Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Theory and Practice across Disciplines

By Scott Frickel, Barbara Prainsack, Helga Nowotny and 20 more

Interdisciplinarity has become a buzzword in academia, as research universities funnel their financial resources toward collaborations between faculty in different disciplines. In theory, interdisciplinary collaboration breaks down artificial divisions between different departments, allowing more innovative and sophisticated research to flourish. But does it actually work this way in practice?     Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration puts the common beliefs about such research to the test, using empirical data gathered by scholars from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. The book’s contributors critically interrogate the assumptions underlying the fervor for interdisciplinarity. Their attentive scholarship reveals how, for all its potential benefits, interdisciplinary collaboration is neither immune to academia’s status hierarchies, nor a simple antidote to the alleged shortcomings of disciplinary study. 

Chapter 10 is available Open Access here (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK395883)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Nov 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9780813585901

Book preview

Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration

The American Campus

Harold S. Wechsler, Series Editor

The books in the American Campus series explore recent developments and public policy issues in higher education in the United States. Topics of interest include access to college, and college affordability; college retention; tenure and academic freedom; campus labor; the expansion and evolution of administrative posts and salaries; the crisis in the humanities and the arts; the corporate university and for-profit colleges; online education; controversy in sport programs; and gender, ethnic, racial, religious, and class dynamics and diversity. Books feature scholarship from a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed, eds., A New Deal for the Humanities: Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education

Adrianna Kezar and Daniel Maxey, eds., Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century: Moving to a Mission-Oriented and Learner-Centered Model

Scott Frickel, Mathieu Albert, and Barbara Prainsack, eds., Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Theory and Practice across Disciplines

Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Theory and Practice across Disciplines

Edited by

Scott Frickel, Mathieu Albert, and Barbara Prainsack

Prologue by Helga Nowotny

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

This publication was supported in part by the Eleanor J. and Jason F. Dreibelbis Fund.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Frickel, Scott, editor. | Albert, Mathieu, 1959- editor. | Prainsack, Barbara, editor.

Title: Investigating interdisciplinary collaboration : theory and practice across disciplines / edited by Scott Frickel, Mathieu Albert, and Barbara Prainsack ; foreword by Helga Nowotny.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 2016. | Series: The American campus | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016008282| ISBN 9780813585895 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813585888 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813585901 (e-book (epub)) | ISBN 9780813585918 (e-book (web pdf))

Subjects: LCSH: Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge. | Interdisciplinary approach in education. | Interdisciplinary research.

Classification: LCC BD255 .I65 2016 | DDC 001--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008282

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2017 by Rutgers, The State University

Individual chapters copyright © 2017 in the names of their authors

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue: The Messiness of Real-World Solutions

Helga Nowotny

Introduction: Investigating Interdisciplinarities

Scott Frickel, Mathieu Albert, and Barbara Prainsack

Part I: Interdisciplinary Cultures And Careers

Chapter 1. New Directions, New Challenges: Trials and Tribulations of Interdisciplinary Research

David McBee and Erin Leahey

Chapter 2. The Frictions of Interdisciplinarity: The Case of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery

Gregory J. Downey, Noah Weeth Feinstein, Daniel Lee Kleinman, Sigrid Peterson, and Chisato Fukuda

Chapter 3. Epistemic Cultures of Collaboration: Coherence and Ambiguity in Interdisciplinarity

Laurel Smith-Doerr, Jennifer Croissant, Itai Vardi, and Timothy Sacco

Chapter 4. Interdisciplinary Fantasy: Social Scientists and Humanities Scholars Working in Faculties of Medicine

Mathieu Albert, Elise Paradis, and Ayelet Kuper

Part II: Disciplines And Interdisciplinarity

Chapter 5. Some Dark Sides of Interdisciplinarity: The Case of Behavior Genetics

Aaron Panofsky

Chapter 6. A Dynamic, Multidimensional Approach to Knowledge Production

Ryan Light and jimi adams

Chapter 7. Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Change in Six Social Sciences: A Longitudinal Comparison

Scott Frickel and Ali O. Ilhan

Part III: Changing Context Of Interdisciplinary Research

Chapter 8. An Electro-Historical Focus with Real Interdisciplinary Appeal: Interdisciplinarity at Vietnam-Era Stanford

Cyrus C. M. Mody

Chapter 9. Interdisciplinarity Reloaded? Drawing Lessons from Citizen Science

Barbara Prainsack and Hauke Riesch

Chapter 10. One Medicine? Advocating (Inter)disciplinarity at the Interfaces of Animal Health, Human Health, and the Environment

