Interdisciplinarity and anxiety

Abstract

At the level of institutional strategy, interdisciplinary research looks like a positive and productive exchange. At the personal level, where it is enmeshed with career progress, disciplinary anxieties and tensions at the interface between sometimes incommensurate kinds of thinking, there can be frictions and difficulties. These, however, are part of what makes such research so valuable, in that they enable individuals and groups within subjects on both sides to uncover those things that need to be better understood. This article forms part of an ongoing thematic collection dedicated to interdisciplinary research.