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Strategically Unclear? Organising Interdisciplinarity in an Excellence Programme of Interdisciplinary Research in Denmark

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Abstract

While interdisciplinarity is not a new concept, the political and discursive mobilisation of interdisciplinarity is. Since the 1990s, this movement has intensified, and this has affected central funding bodies so that interdisciplinarity is now a de facto requirement in successful grant application. As a result, the literature is ripe with definitions, taxonomies, discussions and other attempts to grasp and define the concept of interdisciplinarity. In this paper, we explore how strategic demands for interdisciplinarity meet, interact with and change local research practices and results of higher education and research. Our aim is to question and trace the consequences of applying the slippery and difficult term interdisciplinarity in research. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish interdisciplinary research programme, where we observed and analysed practices of writing, publishing, collaboration and educational development in five different research projects. We show how the call for interdisciplinarity was mobilised in a way that rendered the incentives and motives behind the programme unclear. Furthermore, we argue that the absence of clear definitions and assessment criteria produced a dominant, all-inclusive, but vague, configuration of interdisciplinarity that affected the research outcome, and ultimately, promoted and reproduced the existing monodisciplinary research and power structures.

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Notes

  1. Throughout the paper, the excerpts from our empirical material are thus only referenced with context and position level.

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Acknowledgements

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork that was made possible by grants from the University of Copenhagen’s Excellence Programme for Interdisciplinary Research. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the members of the research projects involved, and of the individual respondents who contributed to the research. Thanks also to Professor Catherine Lyall and Dr Erika Szymanski for sharing ideas, comments and suggestions throughout the writing process. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for constructively engaging with our work.

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  1. Department of Science Education, Faculty of Science, University of Copenhagen, Øster Voldgade 3, 1350, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Katrine Lindvig

  2. Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5, 1353, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Line Hillersdal

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  1. Katrine Lindvig
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Correspondence to Katrine Lindvig.

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Lindvig, K., Hillersdal, L. Strategically Unclear? Organising Interdisciplinarity in an Excellence Programme of Interdisciplinary Research in Denmark. Minerva 57, 23–46 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-018-9361-5

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