Working across academic disciplines
As the demands for ‘impact’ grow, the limits of single-discipline investigation become apparent. Interdisciplinarity has emerged as a key component of the ‘Research for Development’ agenda, and is often presented as a research mode that can facilitate the relevance and usability of knowledge. As one of the first UK-funded research programme to take an interdisciplinarity approach to complex issues in the Global South, ESPA has confirmed the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries, but also highlighted the challenges of doing so in practice.
Read our interdisciplinarity policy brief here.
Read more about ESPA’s researchers and partners’ experience of interdisciplinarity:
Gianni Lo Iacono: How multidisciplinary work was made meaningful for me
Geoff Wells et al.: Day to day workings of interdisciplinary research depend on project size
Simon Willcock: Interdisiplinarity: some potential pitfalls on the route to success
Benjamin Gyampoh: The challenges of interdisciplinarity: Insights from a research programme on climate change
Ian Scoones: Research Collaboration for Global Challenges: why it is really hard
