For the last decade, the value of interdisciplinary research has been in enshrined in many European university documents (Sutphen et al, 2018) and positioned to serve different purposes. Interdisciplinary research can be a strategic player in universities’ bids to jump ranks in international rankings classifications (Feller, 2002). Likewise, Stenaskaer et al have found that high-ranking universities use their support for interdisciplinary research, as outlined in their strategic plans, to signal their legitimacy (Stensaker et al., 2019).

Funders of research also value interdisciplinary research approaches (Bromham, Dinnage, & Hua, 2016), often as a means to solve challenging societal problems, such as climate change or social inequality. For example, the Research Council of Norway (RCN) seeks to promote interdisciplinary research as a means to solve “major societal challenges requir[ing] approaches that cross boundaries between disciplines and give rise to new research methods for analysing complex, interdisciplinary issues.” Recently the RCN commissioned a report on interdisciplinary research that recommended the need for: “a collaborative and supportive research environment” (Davé et al, 2018, p. 27). However, as several authors indicate, easier said than done (Lindvig et al, 2019; Klein 2010; Lyall et al, 2011; Lyall and Fletcher, 2013; Lash-Marshall et al, 2017).

Interdisciplinary research can be challenging on many fronts. A premise held by funders is that interdisciplinary research groups benefit from members who come from a mix of disciplines, yet research group members have to find ways to solve research problems despite not sharing disciplinary vocabularies, approaches, or concepts. Interdisciplinary groups may come together in ad hoc ways with no set composition of members from the same or sister disciplines, making peer-review of interdisciplinary grant proposals tricky because of the difficulties with finding a review committee to assess fairly such  applications (Bammer, 2016). Interdisciplinary research can also be challenging to individual researchers because it may shift or outright change academics’ identities. Whether they consider it a liberation or challenge, when they start, academics who conduct interdisciplinary research enter borderlands, where they may become “a new type of academic; a type that may be viewed as hybrid, fractional, or even anomalous”(Lewis et al, 2016, p. 475).

Although universities and funders alike encourage interdisciplinary research and work, there is little research on how academic staff might prepare students for it. This paper sketches our investigation of how to use development of academic staff as a means to help them prepare students for interdisciplinary work and research. We draw on the concept of academic hospitality (AH), which may take material, linguistic, epistemological, and touristic forms (Phipps and Barnett, 2007) and contend that each is important for (Davé et al, 2018, p. 27). For example, how receptive is one academic to the concepts or methods of one field to that of others (epistemological hospitality)? How are academic visitors to a discipline welcomed or received (touristic hospitality)? In the research group, are visitors from some disciplines, professions, or interdisciplinary areas more welcome than others? How do academics in one discipline enact and instantiate the act of hosting visitors from another discipline (material hospitality)?

Although the concept of AH has been used primarily for studies on learning for professional education and on academic communities or student mobility (Bennett, 2000; Ploner, 2018; Kenway & Fahey, 2009), this paper seeks to answer the research questions: How can AH contribute to the preparation of students at research-intensive universities for interdisciplinary research and work?

Phipps and Barnett (2007) point out that AH can look different in different places, thus we have chosen to compare five research-intensive universities in Europe (University of Oslo, University of Edinburgh, University College Dublin, and University of Sydney). Eventually, we will develop case studies for each of the universities looking at how AH might contribute to the preparation of students for interdisciplinary research and work. In this paper, we focus on the case from the University of Oslo (UiO), and we use Phipps’ and Barnett’s (2007) concept of AH in several ways. First, we “map” evidence of AH in the teaching of interdisciplinary courses at UiO by taking an institution level approach. We analyze documents in the public record, such as strategic plans, as well as what the university says about interdisciplinary research and teaching on its public-facing website. We also interview university leaders to find out about institutional support for interdisciplinary teaching. Our purpose is to characterize how hospitable UiO is in terms of administrative policies in place at the university level and the level of the faculty to support interdisciplinary teaching. Second, we collect qualitative data on the different forms of AH in interdisciplinary teaching by interviewing academic staff about the pedagogies they use in teaching an interdisciplinary programme that UiO puts forward on its website as evidence of its commitment to interdisciplinary research. The interviews seek to establish a baseline to describe where AH is already occurring in an interdisciplinary course. We also conduct classroom observations of the same academic staff to contribute to our baseline description of AH. The third way in which we draw on the concept of AH is to test whether specific pedagogies promote it. For example, if academic staff using an explicit articulation of AH and point out examples of it as they teach, does it increase during the course? Another pedagogy we will investigate is deliberative communication (DC), a pedagogy based on principles advanced by John Dewey and Juergen Habermas (Englund, 2008). The practices are designed to create conditions wherein participants are prompted by a problem to reflect on their beliefs, articulate them, and then come to a consensus about how to solve or move forward with the problem.

We found that UiO has policies, practices, and rewards to support interdisciplinary research that are easily accessible and well-articulated. The leadership of the university is firmly committed to interdisciplinary programmes to solve supercomplex problems, such as climate change. However, teaching in interdisciplinary programmes is another matter. Our preliminary findings indicate that few programmes committed to interdisciplinary research offer bachelor degrees, with more offering master’s and doctoral degrees. This does not mean that students in these programmes, and others at the university, do not take courses in which they experience interdisciplinary teaching. Our findings, however, indicate that on an institutional level it is interdisciplinary research that is publicly supported. We have also found evidence of academic hospitality in teaching done in interdisciplinary programmes, though the term is not familiar. We have also found that the use of pedagogies to encourage AH, in particular, deliberative communication (Englund, 2008) are effective in increasing the number and types of examples of AH. We have also preliminary data pointing to an important role for academic development course for academics on being aware of and using AH in their courses and supervision.

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