Interdisciplinary research is demanding, unsettling, and transformative—otherwise it fails

1 Interdisciplinary research is demanding, unsettling, and transformative—otherwise it fails Shumon T. Hussain Cologne, 15.11.2025 I think of myself as a highly interdisciplinary—perhaps even transdisciplinary (in the sense of breaking up “disciplined” ways of thinking about doing research)—academic, scholar and scientist; and yes, for me at least, interdisciplinarity is worth investing into, it is rewarding, often produces better and more relevant research, and successful interdisciplinarity has a unique capacity to push and re-define the boundaries of knowledge—succeeding interdisciplinarity, even if controversially so, furnishes one of the “holy grails” of the academic world. Yet we must also be candid and clear: interdisciplinarity unfortunately mostly fails. I have been involved in many collaborative, self-declared “interdisciplinary” research projects, and I have talked to many colleagues and friends about their involvements, and rarely do these project appear to produce truly “interdisciplinary” insights and outputs—those that do not merely speak to, and variously feed back into, debates and literatures of specific disciplines, but instead showcase ways of thinking and working across those disciplines. In my experience, this is largely because interdisciplinarity is still too often understood through the metaphor of a puzzle with n distinct puzzle pieces, where n is the number of the involved disciplines and/or sub-disciplinary specializations. The principal task of interdisciplinarity, in this view, then, consists above all of aligning the respectively given pieces in such a way that an intelligible whole can emerge that offers more than any of its individual, constitutive pieces (the individual disciplines/specializations) could bring to the table on their own. Two points are central here: i) interdisciplinarity is construed primarily as a collaborative task—as finding ways of relating, aligning and matching what is already there, and which therefore is, so to speak, ready to be deployed more or less as is; and ii) interdisciplinarity is thought of, and as such consequently mostly practiced, as if it would chiefly pose a mereological problem— individual disciplines or their resources (data, methods, theories) are the functional “parts” and the combination and/or recombination of these parts produces interdisciplinary “wholes”. I believe this understanding, and its associated vision of how to actually do interdisciplinary research, is not only misleading, it also explains why most interdisciplinarity fails. The core issue is the additive logic that underpins such understandings of interdisciplinarity and the circumstance that they conceal the actual challenges of interdisciplinary research, which always have to do with leaving, or least redrawing, disciplinary routines and certainties. The inescapable challenge of successful interdisciplinarity—in contrast to mere “multidisciplinarity” for example (see e.g., Padberg 2014; Alvargonzález 2011; Klein 2010)—is its definitional transformative requirements, transpiring across the scales and contexts of crossdisciplinary interaction; this importantly pertains not only to the involved disciplinary constellations themselves, but equally so to each of the involved individual researchers. Interdisciplinarity calls upon everybody to rethink and change one’s scholarly pursuit (incrementally and/or “revolutionarily”)—what one does, how one thinks, what questions one asks, etc. This irreducible transformative impetus also makes this endeavor extraordinarily challenging and difficult. Interdisciplinarity can thus only be successful, I argue, when it starts with those being involved (we cannot hide behind disciplines)—it is conditional on the openness and willingness of each of us to become something else, to rework the boundaries and assumptions powering one’s idea of self as a researcher, and to work towards a new type 2 of researcher, scholar, intellectual and/or scientist altogether (one that is not found (yet) in specific disciplines). Interdisciplinarity therefore requires dedicated “cross-discipline work” on behalf of everybody involved; it is not enough to simply arrive with one’s disciplinary socialization and inheritance, to merely sit with others at the same table, and/or to discuss problems that concern more than a single discipline. This is precisely the mode bound to fail. What is needed instead, I propose, is a cultivation of interdisciplinary competences including what may be termed “interdisciplinary literacy”—the ability to meaningfully speak to researchers from other research backgrounds, to understand their positionalities and practices, to translate concepts, methods and data as well as their significances across different research contexts, and to take on some of their lessons in one’s own work. Interdisciplinary literacy is the ability to navigate a complex landscape of research epistemologies, knowledges and resources and to relatively comfortably engage with disciplinary others. Such literacy needs to be acquired, and it requires substantial time investment and hard work; for example to read other literatures (as broad as possible) and to follow and analyze developments in other fields. Interdisciplinary research can be immensely awarding and emancipatory, but it asks something from us in return—it is no automatism and it is incredibly hard to master. This diagnosis draws attention to two common issues I see with interdisciplinary research, especially when working across major epistemological divisions within the academic world (both in the sciences and the humanities). The first is the idea, often cast as self-evident and hence rarely subject to critical scrutiny, that interdisciplinary research is all about integration— typically of data and methods—across the range of involved disciplines. Integration in this sense typically appeals to the alleged additive logic of interdisciplinary research described above and responds to the intuition that interdisciplinarity is primarily about drawing together what we know. But this compilatory or synthetic impetus is hardly the principal domain of interdisciplinary research—let alone the reason why we aspire to