Campus podcast: Why we need interdisciplinarity in teaching and research

Complex problems cannot be solved if examined only through a narrow lens. Enter interdisciplinarity. It is now widely accepted that drawing on varied expertise and perspectives is the only way we can understand and tackle many of the most challenging issues we face, as individuals and as a species.

So, there is a growing movement towards more cross disciplinary working in higher education but it faces challenges. Interdisciplinarity requires a shift of mindset in an academy built upon clear disciplinary distinctions and must compete for space in already overcrowded curricula.

We speak to two leadings scholars in interdisciplinary research and teaching to find out why it is so important and how they are encouraging more academics and students to break out of traditional academic silos.

Gabriele Bammer is a professor of integration and implementation sciences (i2S) at the Australian National University. She is author of several books including ‘Disciplining Interdisciplinarity’ and is inaugural president of the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity. To support progress in interdisciplinarity around the world, she runs the Integration and Implementation Insights blog and repository of theory, methods and tools underpinning i2S. Gabriele has held visiting appointments at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center at the University of Maryland and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany.

Kate Crawford is an international scholar of the social implications of artificial intelligence who has advised policymakers in the United Nations, the White House, and the European Parliament on AI, and currently leads the Knowing Machines Project, an international research collaboration that investigates the foundations of machine learning. She is a research professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, a senior principal researcher at MSR in New York, an honorary professor at the University of Sydney, and the inaugural visiting chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her award-winning book, Atlas of AI, reveals the extractive nature of this technology while her creative collaborations such as Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler and Excavating AI with Trevor Paglen explore the complex processes behind each human-AI interaction, showing the material and human costs. Her latest exhibition, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power 1500-2025, opened in Milan, November 2023 and won the Grand Prize of the European Commission for art and technology.

More advice and insight can be found in our latest Campus spotlight guide: A focus on interdisciplinarity in teaching.