Institutionalising interdisciplinarity in PhD training: challenging and redefining expertise in problem-oriented research

Abstract

Interdisciplinary research is gathering increasing support from sustainability scholars, however, there is little dialogue between scholarship on interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary environmental science education. The aim of this paper is to take stock of the insights of studies of interdisciplinary research to inform environmental research and education. We take as our case study a research centre in Spain, which created an interdisciplinary PhD programme on climate change. The analysis is based on 18 interviews with PhD students and supervisors. We focus on: (i) the need to train experts while redefining expertise outside of disciplinary boundaries; (ii) the practical and institutional challenges of interdisciplinarity in the context of PhD training; and (iii) the challenges of assessing the quality across disciplines. Our results show that conflicts with institutional requirements lead to a tendency to abandon interdisciplinary aspects and to the training of experts narrowly centred on the specific problem they analyse.

Keywords:

• Quality
• uncertainty
• higher education
• climate change
• sustainability science

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Öberg (2011) distinguishes between interdisciplinary and transacademic research, where the main focus of the former is on the interaction between academic disciplines and of the latter on the interaction between academia and the larger society.

2 To maintain anonymity, the numbering of interviewees does not correspond with the order in which PhD projects are listed in the table.

3 For example, the University of Bergen, Norway.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, through the ‘María de Maeztu’ program for Units of Excellence (MDM-2015-0552). The first author acknowledges financial support of the Spanish government’s Research Agency (RYC2021-031839-I).