The world faces a plethora of pressing issues today, including intensifying geopolitical tensions, climate change, the rapid advancement of AI, widening social and economic divides, and the erosion of international cooperation. It is commonly agreed that these global challenges are the result of a combination of factors and can therefore not be understood in isolation. Many also concur that these challenges, prevalent in many parts of the world, require international cooperation to be solved. Where international cooperation on a political level is currently failing, education is being called upon to carry on the huge responsibility of cultivating global citizenship, promoting intercultural understanding, and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration in pursuit of shared solutions. However, these challenges and transformations increasingly blur reality and challenge traditional ways of thinking, learning, and living, urging us to reconsider traditional educational frameworks in which we expect interdisciplinarity to work.
The first part of this Forum series on the topic of interdisciplinarity was held during our June conference in Paris, where delegates explored the barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration and asked the crucial question of whether interdisciplinary collaboration and dialogue between disciplines and methodologies are at all possible. The first round of discussion concluded that a lot of interdisciplinary collaboration is taking place, but it tends to be informal. While there is demand and interest in interdisciplinary research, there are limited structures in place to support it, and an exclusionary mindset still persists. The majority of participants agreed, however, that dialogue between disciplines and methodologies is possible.
In Part II of this special Forum series, held both onsite and online in London, we focus on solutions. If interdisciplinarity were to be assessed, what would be the criteria for a successful and high-quality interdisciplinary collaboration project? What academic values does interdisciplinarity address, and how can we reimagine educational values to support interdisciplinary collaboration? What would an interdisciplinary curriculum or research culture look like in practice? How do organisations promote both interdisciplinary interactions within their own institutions and across national and international boundaries? How would interdisciplinary output interact with sectors outside of academia?
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