The tyranny of ‘interdisciplinarity’

Australian archaeology is known for its youthful energy, diversity of approaches, and integration of Indigenous and Western knowledges using modern techniques and technologies. Archaeologists learning their trade in Australia are immersed in the deep antiquity of human presence and continuing connections modern communities maintain on this continent. Nowhere else is archaeology as alive as it is on the Australian continent.

Increasingly, however, archaeologists in Australia (as elsewhere) are being pushed to make connections outside of their discipline in order to produce work which can be classified as interdisciplinary. This push isn’t from peers seeking to grow our understanding of the human story, but rather from university administrators seeking to increase the standing of their institutions. For example, access to basic research support such as internal postgraduate scholarships, postdoctoral fellowships, and various research grant schemes are increasingly offered only to teams which incorporate academic staff from different disciplines. Similarly, more and more frequently such funding schemes—if not entirely restricted to interdisciplinary teams—include statements along the lines that interdisciplinary teams/projects will be looked on ‘with favour’ or ‘will be an advantage’. As such, the already shrinking pool of funds for new equipment, students, postdocs, and projects is becoming less and less available to single-discipline projects and teams.

Initially developed to help create breakthroughs in complex problems by drawing knowledge from two or more disciplines with different ways of interrogating and understanding data, there is no doubt that interdisciplinary research is valuable for approaching issues in a more creative and critical fashion. Indeed, contemporary archaeology is already inherently interdisciplinary in its unique combination of skills and practices. Certainly, interdisciplinary teams—which have included one or more archaeologists—have produced exciting and insightful pieces of work informing on different aspects of the human past and present. The problem specifically stems from the linking of what are arguably two of most common buzzwords in academia at this time: interdisciplinary and impact.

The ability of interdisciplinary research publications to generate high numbers of citations as well as citations across several fields of usually unrelated study has resulted in institutions seeing such work as an easy way to boost their rankings. Undeniably, it has been shown that interdisciplinary projects often do receive a higher number of citations compared to non-interdisciplinary papers (Chen et al. 2015; Okamura 2019), and everyone in the academic sector is well-aware of the constant push to increase one’s metrics. Others have recently highlighted the pitfalls surrounding the way that we frame research projects owing to the rise of metrics and how they are used to evaluate research ‘impact’ (Wallis 2020), so I will here focus on the risks that the current pressure to pursue, and even entirely focus on, interdisciplinarity research presents to archaeology as a discipline.

With Australian universities morphing into business ventures (see Wallis 2020 for discussion), the central goals of teaching and research often find themselves placed backseat to ensuring continued and growing profits. Rather that enhancing the quality of teaching on how to think, to explore, to investigate, administrations now focus on gaining the most, the highest, the best of any and all rankings (i.e. Times Higher Education World University Rankings; QS World University Rankings; ShanghaiRanking Global Ranking of Academic Subjects, etc.). Strong results allow universities to advertise their prowess to their primary income source, undergraduate (especially international) students. As these rankings are heavily based on the ‘impact’ that their academic staff have in their respective fields—as primarily represented by their publication metrics—the lure of ‘easy’ citation metrics becomes quickly obvious. But it is not just these numbers that university marketing teams like to spruik. More often than not, a researcher’s or group’s ability to (almost routinely) engage in ‘interdisciplinary research and teaching’ is used to demonstrate their (the university’s) ‘cutting-edge approach’ to prospective students, industry partners, and funding bodies (which goes towards reputation—also assessed for rankings). But if researchers are increasingly driven to undertake such work, where does that leave the discipline (singular) of archaeology?

Others in the humanities have already warned that increasing interdisciplinarity has a range of risks that are not yet fully appreciated by academia (Burawoy 2013). To begin, increasing interdisciplinarity risks creating weaker disciplines which are then in danger of being pushed into larger, stronger disciplines in the related hierarchy. This narrowing to ‘mega-disciplines’—in which the uniqueness of individual disciplines is essentially dissolved—eventually results in fewer perspectives being available for tackling research questions. Further, interdisciplinary approaches can become too meta-theoretical, resulting in a practice that is not able to deal with more mundane questions. In short, the construction of fewer ‘disciplines’ as a by-product of the push for interdisciplinarity not only breaks down our ability to bring diverse perspectives to create ways forward in complex issues but ends in hobbling our ability to answer even simple questions within (what was once) our own specialty. Additionally, and not insignificantly, an increase in the number of researchers from different but related fields having to compete for resources both within universities and from external funding bodies (both of which are continually dwindling themselves) will end in fewer projects being funded and decreasing advances in knowledge creation. Overall, interdisciplinary research becomes self-defeating by moving researchers down a spiral of ever-increasing merging events towards a state of academic confusion.

Averting this disaster appears straightforward—we resist over-doing interdisciplinary projects and make sure there is a mix of somewhat ‘traditional’ archaeology sufficient that we don’t lose sight of what it is and isn’t to be an archaeologist. Carrying out this plan is hampered, however, by the tertiary sector’s central aims to (1) create profit from attracting students, industry partners, and funding bodies; while (2) spending as little as possible in the process. This problem was already of increasing concern prior to 2020, however, the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic caused universities (and some would say, that they took the opportunity) to further downsize and streamline both their professional and academic profiles to generate as much profit with as little expenditure as possible. Departments and faculties were split, merged, and in some cases, completely closed. Archaeology departments were not excluded from these changes and found themselves paired or otherwise thrown in with sometimes quite different disciplines for the sake of administrative and budget lines. To justify these changes, it was often the word ‘interdisciplinary’ that was tottered out and repeatedly pointed to in order to allay fears of irrelevance, redundancy, and dissolution.

Now on the other side of this budgetary crisis with university balances beginning to recover, it is critical that archaeologists begin to reassert the unique and powerful ways that archaeology can contribute to the modern world. Archaeology, as a discipline, is not simply a ‘sexy’ subject that can be rolled into a range of courses to entice and delight students into the humanities and sciences. Archaeology, as a discipline, is worthy of its own place in our universities—as departments, as centres, as whole undergraduate programs. We need to defend the ‘archaeological-ness’ of archaeology not only if our understanding of the human past and present is to continue to benefit from trans- or interdisciplinary approaches to shared questions of interest, but also to continue to grow the unique ways of investigating, interpreting, and understanding humanity which make Australian archaeology uniquely alive.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.