Rick Szostak- University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
I urge the community of scholars of interdisciplinarity to be more assertive about the existence and value of interdisciplinary methodology. This will improve the quality of interdisciplinary teaching and research, while enhancing our reputation. Granting agencies and university administrators can then better understand what interdisciplinarity is and how it is best performed. I briefly describe the nature of interdisciplinary methodology. I show that we can already point to exemplars of excellent teaching and research.
Introduction
There has long been a tension within the field of interdisciplinary studies (as represented in organizations such as the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies and the Global Network for Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity). We want to be welcoming: to be a place where any scholar with an interest in interdisciplinary research or teaching (or who has just been thrust into a role administering an interdisciplinary program) can find advice and support. Yet to give powerful advice we need to achieve some consensus around exactly what interdisciplinarity is and how interdisciplinary teaching and research is best performed.
This tension is only rarely admitted much less confronted. This has deleterious consequences. Imagine that someone arrives at an interdisciplinary conference. They have just been made the director of an interdisciplinary studies program. Their university has done this on the cheap by cobbling together a bunch of pre-existing courses from several disciplines. What do we say? Do we just point them to anodyne advice on interdisciplinary pedagogy, and perhaps urge them to gradually reform their program?
What we should do without any hesitation is tell them that it is academically irresponsible to construct an interdisciplinary program that does not teach students how to integrate. If an economist arrived at an economics conference talking about a program that omitted any discussion of economic methodology, they would immediately meet stern resistance. While we should be careful of being guided by disciplinary behavior, we must ask ourselves why we refuse to assert the importance of our own methodology.
We can, to be sure, sugarcoat the message a bit. A multidisciplinary program may be better than nothing (Mennes, 2020). Yet we can insist that a program calling itself “interdisciplinarity” needs to integrate. Moreover, it is irresponsible to expect students to integrate on their own. Disciplinary majors are not expected to figure out disciplinary methodologies on their own. Interdisciplinary students need to be guided to learn interdisciplinary methodology.
There is of course a big difference between disciplinary and interdisciplinary methodologies. Disciplinary methodologies center on the formal pursuit of one or more of the dozen or so methods (statistical analysis, experiments, surveys, and so on), employed across the academy. Interdisciplinary methodology centers around dozens of strategies found useful over the decades in the pursuit of interdisciplinary analysis. The academy has long since accepted the importance of disciplinary methods—though the denizens of one discipline often view methods employed in other disciplines with suspicion. Interdisciplinary strategies have a much shorter pedigree: they have for the most part been identified in just the last couple of decades. It is perhaps inevitable that the academy as a whole has yet to appreciate their value. It is far from inevitable—and both disturbing and dangerous—that the community of scholars of interdisciplinarity does not regularly trumpet their value to the world.
There are, after all, now textbooks in the field that describe these strategies in detail (Repko and Szostak, 2025; Keestra et al., 2022). These texts are comparable in detail to disciplinary texts outlining disciplinary methods. Moreover, these interdisciplinary strategies can serve the same purposes as disciplinary methods: guiding scholars and students on how best to proceed and providing a basis for judging the quality of research. Note that disciplinary scholars can deviate a bit from received methodological wisdom if they provide a justification; We likely want to be even more open to the possibility that yet more interdisciplinary strategies may be discovered, but can still reasonably expect that authors will either pursue recognized strategies or explain why not.
This does not at all mean that the entire community of scholars of interdisciplinarity has to agree on a particular set of strategies. Disciplinary scholars may disagree about many elements of disciplinary methodology while still maintaining a broad consensus. The community of scholars of interdisciplinarity needs, first, to agree that we have collectively identified a set of strategies. We should strive to subject each of these to more rigorous testing. In the meantime, though, we can agree that some selection of these strategies deserve to be part of any interdisciplinary curriculum, and recognized by authors of interdisciplinary research. Different scholars can prefer different strategies, while agreeing that our collection of strategies as a whole should guide our research and teaching.
We can thus strive for the consensus we need without jettisoning the plurality of perspectives that characterizes the community of scholars of interdisciplinarity. We are a diverse global community, trained across a variety of disciplines or interdisciplinary fields, and pursuing a wide array of teaching and research interests. I value that diversity, but yet think that consensus is both feasible and necessary if interdisciplinarity is to be properly appreciated in the academy.
Speaking of novel strategies, I would urge the community of interdisciplinarians to borrow more from our colleague transdisciplinarians. The latter understandably devote much effort to advocating for a set of social skills essential to smooth team functioning (e.g., Lawrence, 2023). While it is both true and important that interdisciplinary research can be performed by individuals, we nevertheless want our students to be able to appreciate diverse perspectives and function well in interdisciplinary teams. There are a host of jobs out there—notably in the field of public policy—where graduates with a grasp of both the cognitive strategies emphasized by interdisciplinary texts and the social skills championed by transdisciplinary scholars would excel (see Hoffmann et al., 2022; Our transdisciplinary friends could in turn pay more attention to the cognitive strategies that we have identified but that is a subject for another day).
