At the ECE/ECAH/EGen2025 in London, international delegates discuss potential collaborative solutions to overcoming the challenges and problems in cultivating a culture of interdisciplinarity in the academe.
Many IAFOR conferences, especially since 2024, have focused on the narrative of reframing international cooperation to include intersectoral and interdisciplinary stakeholders in negotiations and discussions in Paris (PCE/PCAH2024, PCE/PCAH2025), London (ECE/ECAH/ECLL/EGen2024), and Barcelona (BCE/BAMC2024). The importance of interdisciplinarity, which lies at the heart of what IAFOR does, is mirrored in international institutions’ framing of global cooperation in the context of education (UNESCO), climate change negotiations (COP and national governments), and AI.
To address the importance of interdisciplinarity, ECE/ECAH/EGen2025 featured a Forum session, which built on the previous Paris conference’s Forum session on Interdisciplinarity. In a ‘Part II’ format, this Forum session on ‘Cooperating in Difficult Times: Making Interdisciplinarity Work’ explored practical aspects of interdisciplinary research and teaching. The first part of this Forum session was held during PCE/PCAH2025, which looked at the challenges of collaborating interdisciplinarily: 67% of delegates reported they regularly engage in interdisciplinary work, with institutional support mixed, and pinpointed challenges to incorporating interdisciplinarity, including time, funding, perception of scholars, and communication. Building on Part I’s findings, this Forum session looked at the next step: what are the solutions to overcoming these challenges and making interdisciplinary collaboration work? Moderated by Dr Melina Neophytou, Academic Operations Manager at IAFOR, and with input from expert respondent Dr Marcelo Staricoff of the University of Sussex, participants engaged in an interactive discussion, answering questions of what a successful interdisciplinary project looks like, what and how they would teach an interdisciplinarity project, and how they would promote both interdisciplinary interactions within their own institutions and across national and international boundaries.
Participants highlighted that successful interdisciplinary projects are values-driven, requiring mutual benefits, a unified vision, inclusivity, trust, openness, new perspectives, and acceptance of failure as learning. Given a brainstorming prompt for teaching a 16-week interdisciplinary course, suggestions included emphasising process over product, metacognition, ethics/integrity, service learning, sustainability, and real-world problem-solving. Promotion strategies focused on networking at IAFOR conferences, online collaboration tools, student exchanges, joint papers, and dedicated academic platforms. Personal stories underscored early-years education and playful, child-led activities as foundations for interdisciplinary mindsets. Dr Staricoff connected themes to global calls for education reform, citing Education: A Global Compact for a Time of Crisis (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2022) and emphasising education’s role in addressing inequities, sustainability, and complex global challenges through inclusive, interdisciplinary approaches. Outcomes reinforced shared values (inclusion, respect, and lifelong learning) as the bedrock for effective collaboration across disciplines, institutions, and borders, inspiring participants toward practical implementation.
Initially, participants engaged in an icebreaker activity that required them to meet people from other disciplines and identify commonalities between them. Many participants were positively surprised by how much they had in common with each other. Two participants found common ground in terms of their approaches to pedagogy through the teaching and learning process, and a sense of wanting the student to be able to thrive in terms of problem solving:
It was surprising for me. I come from the educational faculty, so I do research on active methodologies and how to innovate in primary, secondary, and higher education. And she comes from fashion, so it’s totally different. But the funny thing is that I do research on active methodologies, so I try to make teachers use problem-based learning. She uses that methodology in her classes at university. (A delegate from an unspecified country)
Another pair found common ground in terms of the overall topic of research on minorities, marginalisation and the notion of inclusion:
She’s someone working on the role of minorities in terms of people with disabilities and I’m working on the role of women and sexual and gender minorities in engineering. So we found a great common ground. (A delegate from an unspecified country)
When asked to define what a successful interdisciplinary project looks like, participants reinforced the notion of openness, inclusivity, and active listening to other disciplines:
I put openness up because it’s about encouraging people not to work in their silos. So being able to be taken out of your comfort zone and go into those other areas and listen. (A delegate from the United Kingdom)
I put that it should be inclusive. I’m a designer by profession, so if I’m designing through various experiences, it matters to me that my design reaches all kinds of people: neurodiverse people, different age groups, etc. So it should be really inclusive in terms of people, with different likes and dislikes. (A delegate from India)
After defining what would constitute a good interdisciplinary project, participants were asked how they would teach interdisciplinarity, were it a 16-week course at university. Answers focused on inclusivity, sustainability, the ability to problem-solve, the ability to focus on the learning process and not the end product, service learning, and academic integrity and ethics. One delegate cautiously countered with a provocative question:
Do you think we would need to know the disciplines to be able to create an interdisciplinary course, or do you think you could teach an interdisciplinary course with whatever amalgamation of disciplines? I think that would be the point. You would have to transcend over something to find a commonality between them, right? Even though for me interdisciplinary still retains some of the disciplinarity coming into the project, as opposed to going transdisciplinary where you’re really extrapolating yourself out of it. So, in my head, I would want to know what the two disciplines are and then figure out a way of them working together. (A delegate from the United Kingdom)
I think I would look at inclusivity and sustainability [in terms of] the outcome and the ability to solve problems and be ready for real world challenges. Sustainability would be the ability to solve a problem over time; inclusivity is for every discipline to be able to speak on issues of risk and marginalisation. That’s how I would like to approach a question of interdisciplinarity. (A delegate from India)
It’s all about really knowing that it’s not about the end product and moving attention away from the end product to the process of learning. We need to reflect that with the students and also reflect that in the assessment. So we must place much more focus on the learning process. (A delegate from the United Arab Emirates)
I answered service learning, because service learning is the course that teaches students who come from interdisciplinary backgrounds to apply what they learn in the class to the community. But my challenge is when students go to the community, it’s difficult to make them focus on what they apply, what theories they learnt in class, and then apply in the communities. Commonly, students only do community service. So they help communities, but they don’t focus on enhancing their theoretical knowledge. (A delegate from Indonesia)
I would probably teach academic integrity and ethics. It could be ethics and learning, ethics and research, even in the workplace, depending on your programme. I agree with what you said earlier about when you find a common ground with someone from a different discipline, it’s mostly because you have shared values. This integrity is important, especially now that we have AI. I believe because of that, it’s important to instill those ideas of integrity, not doing things just to show off and actually not learning anything, but also doing things for the good of society and doing it with integrity. (A delegate from the United States)
Finally, participants were asked how they would promote interdisciplinary collaboration within institutions and internationally. Many praised IAFOR as a great way of engaging and networking with international scholars interdisciplinarily, while others shared their experiences from within their classrooms.
Actually we already did it. I teach history and my colleague has interest in AI. So recently we had a joint paper looking at how AI can help conduct research in history. So, we collaborated on AI and history, and we had an internal university exchange program for our students last year. The common ground for us was the study of the constitution, because in modern Indian history we teach the making of the Indian constitution, and law students definitely study it as well. So, students of history and law were teaching knowledge from the historical perspective and the law perspective to each other. (A delegate from India)
I mean, with IAFOR, if you look at the programme, you have 73 opportunities to talk to someone from a different country than yours. It is a wonderful opportunity to network and to talk to people from different disciplines. I always think of the COVID-19 pandemic and the gift that it has given us to all be able to communicate, work and collaborate online. Now I think the world is so transformed that we can collaborate, teach, be inside classrooms in Tashkent at 7:00 in the morning. It’s just amazing, the opportunities it has given us. (A delegate from the United States)
Let me tell you very quickly why I put ‘IAFOR’ as a way to promote interdisciplinarity. I was checking the time and it has been exactly 23 hours since I arrived into London. For me, it’s the first time getting into Europe, the first time at IAFOR, and my first time presenting a paper. I was talking with my boss, and I said to her ‘you don’t know how many exciting ideas I have in these 23 hours that I will start working on when I get back to Mexico’. So, for me these types of events are very interesting to connect with colleagues and also to learn about what they are doing. So, my message here is to dare you to connect with people and to learn about anything they can tell you, because people here are the exact same or more amazing than you. (A delegate from Mexico)
Dr Staricoff closed this Forum session with a quote from Education: A Global Compact for a Time of Crisis: ‘Complex problems require complex solutions. Learning is both individual and social… beyond scientific knowledge and expertise, values and wisdom are required.’ He also quoted Pope Francis in the foreword of this book saying ‘today there is a need to join forces… for forming mature persons capable of mending the fabric of human relationships.’ According to Dr Staricoff, these quotes summarise what all participants shared at this Forum session perfectly, alluding to the precision with which participants explained what interdisciplinarity should do and how it should be done.
This article is an excerpt from the Conference Report and Intelligence Briefing: ECE/ECAH/EGen2025.
Banner image: Linh Nguyen, Unsplash