Angela Cassidy

Notes on Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

This book emerged out of several years of observing, analyzing, and discussing the workings of interdisciplinarity in our own lives as well as the lives of our colleagues, friends, and students. For some of us, interdisciplinarity has changed the institutions we work in, and affected our own practices and priorities. For all three of us, the political dimensions of interdisciplinarity in particular have been an area that we have sought to explore further, and in collaboration with others who have different perspectives and experiences. This desire to dig deeper into what drives interdisciplinarity, and how it drives academic collaboration, led to the conception of this volume. We are grateful to all contributors to this volume for their enthusiastic and, in fact, very disciplined collaboration. We also thank David Tobe for help with the index and Joseph Dahm for fantastic copyediting. Finally, heartfelt thanks go to our editors at Rutgers University Press, Leslie Mitchner, Katie Keeran, and—down the long home stretch—Kimberly Guinta and Kristen Bonanno, for their support and guidance.

Scott Frickel, Mathieu Albert, and Barbara Prainsack

Providence, Toronto, and London

Prologue

The Messiness of Real-World Solutions

Helga Nowotny

In recent times hardly a concept has enjoyed so much popular consensus across a wide range of different funding agencies, university administrators, policy makers, politicians, and the media as the idea of interdisciplinarity in research. A vast literature exists that has delved into the various dimensions believed to contribute, if not to constitute, the elusive aim of bringing together the right kind of available scientific knowledge with the necessary and practical know-how in view of solving a concrete problem. Exploring how interdisciplinary research can live up to this task covers an enormous variety of actual scientific and technological practices, operating in very different organizational and institutional contexts across a vast scientific landscape. It includes the epistemological dimension when subtle and intricate encounters occur between different disciplines. It does not overlook the temporal dimension in the description of the emergence of a new discipline out of seemingly nowhere, combining theoretical, instrumental, and methodological know-how of existing disciplines or of merging subdisciplinary fields. Yet, when asking why, despite the richness of the existing literature, relatively little progress toward interdisciplinarity in research has actually been achieved, a sense of defiant disappointment sets in.

Somewhat unusual, the focus of a major part of this literature is therefore devoted to examining failures. The more attention is given to obstacles and the barriers that appear to prevent interdisciplinary research to flourish, the more urgent a link is established between their description and a call for action. What is singled out may be peer review and the admitted difficulties in coping with the evaluation of interdisciplinary research projects or the real or alleged conservatism of discipline-centered academic gatekeepers and institutions. It may be that those who want to promote interdisciplinarity grossly underestimate the time needed to find a common language and to provide other facilitating conditions for cross-disciplinary engagement. Whatever obstacles are identified, the link between them and the appeal for their removal are so striking that this has become an interesting phenomenon in itself.

Maybe this blatant gap between ideal and practice, between the vision and belief that interdisciplinarity yields better results and the sobering inquiry into the obstacles that prevent it from happening, tells us something about the perceived disconnect between the often referred to real-world problems and the capacity of science to respond in an adequate and expected way. The manifold, messy, and complex problems of society for which we turn toward science and technology to provide solutions obviously do not translate easily into the kind of problem solving that drives scientific activity. If such a diagnosis is correct, the call for interdisciplinarity in research would function as a placeholder of an ideal, although highly simplified, vision of the relationship between science and society. The widespread imaginary of interdisciplinarity as producing better science and better solutions for society would be nothing but a proxy object—unattainable and elusive, yet persistent as long as the aspirations, dreams, and misunderstandings that underpin it are not analyzed, named, and rendered visible. We might have to concede that the unbroken faith into more interdisciplinary research is nothing but a well-intended, if desperate, call for action: to open up science for the real needs and problems that societies face. As such, it has preceded and continues to exist alongside other attempts that point in the same direction. Among them are more recent programs and manifestos like Responsible Research and Innovation and movements like Open Access and citizen science.

But one can also take a more sober view of the same phenomenon. Funding agencies, acting on behalf of governments as the ultimate political authority to allocate taxpayers’ money, see it as their mission and responsibility to make sure that the research they fund will actually deliver results for society that can be measured and be accounted for. The pressure toward accountability and what is now called societal impact has increased considerably. Ex-ante and ex-post assessments have become more refined with greater reliance on metrics and other quantitative indicators. Seen from the perspective of funding agencies, administrators, and policy makers, the likelihood of increasing the return from research with high benefits for society—which often translates into academic research contributing faster and with more direct impact toward innovation and economic growth—is greater when scientific knowledge and know-how are being pooled. Only connect is a seductive formula also for facilitating more collaboration across the implicated disciplines and institutions and, more generally, between academia, industry, and business. None of this can be accomplished through working within disciplinary boundaries only.

