Abstract
What is interdisciplinarity? In its most generic terms, interdisciplinarity is a philosophy of knowledge, but not in the classic sense of an epistemology concerned with first principles. It is practical issues about the production (research) and dissemination (teaching) of knowledge that urged people historically to reach out and beyond edges in search for new sightings. Yet, the notion of interdisciplinarity has always generated mixed reactions even amongst most ardent advocates for the cross-pollination of knowledge. There is some truth to the remark made by William H. Newell, founder of the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies in the USA, who famously identified two kinds of interdisciplinarian. On the one side are the methodists, like Newell himself, who cared about codifying practices by establishing a method of work and quality standards. The anti-methodists would instead take explorations across disciplinary cultures to be open-ended and never-ending, letting ‘a thousand flowers bloom’ (Newell 2001, 6), going so far as to avoid the noun for the more fluid attribute ‘interdisciplinary’ in naming projects such as, the field of Interdisciplinary Studies. 1
A glance at past editorials of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (ISR) reveals that both sensibilities have been vividly represented throughout the intellectual history of the journal. Its Founding Editor, Anthony Michaelis, conceived the project of publishing specialist reviews in the broader context of a naturalistic attempt to explore disciplinary boundaries scientifically, hence ‘Science’ in the journal's title. His belief in the scientific temper would offer a strong ethos for bringing coherence to interdisciplinary endeavours while preserving the diversity of practices that were still vastly un-disciplined in the 1970s. In the following decades, the journal grew in different directions. By the time it entered the editorship of Howard Cattermole, who draws the narrative arc of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews in his article for this issue, there were important reasons for not wanting to ‘see interdisciplinarity in itself as a topic for detailed discussion in ISR's pages’ (2002, 3). If interdisciplinarity exists to challenge the logic of disciplinarity, so the story goes, we should resist attempts to objectify and reify its kernel in the same way in which a university department, or a library catalogue, would need criteria for disciplining bodies of knowledge. In the last 20 years, ‘Interdisciplinary’ in the title came to express an appreciation for the multi-faceted openness and variety of human knowledge, reflecting more of the anti-naturalistic impulses running through the human sciences than the appetite to pin down the intricacies of interdisciplinary thinking.
These changes in the scope of the journal have been unmistakeably tied to the interests and personalities of its Editors. However, regardless of differences in editorial leadership, the purpose of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews has remained unshaken through five decades of life – a point made by all my predecessors which I am keen to reaffirm as the new Editor-in-Chief. The journal has only had five Editors since the outset and will continue to develop its inheritance in the name of continuity: pursuing the epistemic promise of interdisciplinary inquiry, its possibilities and challenges. This commitment runs deeper than methodological fashions and stronger than personal preferences. It has also shaped the journal's history as a whole and therefore cannot be reduced, without loss of meaning, to the backgrounds, leanings, and preoccupations of the single Editors. As much as by individuals, the journal's cultural trajectory has been marked by the collective intelligence of scholars and teachers of interdisciplinary studies more generally.
This is the reason why the fifth editorial era starts with a change of direction, whilst the purpose stays intact. The past ten years have seen a remarkable growth in knowledge of interdisciplinary programmes, mainly in the context of teaching and learning, which resulted in an abundance of practice-driven case studies. We now know much more of what we can do by mixing bodies of knowledge, especially in the classroom, but not enough of why the mixing works. This development was already underway when my predecessor, Willard McCarty, described the field as ‘vigorous’ and ‘in urgent need of critical study’, in his editorial for the fortieth anniversary of the journal (2016, 2). The need has become even more pressing as interdisciplinary studies seem to have reached a tipping point. A paradigm shift is within reach and sight, but for it to happen, the direction of travel has to change. Interdisciplinarity is still dramatically under-theorised in spite of having earned widespread currency in both public discourse and institutional, academic and funding, quarters. To build on the field's critical mass and steer the future we need more, not less, theory: an intentional, reflective, and systematic understanding of the conditions of possibility and validation of interdisciplinarity. As Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal put it, poignantly: ‘Practice validates theory, but without theoretical validity practice cannot be evaluated’. 2
We have revised the aims and scope to allow Interdisciplinary Science Reviews to meet this challenge and to provide the forum our field seeks to progress the agenda of interdisciplinarity. In keeping with the past, we will continue to publish exemplary cases of research bringing together at least two disciplines from the sciences, arts, and humanities; but we will also look out for and support the best scholarly work that engages directly with foundational questions of meaning and scope, methodology, pedagogy, governance and leadership. Interdisciplinarity does not speak for itself. Assuming that it does has resulted in lesser conceptual clarity, category mistakes such as treating multidisciplinary activities on a par, and ultimately the tendency to take ‘Interdisciplinary’ to mean ‘Anything Goes’. In breaking from these patterns, we now ask prospective authors to not only showcase their projects but also explain, reflectively, what makes them interdisciplinary in the first place. It is our conviction that raising the bar of scholarly conversations will lead to higher-quality interdisciplinary outputs and in turn advance the threshold by which we evaluate them.
