Paradoxes, according to Granovetter (1973), are “a welcome antidote to theories which explain everything all too neatly”. In this presentation, we discuss some of the paradoxes that are evident from our studies of Danish and British attempts to institutionalise interdisciplinarity within existing higher education structures (Lindvig, 2017; Lyall, 2019). We contrast individual and institutional practices in order to highlight the decoupling that persists between strategic, institutional levels and those engaged in the daily practice of interdisciplinarity, revealing a series of misalignments between rhetoric and reality.

Existing approaches to interdisciplinarity can broadly be divided into categories of integration and of generalisation; of perceiving interdisciplinarity as something that can and should be defined by concrete, set methods and guidelines (Repko, 2017) or as a concept that covers any dialogue between disciplines (Moran, 2010) and thus applied to a broader field of activities.

Another way of understanding the concept of interdisciplinarity is that it has both a loud and performative voice and a quiet and productive voice. Whereas the performative voice is visible in institutional strategies and national (and international) research funding policies, the quiet voice is present at the local and everyday levels, where students and researchers do highly integrated research and educational activities, often without even labelling it ‘interdisciplinary’.

So far, these voices of interdisciplinarity have been discussed in separate strands of the literature; partly because of a division of labour between research fields studying interdisciplinary research, collaboration and education, respectively; partly because the approaches address different levels of governance of higher education and research and are motivated by different goals. Nevertheless, in our studies from two countries with relatively recent explicit interdisciplinary histories, these voices are concurrently present; as two voices, speaking at different sound levels. The loud and strategic voice is heard at the programme and project management levels; the quieter voice is present at the mundane levels, among the faculty, researchers and students, practising interdisciplinarity.

The presentation draws first on empirical data from fieldwork conducted in Denmark from a large interdisciplinary programme at the University of Copenhagen to introduce the concept of soft and loud voices in order to illuminate the challenges of introducing interdisciplinarity within existing monodisciplinary structures. We then test the utility of this concept by demonstrating how these loud and soft voices can also be witnessed through a series of career history interviews with British academics.

By offering a counter-balance to the experiences from countries with a longer history of institutionalised interdisciplinary education and research, we wish to prompt a discussion of the implications of these voices when they are brought into balance, and the impact that this might have on the organization of our institutions, to enable them to better handle the necessary transformations that we seek as a society. In a wider perspective, the aim is to ensure that researchers and students of the future are better equipped with the skills to co-design and lead processes that target sustainable outcomes.

Literature
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380.
Lindvig, K. (2017). Creating Interdisciplinarity within Monodisciplinary Structures (PhD Thesis). Department of Science Education, Faculty of Science, University of Copenhagen.
Lyall, C. (2019). Being an Interdisciplinary Academic: How institutions Shape University Careers (London: Palgrave)
Moran, J. (2010). Interdisciplinarity (2.). London: Routledge.

Repko, A. (2017). Interdisciplinary research process and theory. Los Angeles: SAGE,.