At the PCE/PCAH2025 in Paris, delegates from around the world share their insights on the institutional and cultural barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration and its potential in cultivating a culture of research in the academic community.
At the PCE/PCAH2025 Conference, the one-hour moderated Forum discussion session among delegates tackled the challenge of engaging in interdisciplinary research and collaboration, which both Dr Giannini and Professor Boddington found difficult to engage with. Inspired by the discussions at the ACAH/ACCS/ACSS2025 Conference in May 2025 in Tokyo, where peace, war, and conflict studies became the topic of debate around disciplinary silos between seemingly identical fields, the conference in Paris carried out a Forum discussion on ‘Cooperating in Difficult Times: Global Citizenship and Interdisciplinarity’. Moderator Dr Melina Neophytou of IAFOR together with IAFOR’s Vice President Professor Grant Black of Chuo University, Japan, as a respondent, asked the audience about challenges of interdisciplinarity. The session was so engaging that IAFOR has decided to continue the discussion about solutions to practicing interdisciplinarity effectively in a ‘Part II’ format at the ECE/ECAH/EGen2025 Conference in London in July 2025.
Interdisciplinary research emerged as both a strong aspiration and a persistent challenge among the delegates. While most participants either already engage in cross-disciplinary work (67%) or expressed interest in doing so (33%), institutional support remains uneven. Challenges to interdisciplinary research and collaboration included uneven formal policies, limited funding, informal encouragement, and disciplinary silos. Heavy workloads, the risk of being seen as generalists rather than specialists, funding structures tied to specific departments, and the undervaluing of interdisciplinary outputs in promotion and publication processes were also common barriers to engaging in interdisciplinary work.
Some delegates emphasised the challenge of being perceived as a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ within academia if they engaged in interdisciplinary research. Generalisation versus expertise is often perceived as a negative, and it is hard to communicate between disciplines without insulting their depth:
When I was studying at university, they were offering a programme in International Relations, which was a combination of history, political science, and languages. The students were coming out of university, educated a little bit in each field, but not a specialist in anything. So, it was seen as a ‘failure’ because they were not properly educated in any discipline. That degree is now gone. (A delegate from Cambodia)
We recently got a funded project where we [computer scientists] were working with the department of Social Sciences on how we can achieve digital inclusion for people with disabilities. Part of doing this is to get published and to get promotions. The problem in India is that this is neither considered research in education nor in computer science. Education people will say, “this is too shallow”, and computer scientists will say, “this has nothing to do with theoretical computer algorithms. (A delegate from India)
My research integrates different fields: Education, Communication, Music, and I work with people with disabilities. The challenge for me is how do I present all this information? Who am I talking to? Because I can be too technical as a musician, but a linguist might not understand, and vice versa. The challenge is to mediate all these areas and try to sound compelling in presenting this work to everyone. (A delegate from Colombia)
I think it’s very hard for faculty, depending on their faculty load and how much free time they have to learn another subject, especially if they are trying to get published and gain more recognition in their field. You are either called to be an expert in something or a jack of all trades. (A delegate from Turkey)
The ‘silo mindset’ is a direct cause of this challenge, further complicating engagement in interdisciplinary research and collaboration. Specifically, one delegate mentioned that:
One challenge is that some people have that ‘silo’ mindset: when you are an expert in your field, you cannot imagine that someone who is outside of your field has anything of value to add. But, in fact, having an outside perspective and having various perspectives sheds new light on the way we do and see things. I think some people see the value behind that, but not everybody does. Lots of people I’ve worked with have said, ‘Thanks for that perspective, but you don’t know my field.’ And I think that’s a shame. (A delegate from Canada)
Another delegate commended IAFOR’s work in promoting interdisciplinarity within an academic landscape that generally tends to avoid it:
One challenge is bringing people of different disciplines together in one room like this. I want to commend IAFOR for doing this. Many conferences are general meetings for medical science, electrical engineering etc. They don’t want to bring on board other people from other disciplines. But this educational initiative brings people from different disciplines together to discuss and look at how they can collaborate or work together. So, thank you. (A delegate from Kenya, working in Japan)
Budgetary constraints, closely linked to institutional fragmentation in some countries, were another challenge identified by participants. A poll conducted during the session revealed that only 50% of participants’ affiliated institutions encouraged interdisciplinary research and supported it through formal policies, funding, and study programmes, while 29% encouraged it informally, without institutional infrastructure or dedicated funding. For 13% of participants, their institutions primarily focus on discipline-specific research, providing no support for interdisciplinary collaboration at all.
