What inspires or drives your interest in interdisciplinarity?
Interdisciplinarity, for me, concerns the formal recognition that classification does not determine connection. We can identify coherent branches of knowledge and experience, and base our intellectual culture on a conventional division of labour, but no phenomenon remains conveniently disciplined. This is particularly obvious when cracks appear on the surface of the spaces we inhabit, and you can take this literally.
Consider the living room wall. A plug socket fails, and you prepare to replace it by breaking the circuit. Your sole concern is now for wiring you never gave a thought before, suddenly tangible. As you replace the socket, some brittle plaster breaks off, and these impregnable walls suddenly seem much more fragile. You drift and wonder: whatever happened to wallpaper? When will flowery patterns become fashionable again? It is at this point you realise that you forgot to remember which wire is supposed to go where. You must proceed with the socket replacement, though. Your masculinity is at stake!
The wall, in this manner, discloses itself in many ways: as a technical ensemble, as a concrete separation, but also as a space of symbolic representation and social projection. To study the wall as such, no single discipline would do. I currently teach sustainable health as an object of study, and questions can range in concern from the measurable reduction of hospital emissions to the conceptual scope of planetary wellbeing. Along the way one will cross some apparent disciplinary boundaries, and this is not unusual. Academics are often curious people. It is pleasing to understand matters that previously appeared opaque, and often that requires drawing on multiple fields of scholarly activity. Yet disclosure takes time and care, so that things can neither be thought nor taught from each imaginable perspective at once. In this sense interdisciplinarity is a challenge, surely, and one that INTED seems intent on addressing.
How has INTED supported your interdisciplinary programme?
I think I first met the good people of INTED at a workshop on interdisciplinary teaching they were hosting. At the time, I had just started to teach regularly on the honours certificate Education for Sustainable Health, which attracts students from a variety of backgrounds. We already operated with a set of pedagogical goals and principles in mind, but I felt there was more to know about whether people with different educational histories and orientations think and work in different ways. And if we do encounter divergence, how do we render our thoughts commensurate and our classes adequately communicative? This is an ongoing learning process, and INTED provides, firstly, reassurance that institutional and intellectual thought goes into this process. Secondly, INTED is a very welcoming environment, which through its events puts a friendly face on the impersonal abstraction that ‘interdisciplinarity’ may appear to be. Thirdly, an INTED representative, Martine, has lectured on our sustainable health course, explicitly addressing why people feel the need to move between disciplines, and how this can be facilitated. In sum, I have felt supported in several ways, and I also should state here that I think INTED has set itself a hard task. Disciplines are ultimately fictions, but very powerful ones, as they constrain curricular, administrative, and communicative possibilities, which in turn shape the mental and physical patterns of movement at our university. As a mediator in this environment, it can be hard to establish a position, or even be found. Yet here we are!
With interdisciplinarity on the rise, what do you see as the future of higher education
I will attempt to answer this question concisely, as the future is uncertain. A first note here is that, in my view, the best interdisciplinary work is done by people with a strong disciplinary foundation. While the mode of expression differs, I suspect that the sensation of approaching unfamiliar patterns within the depth of mathematics, or literature, or medicine, is in each case quite similar. And once you get a taste for the abstraction that comes with depth, you can more comfortably branch out, if you’re so inclined. What concerns me in this regard is that higher education now often promotes itself as a space where solutions and innovations are produced. This places the focus on immediate, measurable, and actionable insights, so that curricula across disciplines are pressured to justify themselves by superficially appealing to each day’s mania and all the world’s woes. This produces a sad kind of interdisciplinarity mostly geared towards cursory, excruciating exchange. To work towards more meaningful meetings of minds, methods, and materials, we will first need to regain our patience. In addition, to understand phenomena, we will need to guard our presence. It is unlikely, but stranger things have happened! Finally, I should say there is no better way to clearly separate two places than to build a bridge between them, and that too is something interdisciplinary initiatives should take into account. I will end on that note. As usual, thanks for giving me the space to reflect, and take care.