monographs, anthologies and handbooks, and emergent theory in peer-reviewed journals. The authors also present visualisations of the different ‘schools’ of scholarship and suggest that there is a shared global conversation but a divergence in citation patterns whereby typically North American scholars professionally affiliated with the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies are more likely to cite each other as are European scholars affiliated to the Transdisciplinary Network, td-net, although several scholars are well known to both groups (ibid.). So, who then is reading this flurry of consolidation texts? Are we still just talking to other interdisciplinary insiders within our ‘invisible college’? If we are going to do inter- and transdisciplinary research (and education) better, what more can we do to render the contributions of our invisible college more visible?

Countering Short-Termism and Projectification

Over the past 25 years, we have created a cadre of interdisciplinarians but how many have stayed the course and at what personal cost? Scholars who develop cross-disciplinary identities can bear professional anxieties due to lack of fit within traditional structures, and feelings that their expertise and contributions are not recognised and valued (Lattuca 2001; Pfirman and Martin 2017; Holley 2024) along with the additional emotional labour of constantly reconstructing their academic identities over time and according to their context/audience (Lyall 2019).

Fundamental, structural challenges are endemic within the current research system for those who follow the interdisciplinary route. If universities are to develop effective interdisciplinarity, this requires a whole-institution approach in order to overcome the many academic and administrative barriers that exist. At present, it is more straightforward for universities to simply adopt the flagship institute mentality. Doing inter- and transdisciplinarity better requires academia to rethink our value systems and reconsider research governance at various levels.

While there may not be one single step change that would discourage universities from adopting this tokenistic ‘policy mascot’ approach ¹⁴ (Vienni-Baptista and Lyall in press), research institutions and policy makers could do more to facilitate interdisciplinary research careers: inter alia a new professionalisation and recognition of inter- and transdisciplinary skills, consistent funding pathways as well as training and developmental support across the academic life course. Interdisciplinarians continue to receive mixed messages about when to ‘become interdisciplinary’ (British Academy 2016; Lyall 2019) which calls for more explicit strategic career planning and support after graduation and beyond (Melander et al. 2025) and, in turn, necessitates the provision of role models, mentors and champions (Dupin 2023; Dupin and Lyall 2024).