Background

The world is grappling with complex and multi-dimensional challenges on an unparalleled scale (Markauskaite et al., 2023). These significant societal issues are characterized by their vague boundaries and their intricate often contradictory and evolving nature, making them difficult to resolve. Rittel and Webber (1973) have described these types of issues as “wicked problems.” There is mounting pressure on higher education institutions to equip students with the skills necessary to navigate and address these problems (Cantor et al., 2015; McCune et al., 2023). Given that wicked problems have no clear-cut solutions and involve multiple stakeholders, interdisciplinary education is increasingly promoted as a generative means of surmounting these problems (McCune et al., 2023).

The last fifty years have therefore seen an increasing number of national and international policy-makers champion interdisciplinarity. However, productive, ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration is easier said than done (Chandramohan & Fallows 2009; Lyall et al. 2015). Yet universities must prepare their graduates well for it (Lindvig et al. 2019), and educational leaders, teachers, students and administrators need to find ways to work interdisciplinarily in education.

Interdisciplinary education involves harnessing and integrating insights from various disciplines to form a more holistic understanding (Newell, 2013). The aim is often to create insights that are integrative or synthetic, rather than merely additive (McCune et al., 2023). This complexity necessitates a need to negotiate and reconcile the often implicit and conflicting epistemological positions, values, and practices inherent to different disciplines (Di Giulio and Defila, 2017; Ripley et al., 2023). There is often a struggle to overcome both structural and cultural obstacles to interdisciplinary collaboration. Even though many academic leaders signal the importance of interdisciplinary education in their university’s strategic plans, they are silent on how to support it (Stensaker et al., 2019; Sutphen et al., 2019). So how then can we do interdisciplinary education that works? Is it even possible?

Three cases

In this panel, researchers from Norway, Sweden and Ireland will present empirical cases that look at collaboration in interdisciplinary education. The cases presented have come out of the international research project Academic Hospitality in Interdisciplinary Education (AHIE), led by Molly Sutphen at the University of Oslo, who is also the proposed chair for this panel. The presentations will also draw on the extensive literature review coming out of the AHIE project.

At each of the three universities, focus-group interviews have been carried out with different stakeholders involved in interdisciplinary education. The presentation of preliminary results will lead into a discussion of challenges to collaboration in interdisciplinary education and how to overcome these. The international perspective will contribute to a fuller contextual understanding of the findings.

Discussion

The concluding discussion will focus on ways of addressing challenges to collaboration in interdisciplinary education. Here, we would like to discuss and receive feedback on some of the central ideas in the AHIE project, not least the potential of what Phipps and Barnett (2007) have termed academic hospitality.

Phipps and Barnett (2007) argue that working within different disciplines requires a hospitable academic practice, adapting to the evolving dynamics and demands of academic life. The concept of academic hospitality involves demonstrating generosity towards peers, students and other university staff in daily academic interactions. Phipps and Barnett delineate four distinct types of academic hospitality – epistemic, linguistic, material and touristic – which we would like to discuss with colleagues attending the panel in relation to their research or experiences and to the cases presented by the panel. We also draw on concepts of affective hospitality (Imperiale et al., 2021; Zembylas, 2019) as a means for understanding hospitality as a relational, embodied and entangled mode of being.

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