The problem we have in the Philippines is how we approach research. It is fragmented. Interdisciplinary research is encouraged, but it lacks institutional support. The funds are given per department. So if I work in the Department of Theology, I can only get the funding allocated to my department. In order to collaborate with other departments, I have to have really good friends from other departments. (A delegate from the Philippines)
In Colombia, every government proposal is for only one discipline: you have funding for music, arts, or mathematics. So, everything is separated. If you want to integrate different disciplines, you will probably be disqualified… If you want to link with other departments or universities, they will say, “Yeah, but it’s not convenient for us. We cannot have research on music, because we need that money for computer science.” Most of the interdisciplinary research we do is “underground” and a “hush” thing. Also, in Colombia, there are different ministries for culture, science, and sports [the Ministry of Cultures, Arts, and Knowledges; the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation; and the Ministry of Sports]. These categories don’t ever mix. It is difficult to impossible to get funding or cross over to other departments. (A delegate from Colombia)
However, one delegate mentioned that budgetary constraints in their institution in fact unintentionally promote faculty positions with interdisciplinary requirements:
Because of budgetary constraints, my university does not advertise positions as purely Management or Finance anymore, but they are grouping the disciplines for that position. Now we are seeing that you have to have a background in Strategy, in Ethics, in Finance to be shortlisted for the position. This is a new trend because of budgetary constraints. (A delegate from Trinidad and Tobago)
Asked about the challenge of bringing disciplines together in terms of methodologies, a poll conducted during the session revealed that the majority of respondents (66%) thought it’s possible for disciplines to find common ground with only partial methodological alignment and careful contextualisation. 21% of respondents thought it is possible for disciplines to coexist and adopt each others’ methods and language fully, while 13% thought it is completely impossible for methods to be translated meaningfully across disciplines.
Despite these results, one delegate mentioned that interdisciplinarity is crucial to address global challenges.
Topics such as climate change are very complex and cannot be addressed by one discipline. I think a lot of problem-based thinking and learning is going to require more interdisciplinary thinking going forward. (A delegate from Sweden)
One of the goals of interdisciplinarity is impact and problem-solving. It’s one of our motivations for doing it. So, when we are thinking about interdisciplinarity, we should also be thinking about what it means. What does it mean across sectors? What does it mean in terms of action research? Who are our participants? How do we work across sectors with NPOs and NGOs? (A delegate from the United States)
In closing, one delegate’s comment offered a picture of interdisciplinarity today:
I was a bit confused at the start of this session, but it made me realise that I’m extremely lucky. Coming from an Economics background, I feel like I was exposed to interdisciplinarity my whole academic career. In economics, you have the usual suspects of maths and statistics, but you also have history and consumer psychology. So, I was a bit confused as to why there is not more interdisciplinary research in academia. How is this still an issue? I feel lucky to be an economist. (A delegate from Serbia)
The challenges of engaging with interdisciplinarity are clear to most academics and educators. It is a matter of convincing institutions and policymakers to enact changes and promote interdisciplinary research and collaboration. Part II of this Forum discussion, held at the IAFOR conference in London, takes the debate one step further and looks at solutions to these challenges.
This article is an excerpt from The 4th Paris Conference on Education (PCE2025) and The 4th Paris Conference on Arts & Humanities (PCAH2025) Conference Report and Intelligence Briefing .
Banner image: krakenimages, Unsplash