To understand the new vision, let us look back to the future. The project of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews was conceived after cross-disciplinary sensibilities had started to coalesce in the counterculture of the 1960s. The term ‘interdisciplinary’ was not new, having made its way into social science research deliberations in the mid-1920s; nor was the mode of inquiry captured by the term dating back for centuries. But the political impetus of the sixties unearthed a quality of being, or becoming, interdisciplinary that has since become the norm of inquiry: the potential not to augment but to create new objects of knowledge.
In the context of counterculture, this promise was primarily political. Those who brought demands for alternative forms of representation and governance to bear on academic institutions realised that the friction of conventional structures of knowledge could spark new forms of consciousness, that is, new social imaginaries. The potential for political action was immediate. However, most importantly, the underlying realisation was epistemic. If more and newer options for thought, and therefore political choice and intervention, could be made possible by the collision of disciplinary canons, it was because interdisciplinary inquiry produces knowledge of a fundamentally different kind from other epistemic acts, like multi-disciplinarity. Just as water is created by combining hydrogen and oxygen, its identity emerging from and through synthesis, so the joint output of multiple perspectives coming together looks different from its single parts taken separately. They are all responsible for it but the output is a new thing altogether, enabling a novel vantage point from which to see unseen possibilities. We now know the subject matter in a different way. Just, what exactly is this fundamentally different way? What makes it different from any other (cross-) disciplinary modes of knowledge?
It would take decades for these questions to come into sharper focus. But this is exactly where the origin of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews lies – in the powerful realisation that interdisciplinary knowledge is emancipatory to the extent that it is irreducibly different – something Anthony Michaelis may have only intuited when he saw the future coming with uncanny prescience. The first issue of the journal was published on 29 March 1976 and was opened by an editorial called ‘Future Affirmative’, which the current piece echoes in the title and looks at with deep admiration. Michaelis’ editorial stands out with hindsight as one of the most compelling formulations of interdisciplinarity in the history of the idea. He stated that Reviews for the journal must exhibit evidence of the ‘fusion of effort’ that characterises a chemical compound, when the single ingredients become ‘integrated’ and can no longer be partitioned (1976, 1). This metaphor was used to define the scope of the journal, not interdisciplinarity as a form of scholarship or education, but those words are worth pausing on for a moment. As ISR's senior Associate Editor and long-standing editorial board member Steve Fuller writes in his contribution to this issue, the compound image and the chemistry language played a central role in the grander scheme of things during the twentieth century. Michaelis was a chemist by training, so his logic of inquiry was scientific and synthetic. By drawing attention to the way in which the parts of a whole are combined to produce something different to their sum, he suggested that the defining trait of being interdisciplinary is not a feature of the output of the merging process – it is the process itself.
This process is called integration and qualifies the epistemic import of interdisciplinarity. In truth, Michaelis did not say ‘integration’ even though the term had been in the air, if not in print, for some time. One could find it, prominently, in the 1972 book-long report by the OECD (Apostel, et al. 1972), which had marked a pivotal moment in the institutionalisation of interdisciplinary studies. Still, we should bear in mind that in the cultural climate of the 1970s, the term was used in paraphrasing interdisciplinarity only indirectly and loosely, without nuance. All the enthusiasm back then was around the affirmation of new paths of discovery, so the term by and large referred to the output being integrated. But when Michaelis put the process of discovery in the spotlight and stated with confidence and exactitude that this process must be integrated for the output to count as interdisciplinary, he provided a clear criterion for identifying and differentiating, not just prospective submissions to the journal, but the scope of interdisciplinary inquiry tout court. Nor is the force of his words lessened by the fact that ‘integrationism’ has since become the dominant paradigm in the field. If anything, the fact that awareness of integration has become the marker of interdisciplinarity only testifies to the strength of the insight that informed Interdisciplinary Science Reviews at inception.
Disciplinarity was not the target and has never been under question; it just is not exhaustive of all the possibilities of human knowledge. The target was indeed multi-disciplinarity, a necessary but not sufficient condition for achieving the novelty of interdisciplinary insight. Again, as a chemist, Michaelis pointed out that merely augmenting knowledge by aggregating concepts and methods from multiple disciplines, gradually and cumulatively, does not yield the groundbreaking change made by the integration of knowledge. This difference lies at the heart of the journal's ethos since 1976 and is now reaffirmed as a guiding compass for making publishing decisions. In the words of Willard McCarty, who ably steered the course for sixteen years until 2024: ‘Remarkably much remains the same since Michaelis began ISR in the conviction that communicating and exploring across disciplines would yield great benefits, as it had before him’ (2016, 1).
