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. (shrink)

Interdisciplinarity is widely considered necessary to solving many contemporary problems, and new funding structures and instruments have been created to encourage interdisciplinary research at universities. In this article, we study a small technical university specializing in green technology which implemented a strategy aimed at promoting and developing interdisciplinary collaboration. It did so by reallocating its internal research funds for at least five years to “research platforms” that required researchers from at least two of the three schools within the university to (...) participate. Using data from semi-structured interviews from researchers in three of these platforms, we identify specific tensions that the strategy has generated in this case: in the allocation of platform resources, in the division of labor and disciplinary relations, in choices over scientific output and academic careers. We further show how the particular platform format exacerbates the identified tensions in our case. We suggest that certain features of the current platform policy incentivize shallow interdisciplinary interactions, highlighting potential limits on the value of attempting to push for interdisciplinarity through internal funding. (shrink)

The National Science Foundation (NSF) evaluates grant proposals based on two criteria: intellectual merit and broader impacts. NSF gives applicants wide latitude to choose among a number of broader impacts, which include both benefits for the scientific community and benefits for society. This paper considers whether including potential societal benefits in the Broader Impacts Criterion leads to enhanced benefits for society. One prerequisite for realizing societal benefit is to transfer research results to potential users in a meaningful format. To determine (...) whether researchers who discuss broader impacts for society are more likely to engage in broad dissemination activities beyond the scientific publication, I analysed proposed broader impacts statements from recent award abstracts. Although 43% of researchers discussed potential benefits for society, those researchers were no more likely to propose dissemination of results to potential users than researchers who only discussed broader impacts for science. These findings suggest that considering potential societal benefit as a broader impact may not lead to more actual societal benefits and that many potentially useful results may not be disseminated beyond the scientific community. I conclude with policy recommendations that could increase the likelihood of realizing potential societal benefits from academic research. (shrink)

Universities worldwide are facing enormous strains as a result of increased external expectations where global visibility should be mixed with local and regional utility. In debates on the future of higher education, becoming an entrepreneurial university has been highlighted as a novel – although perhaps a more hybrid – way to deal with this challenge. However, while the label entrepreneurial points to an image of the university as a dynamic free agent shaped in the interplay between dynamic environments and internal (...) flexibility, the current article takes a more critical view on the factors conditioning universities with the ambitions of becoming more entrepreneurial – particularly those of more recent age and less academic standing. For these institutions it is suggested that the university ideal of being entrepreneurial may lead to a situation of strategic inertia characterized by an institutionalized ‘lock-in’ with few alternative development paths. (shrink)

The epistemic barriers to interdisciplinarity are understudied. To fill this gap, we ask whether a university initiative designed to reduce structural barriers to interdisciplinarity also facilitates the dissolution of epistemic ones. Through analytical autoethnography of graduate training in two disciplines, sociology and ecology, we develop the concept of asymmetric epistemology to better understand the unique epistemological position that emerges for interdisciplinarians. Building from feminist science and technology studies (STS) and scholarship on epistemic identities, our work illuminates how epistemologies are embodied (...) by individuals, leading to tensions around identity, materiality, and spatiality during the practice of interdisciplinarity. While some epistemic barriers recede and others remain, we reveal that the navigation of these boundaries deeply impacts individuals’ epistemic identities. (shrink)

Do immigrant faculty trained in American higher education institutions adopt the outlook and practices of native US scientists and engineers, or do they diverge from such practices? The modern science paradigm holds that location will not matter significantly and that immigrants in either place will converge to a common standard of scientific practice. Drawing upon 134 in-depth interviews, this paper compares the scientific practices of two groups of Indian immigrant faculty in science and engineering: those who studied and worked in (...) the United States and then returned to India and those who continued to work in the United States. This paper shows that the two groups differed in important ways: ease of securing grants, management of grants, research environment, professional autonomy, and research type. (shrink)