The reaction as well as anticipation on behalf of researchers and the academic community is at least threefold. Partly, the demands of funding agencies are in resonance with their own experience. Researchers know very well that novel approaches, often introduced through new research technologies and instrumentation coming directly out of the lab, can transform a research field by opening up completely new vistas and opportunities. They are aware that innovative ideas in research often occur at the interface of disciplinary or subdisciplinary paradigms and approaches. They highly value the role played by serendipity in research, the unexpected discovery of new phenomena or connections one was not looking for and yet realizes their significance. It is in the very nature of serendipity that it is not bound to disciplines nor does it respect other institutional and circumstantial constraints. Experience tells the scientific community that the likelihood for any of these boosts in creativity to happen often increases by talking to people outside their own area and specialty. At the same time, they know that this is only the beginning. A long and arduous road lies ahead, and no certainty is ever guaranteed for the outcome.

Then, there is the skepticism among researchers against certain forms of interdisciplinarity, equally rooted in experience. They are intimately aware of the difficulties of assessing the scientific quality of research projects that claim to be interdisciplinary. After all, peer review, with all the admitted weaknesses and faults, remains the daily life blood of doing science. They know about the widespread feeling among their peers that interdisciplinary research is often looked down upon as somehow lower in quality. This may be nothing but prejudice, but as long as it persists, it makes them wary to guide their PhD students and postdocs toward career paths where they are likely to encounter such prejudice.

Finally, there is the realistic assessment that science as a whole is moving in the direction of more and larger collaborations. Researchers know that the quantity of multiple-authored scientific publications is on the rise and that it correlates with higher citations. The internationalization of science is also greatly favored by the recognition that many of the most urgent societal challenges, from climate change to the eradication of poverty, from effectively fighting new epidemics to continuing work on healthy aging, can be tackled only by multidisciplinary, multinational, and multifunded forms of collaboration. Yet, many questions remain of how to best organize such and other desirable as well as necessary forms of collaboration. Here, issues of what is genuine interdisciplinarity and what are multi-, cross-, trans-, or other forms of collaboration and how to set up conditions that favor and facilitate them return with a high policy-relevant urgency.

It is precisely at this junction of very different strands of inquiry into interdisciplinary research where the value of a fresh, critical look enters. Trying to make sense of these issues by carefully analyzing interdisciplinary research with a distant, yet engaged approach is the goal that the contributors to this volume strive to achieve. Coming mostly from a background in the social sciences and inspired by an STS (science and technology studies) approach, they are well equipped to cast the empirical net of inquiry across a wide range of interdisciplinary research. They are ultrasensitive to the differences in organizational and institutional context in which it is situated and well attuned to take a temporal, historical dimension on board. They can draw upon a rich tradition of social theory that allows them to delve into the manifold practices of interdisciplinary research. They are determined to scrutinize the different strategies and purposes—including the deliberate instrumentalization of interdisciplinary research—that practitioners, funders, and policy makers deploy. They are in a good position to carefully compare what otherwise remains fragmented.

The volume has the potential of putting interdisciplinary research into a larger frame of the ongoing transformation of the scientific enterprise. These processes span the macro level in the form of the ongoing globalization of science with its trends toward more collaborative ventures, as well the inner dynamics of different fields operating at the micro level. This includes the social sciences and humanities. A larger picture allows scholars to focus on the emergence of novel forms of how science is organized and organizes itself under the growing pressure of delivering faster and more tangible results and benefits. The necessity of including the social sciences and humanities in ways that are still to be determined becomes clear if problems and challenges are to be tackled at the real-world scale with its inherent messiness.

The time may have come for a more honest and critically sharpened view of interdisciplinary research, one that is better grounded in the continuously evolving relationship between science and society. If this can be achieved, policy makers, funding agencies, and governments may gain a better and more realistic understanding of what is actually at stake, while initiating another major step in the responsiveness of science toward societal needs and problems.

