Interdisciplinary research cultures are inclusive, not competitive

Universities champion it, funders demand it, and strategies proudly feature it. Interdisciplinarity is everywhere in higher education rhetoric, yet it remains stubbornly elusive in practice. Anyone who has worked across fields that rarely meet (politics and musculoskeletal biology, for example, or governance and public health) knows that interdisciplinarity does not reside in mission statements or glossy plans. It lives in the slow, human work of translation, patience and the willingness to have one’s assumptions unsettled by someone trained to see the world differently.

The UK’s Research Excellence Framework 2029, which will inform how block-grant funding is allocated, sharpens this reality. The new Strategy, People and Research Environment (SPRE) component places research culture at the heart of the exercise. Universities are now expected to demonstrate not just what they produce but also the conditions that make robust, ethical and inclusive research possible. Strategies proliferate and culture statements expand, yet the practice most often celebrated (and least adequately supported) remains interdisciplinarity.

Government priorities compound this challenge. Mission‑driven research is increasingly central to national research and development strategy, from addressing health inequalities to shaping the governance of emerging technologies. These missions implicitly assume interdisciplinarity; no single discipline can tackle complex structural issues alone. Yet this assumption often obscures the labour required to make such work successful. Without time, trust and proper resource allocation, missions risk becoming policy slogans rather than coherent research programmes.

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At the same time, the sector is under sustained pressure to reduce research bureaucracy. Recent reforms aim to streamline funding applications, simplify processes and ease administrative obligations. These are necessary improvements, but interdisciplinarity often involves more administrative complexity, not less: coordinating cross‑faculty budgets, navigating divergent ethics procedures, aligning data practices and translating outputs for multiple audiences. Without targeted support, efforts to reduce bureaucracy can unintentionally make interdisciplinary collaboration more fragile, not more feasible.

Key challenges to interdisciplinary research

Our own collaborative work, exploring sex biases in preclinical research and the political determinants of public health, reveals why interdisciplinarity matters and why it is so difficult to do well. The outputs of such projects matter: evidence reviews, policy briefs, journal articles. But the deeper legacy is harder to capture. It involves the creation of intellectual commons, the emergence of unexpected networks and the dismantling of assumptions that no single discipline could challenge alone.

The first challenge is that disciplines think differently about what counts as good evidence. Biology prizes control and replicability; political science looks to institutions and historical trajectories; and public health works with community contexts and incomplete data. None of these approaches is inherently superior, but each operates according to different internal logics. Interdisciplinary work begins not when those differences are played down, but when they are taken seriously. Once they are on the table, the tensions become clearer: the pull between experimental neatness and lived complexity, between administrative datasets and social meaning. These frictions are not obstacles; they sharpen analysis, reveal blind spots and widen the range of what research can see.

The second obstacle is cultural. Disciplines develop distinct intellectual ecosystems of texts, arguments and assumptions. Foundational texts in one field may be unknown in another. Building a shared bibliography is an act of translation, bringing texts across disciplinary boundaries along with their debates and critiques. As teams read across literatures, projects change shape. Questions become more complex and recommendations become more realistic because they must account for institutional feasibility and the distribution of benefits and harms as well as clinical or technical robustness.

The third obstacle is structural. No academic enters interdisciplinary projects as a blank slate. They bring authorship conventions, teaching loads, promotion expectations and disciplinary norms about what counts. For some, a single‑author theoretical paper is the gold standard; for others, a multi-author dataset or a policy intervention carries weight. When these expectations remain unspoken, what appears to be intellectual disagreement often masks a simpler truth: people need different things for the work to matter in their own environments. Naming these needs early and without embarrassment is the foundation of effective collaboration.

Changing cultural and structural research conditions

This is where SPRE matters. By assessing strategy, people and research environment, REF 2029 transforms the cultural and structural conditions of research into something legible and, therefore, fundable. SPRE ties research culture directly to quality‑related funding. It asks universities to evidence long‑term investment in inclusive, supportive environments. For interdisciplinarity, this is a profound shift. Time for cross‑disciplinary learning, recognition for collaborative labour, shared platforms for methods and analysis have long been treated as aspirational goods. Under SPRE, they become indicators of institutional strength.

This creates new incentives. Funding follows institutions that invest in the conditions that interdisciplinarity requires, not those that merely praise it. It encourages a shift from output‑driven competition to environment‑driven support. And it exposes a longstanding contradiction: universities cannot credibly champion interdisciplinarity while rewarding speed, individualism and disciplinary siloing. Under REF 2029, that contradiction becomes not only reputational but financial.

None of this works without curiosity. Yet the engine of interdisciplinary thinking cannot thrive in environments governed by competition. Interdisciplinary work depends on curiosity that is expansive, relational, open to challenge and a disciplined habit, where naive questions are asked without defensiveness, premature closure resisted and critique welcomed early rather than feared late.

It also depends on time. Interdisciplinary work is slow. It demands time to learn another field, to sit with unfamiliar methods, to troubleshoot conceptual tensions before they become conflicts. Without structural recognition of this temporal cost (through workload models, mentoring structures and leadership commitment), interdisciplinarity remains an ambition rather than a practice.

When it works, interdisciplinarity reshapes institutions as much as knowledge. It redistributes authority from disciplinary gatekeepers to collaborative problem‑solvers. It strengthens networks, diversifies expertise and creates research communities capable of thinking beyond inherited boundaries. The most enduring outcome is not the output but the relationships that make future collaborations possible.

Our most urgent problems (scientific bias, health inequity, climate vulnerability) ignore disciplinary boundaries. Our research systems must learn to do the same. If universities value the cultures they build as much as the outputs they produce, interdisciplinarity becomes not a slogan but a sustained practice. REF 2029 offers the incentive. The sector must now offer the commitment.

Valentina Cardo is an associate professor of politics and identity and co-director of the Intersectionality: Politics - Identities - Cultures Research Group; Claire Clarkin is professor of skeletal and developmental biology; and Ingrid Slade is an associate professor of public health, all at the University of Southampton.

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