So, in light of these debates we may ask ourselves again, what is interdisciplinarity? It is the virtue of mavericks venturing into uncharted territories of knowledge, unconscious of boundaries and constraints. Or maybe it is a placeholder for a condition of being human: the individual's reaction to a dis-integrated state of affairs, the pull towards a unity we all seem to be longing for. Or, one may say more practically, interdisciplinarity is a mode of learning suited for a world saturated with data, where the complexity of systems natural and social, human and artificial, calls for a networked and synthetic way of thinking. Whatever the answer, the question remains and it is time to problematise it, by making it part of a larger investigation into the aetiology – the why – of contemporary interdisciplinary discourse.
During the last two years, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews has undergone a period of transition starting with the transfer from Taylor & Francis to Sage as the publishing partner of the Institute of Materials, Minerals, and Mining. Since my tenure began in January 2025, the editorial team and newly recruited board members engaged in a strategic exercise of consultation, aimed at aligning the mission of the journal with wider trends in scholarship. ‘Project 50’ is the result of this exercise and the title of a programme of initiatives unfolding throughout 2026. The programme includes the publication of the flagship anniversary issue introduced by this editorial, a revised statement of ISR's aims and scope, and the refreshed design of the journal's visual identity.
In this issue, we celebrate 50 years of activity by reflecting on the past, present, and futures of interdisciplinarity. The issue contains articles by leading figures in interdisciplinary discourse sharing their leadership experience in education, governance, and research. No one is in a stronger place to take us on a journey through ISR's lineage and history than Howard Cattermole, whose thirty-year involvement with the journal means that he has now met all the Editors to this day. There is so much to cherish in his recollection of ideas and people – a sense of personal charisma and enterprise, of ambition and grace, thoughtful curation and, undoubtedly, good writing. We may be swimming against the tide in scholarly publishing, but if a journal aspires to set the agenda and the tone of the conversation, it cannot afford to publish material that attends to standards of academic content alone, whilst accepting that the relevant content may be packaged in barely adequate prose. Writing is thinking: the stronger the literary effort, the higher the intellectual impact.
This is surely the case in Diana Spencer's reflection on the present of interdisciplinary education. Her rendering of the moment in which interdisciplinary understandings materialise before the mind, as sudden recognitions that there exist connections between objects of thought now freed up from the strictures of disciplines, illustrates the new aesthetics of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. It also shows how fertile the experience of setting up and leading successful interdisciplinary programmes has been for educators and theorists alike, keen as we are to decipher the engine of interdisciplinarity – what makes the integration of knowledge spark insights beyond the juxtaposition of multiple disciplinary perspectives. Admittedly, if we apply this insight to our own field, the outcome still appears as less than the sum of the parts, claims Catherine Lyall in her piece, since there is still a tendency in the field to produce piecemeal accounts of practice that augment knowledge without advancing it. As anyone teaching integrative skills will know, progress would entail moving from a descriptive to a higher level of evaluative and reflexive attention. Questions of metascience typically signal that a field of activity has reached maturity. The subject of interdisciplinarity is no exception, however, the shift is yet to come. How could we aspire to do interdisciplinarity better, in Lyall's words, if we keep operating without shared criteria of what counts as good, or bad, practice?
One way towards establishing success criteria is to go back to the origins of the interdisciplinary movement and consider how the governance of knowledge has since evolved. Disciplinarity is built into the name of inter-disciplinarity, but if the blending continues to be pursued within university structures designed wholly and solely for knowledge accumulation, the project is doomed. Few works have probed this idea more effectively than Robert Frodeman's attempt to sketch a theory of interdisciplinarity against the backdrop of pressing concerns about the governance of knowledge in post-disciplinary societies (2014). Over time, Frodeman has developed healthy scepticism about interdisciplinarity as a form of inquiry that promised knowledge for society but remained trapped in the logic of disciplinarity. However, in his contribution to Project 50, he gestures to a possibility for intervention that bears stunning similarity to the vision that Michaelis, once again, set out in 1976: the grey area where developments in science and technology raise existential questions of sense-making and purpose. If we are to enter a new normal of human-machine hybridisation, where knowledge can be produced if not ‘discovered’ publicly, in Steve Fuller's words, through the use of generative artificial intelligence, we better be able to interrogate the mechanics and the ethics of interdisciplinary integration with a refreshed sense of commitment. This marks the start of the sixth decade of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews.
I thank Steve Fuller and Carl Gombrich for their confidence.