Introduction

Investigating Interdisciplinarities

Scott Frickel, Mathieu Albert, and Barbara Prainsack

In the past decade, a resounding call for interdisciplinary research—understood as collaborations between researchers across academic disciplines—has risen from virtually every corner of the academy and beyond (e.g., Canadian Institutes of Health Research 2009; European Commission 2014; National Institutes of Health 2007; Harvard University 2006; National Academy of Sciences 2005). Echoing through university faculty and administrations, funding agencies, and policy domains, this call is grounded in the assumption that interdisciplinary research generates more nuanced and robust understandings of the social and natural world than knowledge emerging from within traditional disciplines, and that it will lead to more innovative or more holistic solutions to real-world problems (Hadorn et al. 2010; Klein 1990; National Science Foundation 2011). Programmatic statements such as these often cast interdisciplinarity as an antidote to the limitations of disciplinary knowledge and as a panacea for the myriad problems facing our societies and our planet.

Such arguments are extended and reinforced by pressures and incentives originating within and outside the academic field (Albert and McGuire 2014). Political and economic interests in the promotion of interdisciplinary research and scholarship loom large. Governments are adopting pro-interdisciplinary innovation policies to stimulate national economic competitiveness (Albert and Laberge 2007; Weingart 2000; Woelert and Millard 2013). Funding mechanisms are being restructured or newly created to encourage researchers from different fields to engage in problem-solving research and to collaborate with nonacademic stakeholders from industry, government, and civil society (see European Commission 2014; National Institutes of Health 2007). Topic-centered programs, institutes, and schools are emerging, many with the aim to train the next generation of highly qualified problem-solvers (University of Toronto 2015). Amid this flurry of institutional rebranding and reorganization, a rapidly growing body of academic scholarship implicitly or explicitly celebrates these developments (e.g., Frodeman et al. 2010; Klein 2010b; Öberg 2009; Repko 2012).

We think that these celebratory accounts give insufficient analytical attention to the insistent and sustained push from administrators, policy makers, and funding agencies to engineer new research collaborations across disciplines. In our view, the stakes of these efforts to seed interdisciplinary research and teaching from above are sufficiently high to warrant a rigorous empirical examination of the academic and social value of interdisciplinarity. Yet to date, such an empirically informed case for interdisciplinarity—one that can withstand serious empirical scrutiny from different theoretical vantage points—has not been made.

Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration is premised on what we see as a pressing need for more rigorous empirical analysis of political and institutional support for interdisciplinarity, and the effects that interdisciplinary collaborations have on researchers, students, organizations, and knowledge. The book arises from our shared concern that, to date, much of the extant work on interdisciplinarity misses or overlooks the complexity of interdisciplinary politics and the social heterogeneity of interdisciplinary practices. This literature is often guided by narrowly framed research questions pointed at the problem of how interdisciplinary research collaborations are accomplished. The welter of studies describing the communication challenges researchers encounter in the context of short-term interdisciplinary collaborations or team science is just one example (Heemskerk et al. 2003; Stokols et al. 2008; Thompson 2009; Winowiecki et al. 2011; Callard and Fitzgerald 2015). While gaining leverage on how problem-focused collaborations overcome technical language barriers is important, its significance as a program of research is limited by the absence of a broader set of inquiries into the institutional conditions that influence success or failure of team science. What makes team science across disciplines desirable in the first place? What political, economic, and societal values underlie its promotion?

Interdisciplinary collaborations occur not in a social vacuum but within institutional settings that shape relationships between researchers, disciplines, theory traditions, and methodologies. Understanding interdisciplinary collaboration thus requires moving beyond a narrowly focused interactionist perspective. Instead we need to be attentive to power relations and status hierarchies between disciplines and knowledge areas, expectations of funders and administrators, and struggles for scientific authority. Detailed analyses of the epistemic foundations, institutional moorings, policy impacts, and social costs and benefits of interdisciplinarity are the best way to make cogent assessments of the reorganization of academic knowledge currently underway. Such analyses are essential for understanding why there is so much pressure on research institutions and individual researchers to embrace interdisciplinarity, and to understand the broader and longer-term implications that this pressure is having on research and education landscapes.

One of the missions of this book, then, is to begin to provide a closer and much needed empirical assessment of interdisciplinary research as practiced in Britain, Canada, and the United States. The ten chapters in this volume present perspectives from anthropology, history, political science, science studies, and sociology. These perspectives also reflect the academic contexts and work environments of our authors, ranging from traditional disciplinary departments to various interdisciplinary programs, institutes, schools and faculties. As the Notes on Contributors section attests, many of us have appointments in, or affiliations with, more than one discipline. The nature of such jobs requires that we maintain dual positions in the academic field, with one foot planted in the bedrock of traditional disciplinary departments and the other foot treading across less stable interdisciplinary terrain. Thus we come to our investigations of interdisciplinary research as practitioners of the same. Our skepticism is, we argue, a healthy one in that it is born from lived experiences of developing interdisciplinary organizations, practices, and sensibilities. We think this is entirely appropriate to the task we have set for ourselves in the pages that follow.