engage with and promote interdisciplinarity in the first place. In fact, integration often proves to be impossible—at least in its naive, juxtapositional guise—and this has to do with the basic fact that research epistemologies can vary substantially even within disciplines and that different research ventures frequently mobilize vastly different understandings of “data” and how to analyze and interpret such data. To insist on one particular way of going about these issues inescapably yields a hegemonic, quasi-imperialist impetus and thus threatens to undermine the very project of interdisciplinarity before it has even started (we extend the standards of one or more disciplines into other disciplinary domains which are then allowed to do new research “at our grace” or “mercy”). This brings me directly to the second issue I regularly see jeopardizing interdisciplinarity: pervasive yet typically unrecognized double standards of what to expect from those we supposedly wish to collaborate with in interdisciplinary ambition. A double standard occurs when the same principle is applied unevenly or in a fairly one-sided manner across those participating in the target interdisciplinary project. A classic example is the very insistence that disciplinary others need to change in some relevant way to facilitate effective cross-disciplinary collaboration, but such necessity to change is not applied to oneself as well. Take for example the rhetorics of providing and integrating “data”, which is encountered again and again in large cross-faculty projects such as HESCOR that attempt to facilitate research across the sciences and the humanities. Such demands are typically onesided, and they often do not even care to mirror the expectations on the other side. Research from a “scientific” outlook is defined by its data-driven character and “human” or “humanities data” is therefore called for. But even if such “data” is provided or the involved humanities disciplines work hard to “data-fy” their observations—as data in the sense of the sciences has not necessarily the same status in the humanities—expectations of the humanities are in my experience rarely given the same attention. Instead of being “data-driven” as most sciences are, 3 many humanities fields are “concept-driven” and research only lives up to high standards if it is made transparent what assumptions researchers buy into and whether it is justified to do so. By constructing and digesting “data” in specific ways, we already make assumptions about the world as well as close-off particular ways of learning about it and accruing knowledge. Yet such conceptual transparency and adequacy (in light of state-of-the-art concept analyses and debates) is rarely taken to be a benchmark for the contributions the sciences bring to the table in interdisciplinary projects. From a “humanities” perspective, the core problem, in my view, is therefore often not so much the use of mathematical equations or numerical models per se, but their conceptual naivety and intransparency and their frequently unanalyzed assumptions. But should we not expect that key concerns ought to play a role in calibrating interdisciplinary work in both directions? Would it not be fair to conclude that the datafication of the humanities should go hand in hand with rigorous conceptual self-analysis in the sciences? It would then be part of the responsibility of the sciences to for example offer models and quantitative toolkits that are adapted to the conceptual requirements and expectations that emerge from the confrontation with the humanities, in the same way as the datafied humanities respond to some of the requirements and expectations emanating from the engagement with the sciences. I would like to call this the parity principle of interdisciplinary work and argue that without respecting and continuously negotiating it, interdisciplinarity cannot be successful. To enact the parity principle across different disciplinary constellations and in the face of varying research problems and challenges requires interdisciplinary literacy in the sense outlined above. Asking representatives of specific disciplines to “explain” what their discipline is all about cannot do the trick. Ironically, in many cases (and strongly backed up by my own experience), such practice all-too-often reinforces disciplinary stereotypes and forces disciplinary practices in a simplified straight-jacket. This is precisely not what we want to achieve through interdisciplinarity. We want to mobilize disciplines in such a way that they can bring in their full creative and innovative potential, perhaps especially perspectives, potentials and ideas not yet fully developed in the partaking disciplines or currently honed at their fringes or outside of the “mainstream”. To facilitate a truly cutting-edge encounter of disciplines within a shared problem context, I maintain, therefore demands from us all that a basic familiarization among disciplines has already taken place and is continuously worked on. To do so remains a fundamental homework of everybody involved and is a task never completed. This brings us squarely back to the critique of integration. Instead of the static vision of different disciplines coming together and throwing their insights into the same cooking pot in order to somehow (miraculously) brew a game-changing magic potion (the Getafix (Ger. Miraculix) illusion of much practiced interdisciplinarity), we need a dynamic vision of different disciplines co-adapting their way of working and thinking as they take serious and continuously engage with each other in order to re-make themselves to create something new altogether (such as types of scholarship and disciplinarity that do not yet exist). Instead of integration, we therefore need transgression in the service of cross-disciplinary transformation. Transgression orients interdisciplinary work away from what one considers certainties or “normal” ways of doing things (e.g., Thomas Kuhn’s ([1962] 2020) “normal science”), away from how things are to how things could be otherwise—to the unique potentials of interdisciplinary encounter and interaction. Again, the contentious issue of “data” is a point in case. Ideally, I would argue, cross-disciplinary encounters that honestly and