An aside: I was invited to speak at a conference of European policy makers in 2024. They told horror stories of gathering groups of disciplinary experts together only to have them talk past each other. It became abundantly clear both that they needed to put integration experts onto such panels and also hire our graduates into policy making bureaucracies. There was a widespread recognition of the need for interdisciplinary policy advice but less appreciation of how to achieve this (See Belgian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, 2024).
Strategies for integration
When the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies was formed in 1979, it was not yet clear how to guide students or scholars through a process of interdisciplinary analysis. Over the succeeding decades though, a set of strategies were identified. Repko and Szostak (2025), for example, devote two chapters to describing in detail a handful of strategies for the act of integration itself. These involve strategies to deal with differences in terminology across disciplines, strategies to deal with the simple fact that different disciplines stress different phenomena and causal relationships, and a strategy to place conflicting arguments on a continuum. Van Lambalgen and van der Tuin (2024) suggest other strategies. There is thus no longer any excuse for not teaching students how to integrate.
Strategies for evaluation
The Repko and Szostak text identifies dozens of other strategies for performing other steps in the interdisciplinary research process. I will mention here only strategies around the important step of evaluating disciplinary research. We can empower both interdisciplinary scholars and students with a simple message: that interdisciplinary evaluation complements disciplinary evaluation and that we will ask a set of questions that will generally not have occurred to disciplinary authors, referees, or editors. Referees for a disciplinary journal will ask whether a particular paper applies disciplinary theories and methods appropriately. They will rarely if ever ask if those theories or methods have important weaknesses in addressing the research question, and whether alternative theories and methods from other disciplines might shed important light on that question. They will also not usually ask if there are phenomena studied in other disciplines that should have been included in the analysis. They are even less likely to ask why this paper reaches different conclusions from studies in other disciplines. Yet the interdisciplinary scholar or student should turn naturally to precisely such questions. Moreover, we can provide both scholars and students with a basic understanding of the key phenomena studied by each discipline, and of the strengths and weaknesses of different methods or theory types. This will aid them immensely in answering such questions. Students sometimes wonder how they can be expected to review published works by experts in a field. We can equip our students with a set of questions and understandings that make it straightforward to do precisely that. We should be immensely proud of our ability to do this, and not at all shy about insisting that an interdisciplinary education must do things like this.
The essence of interdisciplinarity
Our students need to appreciate not just how to perform interdisciplinary analysis but what interdisciplinarity is. We have already identified a set of key characteristics. Students—or program administrators—who cannot describe these key attributes of interdisciplinarity off the top of their heads do not serve to advertise the value of interdisciplinarity to university administrators or parents or employers:
• We have debated far too long whether integration is essential to interdisciplinarity. I am happy with a statement that interdisciplinarity usually or almost always involves integration. This is a strong enough statement to justify arguing that any interdisciplinary program should teach integration strategies.
• Likewise, we can say that interdisciplinarity almost always involves looking at how phenomena studied in one discipline interact with phenomena studied in other disciplines (We often look at systems that transcend disciplinary boundaries). We should stress how important this is. In my own research in world history (Szostak, 2021), I have found that every important transformation in the history of the world involved cross-disciplinary interactions. That is, economic transformations do not just have economic causes or effects, nor do political transformations have just political causes or effects. Quite simply, If we limit ourselves to disciplinary investigations we will fail to appreciate the most important things that happen in the world. We should not be shy about saying so.
• Interdisciplinary analysis usually involves integrating across theories employed in different disciplines and triangulating across results from different disciplinary methods. These practices reflect a recognition that no theory or method is perfect, and indeed, they have compensating strengths and weaknesses. We do not often state this point clearly, but our research and teaching practices make little sense otherwise. We should. It may shock some disciplinary scholars, though few might explicitly pretend that their disciplinary theories or methods are perfect. Yet this is a battle we must be prepared to fight, for interdisciplinarity will seem unnecessary if disciplines judge themselves flawless.
• We also must grapple with differences in terminology across disciplines. The most insidious of these occur when the same concept takes on different meanings—though using different concepts for the same idea can also be troublesome. We have strategies for dealing with this challenge too (see above; Diphoorn et al., 2023). Terminological confusion is an important source of cross-disciplinary misunderstanding.
Organizing our understandings
Gardner (2020, p. 216) argues that the key to synthesizing is organizing diverse information in a useful way. I would argue further that we will not succeed well in communicating a more assertive interdisciplinarity unless we organize our shared understandings well. Most obviously, we need to organize our strategies for performing interdisciplinary analysis so that it is easy for both scholars and students to readily identify and apply these. The textbooks in the field naturally organize our understandings of interdisciplinary strategies around different steps in performing interdisciplinary research. A similar strategy might usefully be employed toward the plethora of toolkits in the field (see ITD Alliance, 2025). These toolkits contain much valuable information about both teaching and research, but the sheer number of them, and the fact that they overlap in coverage of different topics, makes it difficult for a teacher or researcher to identify strategies best suited to a particular need. It would be wonderful if there was some sort of guide to toolkits that could point users toward advice on, say, how to run a productive team meeting. Our goal should be to provide the easiest possible access to all of the strategies that have been identified for any task in interdisciplinary research or teaching—while leaving room for the discovery of yet further strategies.