In the remainder of this introduction we sketch a critique of social scientific studies of interdisciplinary research. Our critique is informed, first, by consideration of some different ways to characterize the sprawling body of more than eighteen hundred books, chapters, articles, essays, editorials, and reviews that emerge from a title search for interdisciplinarity in Google Scholar that we conducted at the time of this writing. Much of this literature advocates for interdisciplinary research; it also tends toward ideological treatment of the subject. Neither is particularly helpful in understanding what interdisciplinarity is or why we need it.

Subsequently we will unpack three basic assumptions that underlie the slimmer body of work on interdisciplinarity emanating from the social sciences. These assumptions are, first, that interdisciplinary knowledge is better than disciplinary knowledge; second, that disciplines are silos that constrain the free development of interdisciplinary knowledge; and third, that interdisciplinary interactions are unconstrained by the status hierarchies and power asymmetries that operate within disciplines. Our concern with these assumptions is not that they are necessarily wrong, but that researchers too often take them for granted. This, we believe, has impeded systematic critical reflection and close empirical examination of the political values underpinning calls for interdisciplinarity.

Our position on these issues has important implications. Since the benefit of interdisciplinarity is also taken for granted in policy circles, decisions encouraging interdisciplinarity are often made based on faith more than on evidence. This has created a situation where funding bodies and other institutions have committed to an ideal that has various unintended consequences, such as negative effects on careers of interdisciplinary scholars, or the longer term effects of the interdisciplinary reorganization of research institutions and universities (see, e.g., chapters in this volume by Albert et al., McBee and Leahey, and Mody). By critically addressing these and other gaps in the current understanding, our hope is that this book will provide the kind of systematic social knowledge policy makers need to craft effective interdisciplinary research and education policy. Contributors to this volume begin this work by making one or more of these assumptions explicit.

Mapping Interdisciplinary Landscapes

The body of scholarly writing that covers interdisciplinary research is vast. Developed by researchers from dozens of fields and subfields, this sprawling literature addresses a wide range of topics from various perspectives; it is written for different purposes and for diverse audiences. Rather than attempt a comprehensive summary of this material, it may be more helpful to consider some ways to more selectively map different features of this large and complex body of work.

Ecologies of Interdisciplinary Knowledge

One way to organize this material is to map interdisciplinarity through the lens of an ecology of knowledge (Rosenberg 1979). This approach would aim to identify interrelationships considered constitutive of interdisciplinary work in particular fields or broader institutional domains. Doing so is relatively straightforward because so many people who write about interdisciplinarity do so from within the context of one or another discipline or area of research—most often their own. As a result, it is possible to identify concentrated pockets of scholarly writing and research on, say, interdisciplinarity and its impacts in education (Davies et al. 2010; Hall and Weaver 2001; Lattuca 2001), sociology (Calhoun and Rhoten 2010; Christie and Maton 2011), or environmental studies (Lélé and Norgaard 2005; Phillipson et al. 2009; Strang 2009). Other scholars have taken on larger swaths of academic terrain, writing on interdisciplinarity across broad institutional domains such as the natural and social sciences (Barry and Born 2013; MacMynowski 2007; Callard and Fitzgerald 2015), the humanities (Klein 2005), or higher education studies (Brint 2005; Brint et al. 2009; Graff 2015). Research problems attract similar levels of concentrated writing and research activity. Thus we find interdisciplinary perspectives on issues of widespread social concern such as climate change (Bhaskar et al. 2010), social justice (Parker et al. 2010), or medical education (Hodges and Lingard 2013).

Mapping the ecological relations among different pockets of scholarly writing and research about interdisciplinary research can be a valuable way to proceed. For example, this approach could tell us a great deal about the distribution of academic interest in interdisciplinarity as a topic of study. It could also tell us something about how interdisciplinary practices might vary from one domain to the next or about how different domain-based practices are changing in relation to one another.