self-critically work towards interdisciplinarity also reconfigure the very standards and formats of data, what sort of data is needed and why, and how we might need to reasonably analyze such data in the nascent field of interdisciplinarity research in question. The new type of scholarship and scientificity curated through such engagement, in other words, might also change how we observe what we want to study. The HESCOR project is a powerful illustration of this, as 4 engaging with an Earth system perspective can change how we look at human agency, what we consider planetary-scale human data and arguably also what is evidence for human-Earth system coupling. But acknowledging this also means that the involved sciences have to adapt their handling of data accordingly and it may mean that not all of their data is useful or relevant anymore (and, relatedly, that they, too, need to find new ways of observing and datafying). This is why successful interdisciplinarity is likely earmarked by its capacity to generate disciplinetranspiring and - transcending novelty, and this is true even if we are (and rightly so) skeptical about the tendency to fetishize innovation and novelty in contemporary research. To conclude, I agree with the principal point recently put forward by Simon and Thomas (2022), namely that the purview of Earth system science and one of its main challenges—the incorporation of historical human agency—provides exhilarating potential to re-articulate “human” and “Earth” sciences in unprecedented ways, and thus to heed productive, pathbreaking interdisciplinarity in this key research space. Yet at the same time, following the argumentation outlined above, such interdisciplinarity can only be successful if parity is made possible and the involved researchers and disciplines co-transform each other in the process: promoting what Simon and Thomas have called a “humanities-induced” Earth system science on the one hand and a “sciences-induced” Anthropocene historiography, geoanthropology or environmental humanities on the other. Such much-needed developments and the conditions required to enable them are premised on a fundamental form of co-commitment, however: to truly share (and therefore unpack) the commitments of employed data, concepts and methods of analysis and to resist the temptations of hegemonic claims such as those concealed in the rhetorics of what science “actually is”—a matter that in reality is open-ended and may similarly be redefined during interdisciplinary encounters. The co-commitment conducive to the kind of fruitful and transformative interdisciplinarity sketched here is therefore situationally tempered by the kinds of research cultures that variously meet in real-world, busy interdisciplinary engagements, and, as a consequence, needs to take cross-disciplinary differences extremely seriously. It would indeed be part and parcel of the sort of urgently needed “interdisciplinary literacy” to be sensitive to such differences and be ready to cultivate shared projects through cross-disciplinary diplomacy. Such diplomacy cannot be naïve about the conditions and modes of how disciplines meet, and we “should [therefore] not always trust that researchers generally triumph in working together [interdisciplinarity] if they have no, or little reflected, inconsistent or misleading understandings of what such [a] notion[] may entail” (Sukopp 2013: 17). Interdisciplinary literacy, in other words, calls for at least a minimum of meta-scientific reflection and understanding (reflection and understanding of the workings and preconditions of a successful scientific process in the face of diversity). As Britta Padberg (2014: 11) reminds us, “long-term oriented interdisciplinarity that is established misjudging the differences between disciplinary cultures […] will promote type 6 of interdisciplinarity: That of the hunting communities”—the forced collaboration of vastly diverging scholarly and disciplinary interests, often in the context of strong incentives to do so through third-party funding initiatives. Hunting communities typically fail to deliver the sort of interdisciplinarity they have promised, and I propose that the principal reason is their lack of co-transformative openness. They typically also miss the required resilience when complications arise during the complex re-negotiation process diagnostic for interdisciplinarity in-the-making, they are often primarily interested to continue “business as usual” (for example doing the same stuff the same way but with “more data”), and they invest little in the creativity needed to productively engage disciplines, especially in situations in which much of the partaking “normal science” is—wittingly or unwittingly—modeled on the image of an assembly line production or as factory-like work (characteristically foregrounding the technicalities and implementation-oriented aspects of science). Hunting communities hence 5 dramatically misjudge the core of what makes interdisciplinarity interdisciplinary, the fact that “interdisciplinary research is the work on issues that have not yet found their disciplines” as Lorenz Krüger (1987: 119) so lucidly said many years ago. References Alvargonzález, David. 2011. “Multidisciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity, Transdisciplinarity, and the Sciences.” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 25 (4): 387–403. https://doi.org/10.1080/02698595.2011.623366. Klein, Julie T. 2010. “A Taxonomy of Interdisciplinarity.” In The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity. Oxford University Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. [1962] 2020. Die Struktur wissenschaftlicher Revolutionen. Zweite revidierte und um das Postskriptum von 1969 ergänzte Auflage, 26. Auflage. Translated by Hermann Vetter. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Padberg, Britta. 2014. “The Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF)—Epistemic and Institutional Considerations.” In University Experiments in Interdisciplinarity: Obstacles and Opportunities. Bielefeld: Transcript. Simon, Zoltán Boldizsár, and Julia Adeney Thomas. 2022. “Earth System Science, Anthropocene Historiography, and Three Forms of Human Agency.” Isis 113 (2): 396–406. https://doi.org/10.1086/719647.