Organizing interdisciplinary strategies so that they are easy to find and apply is crucial. Yet we have argued above that interdisciplinary analysis generally involves examining interactions among phenomena studied in different disciplines and integrating/triangulating across different disciplinary theories and methods. It is thus important that we also organize our understandings of the phenomena studied by different disciplines and the strengths and weaknesses of different methods and types of theory (Repko and Szostak, 2025 pursue these goals at length). Disciplines might also benefit from such information—it would place their own analyses in a broader context—but have happily survived with little or no appreciation of the limitations of their own theories, methods, and research foci, and even less appreciation of the theories, methods, and phenomena pursued elsewhere. Yet such information is crucial to interdisciplinary teaching and research.
Exemplars
I should stress that the building blocks for the kind of interdisciplinarity I advocate are already in place. We already know a great deal about how to teach and do research. We just have failed to communicate powerfully these shared understandings. Van der Tuin (2025) has edited a book that not only pulls together dozens of key works about interdisciplinarity teaching but provides commentary on these by colleagues at Utrecht University. Notably, the book suggests many ways that a program might go about teaching about interdisciplinary integration. Contributors to Szostak (2024) describe excellent interdisciplinary teaching practices at many institutions: Utrecht University and ETH Zurich in Europe, Kennesaw State, University of Seattle, and Miami University of Ohio (among others) in the United States, the University of the Republic in Uruguay, and the National University of Singapore. There is, I might note, variety in the programs these authors describe. Yet they agree on the need to teach students how to perform interdisciplinarity, and to reinforce these understandings across multiple courses.1 Amsterdam University Press has produced a series of books on such topics as interdisciplinary skills, how to evaluate interdisciplinary programs, and a forthcoming book on how to create an interdisciplinary teaching program.
There is a great deal of wonderful interdisciplinary research out there. Public policy on climate change is often guided by such research, for example. Repko et al. (2012) pulled together several exemplary pieces of interdisciplinary analysis. Our transdisciplinary colleagues have produced important work on a range of environmental issues as well as on urban planning, education, and many other issues (Lawrence, 2023). Vienni-Baptista et al. (2023) provide extracts from dozens of key works on how to perform interdisciplinary research, with commentary on each. But there is also a lot of less-wonderful research out there: When I talk to disciplinary colleagues they often complain about superficial interdisciplinary research that they have encountered. If we could be clear that we as a community have actually identified some standards of evaluation, we would have no problem pointing to research that meets these standards while distancing ourselves from research that does not.
Final thoughts
Why do I even have to write these words in 2026? Why do the simple points I have made above not trip off the tongues of every interdisciplinary scholar and student? Why do university administrators and granting agency directors still so often have little clue what interdisciplinarity is or how it is best performed?
I recognized over a decade ago (Szostak, 2012) that many scholars are attracted to interdisciplinarity by the freedom it provides from disciplinary limitations. They are thus hesitant to embrace the very idea of an interdisciplinary methodology. Yet I argued that an interdisciplinary methodology still gives us the most important freedoms: to use and blend whatever theories and methods we see fit in investigating any combination of phenomena we deem worthy of analysis (and redefining terminology as appropriate along the way). To be sure, an interdisciplinary methodology robs us of the freedom to do superficial teaching or research: to paste together a bunch of disciplinary courses and falsely claim interdisciplinary status, to cherry-pick arguments we like from different disciplines with no attempt to subject these to either disciplinary or interdisciplinary evaluation, and to neglect the fact that we have painstakingly identified a set of strategies for best performing interdisciplinary analysis. Do we need to keep having this conversation endlessly? Can we not recognize once and for all the value of a consensual (but still flexible) methodology? Can we not appreciate that an “anything goes” attitude hurts not only the quality of our research and teaching but our reputation in the academy?
We like to get together and bemoan the ignorance and shortsightedness of university administrators and granting agencies. Yet we could do a much better job of communicating to them what interdisciplinarity is and how it is best performed. It is well past time that we did so.
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Footnotes
1. ^In Repko and Szostak (2025) and Repko et al. (2025) we summarized some great student projects from the University of Seattle, West Virginia University, St Mary's University in Calgary, Alberta, and the National University of Singapore (I again thank their instructors for forwarding these projects to us). These students each displayed a clear understanding of interdisciplinary methodology.
References
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Szostak, R. (ed.)., (2024). Handbook of Interdisciplinary Teaching and Administration. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. doi: 10.4337/9781035309870
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Keywords: assertive, communication, evaluation, integration, interdisciplinarity
Citation: Szostak R (2026) A call for a more assertive interdisciplinarity. Front. Educ. 11:1694738. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1694738
Received: 28 August 2025; Revised: 12 December 2025;
Accepted: 06 January 2026; Published: 22 January 2026.
Edited by:
Richard James Wingate, King's College London, United KingdomReviewed by:
Badrane Benlahcene, Qatar University, QatarCopyright © 2026 Szostak. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Rick Szostak, cnN6b3N0YWtAdWFsYmVydGEuY2E=