Phases and Aspects of Interdisciplinary Knowledge Creation

A second strategy for mapping the field is to focus on substantive areas of topical research that fall within the broad scope of interdisciplinarity. When academics conduct research on interdisciplinarity, what specifically do they study? While there are many ways to measure topical popularity or attention, most top ten lists would likely include studies of the epistemological status of interdisciplinary knowledge (e.g., Fuller 2004; Froderman 2014; Weingart 2000); structural and cultural barriers to interdisciplinary programs, research, and careers (e.g., Rhoten and Pfirman 2006; Miller et al. 2008; Sá 2007; Jacob and Prainsack 2010; Prainsack et al. 2010); interdisciplinary research activities (Albert et al. 2015; Dewulf et al. 2007; Rafols 2007); emergent standards of evaluation (e.g., Albert et al. this volume; Huutoniemi 2012; Laudel 2001; Laudel and Origgi 2006; Mallard et al. 2009; Lamont et al. 2006; Lamont 2009); and the emergence and institutionalization of interdisciplinary fields (e.g., Frickel 2004b; Panofsky 2011; Rojas 2007).

This approach can provide a studied sense of what is known about interdisciplinary research, broadly construed. With such a map, we could begin to understand the extent of the heterogeneity of epistemic cultures contributing to interdisciplinary knowledge and how these are multiplied or refracted through interdisciplinary settings. This approach might also tell us something about the politics of interdisciplinarity studies to the extent that a map of interdisciplinary research topics encourages critical examination of their uneven distribution or why some topics receive less attention than others.

Finding and Mining the Gaps

A third approach to categorizing the literature is to examine research in relation to the untested or taken-for-granted assumptions that underlie knowledge claims and policy recommendations pertaining to interdisciplinarity (Jacobs and Frickel 2009). This is the mapping approach we pursue in more detail in the following section. We do so because it allows us to find and mine extant knowledge gaps—epistemic absences that unnecessarily constrain how we think about, study, and conduct interdisciplinary research.

From a practicality standpoint, an examination of underlying assumptions can help make visible the epistemic machinery (Knorr Cetina 1999) of interdisciplinarity studies. It helps us identify conceptual ambiguities that can impede understanding and theory development—the frequent conflation of interdisciplinarity with applied research is just one example. It can also shed light on the field’s commitments to different methods and tools of analysis. In short, making visible the unwritten assumptions built into a field of research can provide important insight into the kinds of knowledge fields do and do not produce.

From a politics of knowledge standpoint, consideration of a field’s underlying assumptions can help us better understand how ideas about interdisciplinarity emerging from extant studies are used to advance various intellectual and political projects and subvert others (Frickel and Gross 2005). Calls for interdisciplinary research in the academy are not a novelty of the past decades (Abbott 2001), but the increased scale and prominence of such calls today certainly invites sustained and systematic attention to the politics of interdisciplinarity as an important development in contemporary intellectual movements. What explains the current institutional and political appeal of interdisciplinarity? What is the reason for the unrivaled popularity of interdisciplinary discourse and policy? Is the emergence of this intellectual movement connected historically to other political and social movements? What do top-down interdisciplinary policies tell us about the maintenance or loss of academic autonomy in the face of mounting political and market pressures? We argue that important aspects of dominant understandings and prescriptions of how interdisciplinary research should be done, what purposes it should serve, and why researchers should get involved with it are rooted in three important assumptions that underlie calls and incentives for interdisciplinary research (and remain unexamined in much of the scholarship on interdisciplinarity). To these we turn next.

Assumptions about Interdisciplinary Research

In this section we describe three interrelated assumptions that are implicit in the literature on interdisciplinarity. Each of these assumptions plays a significant role in justifying the creation of interdisciplinary knowledge, research centers, and policies, yet each also remains understudied. These lacunae we believe limit the authority of interdisciplinarity as an intellectual movement and may endanger the academic and scientific institutions the movement claims it can strengthen.

Interdisciplinary Knowledge Is Better Knowledge

Sifting through the body of work on interdisciplinarity one is likely to encounter the idea that interdisciplinary research leads to knowledge that is superior to knowledge identified as not interdisciplinary. Indeed, this assumption is widespread and rarely contested (e.g., see National Academy of Sciences 2005; Canadian Institutes of Health Research 2009; European Union 2010; Hall et al. 2006; Hadorn et al. 2010). Recently interdisciplinarity has also been promoted as a way to increase public accountability (Huutoniemi 2015), or seen to enhance the impact of academic work (Larivière et al. 2015). The latter is particularly interesting in light of the operationalization of impact as an assessment criterion in the national research evaluation framework in the United Kingdom,