Across the late twentieth and early twenty-first century interdisciplinarity was offered as a remedy for what ails both academia and society. But we now live in different times: knowledge production has become too dangerous for it to continue along the laissez faire path it has trod. This implies that the concept of relevance, the stock and trade of interdisciplinarity, has become problematic. Rather than relevance, the conversation about knowledge needs to be concerned with the governance of knowledge. This essay begins with an account of the value and efficacy of interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge. In its second half, the essay explores the possibility of a new social consensus on values - the necessary condition for the creation of a governance structure for knowledge. I end with thoughts on the role that universities might play within a reconstituted epistemic order.
This article reflects on 11 years leading the University of Birmingham's Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences unit, examining how we might continue to educate undergraduates in genuine interdisciplinarity when the very concept remains contested and unstable. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's understanding of historical consciousness and the 'weak messianic power' of the past, I argue that interdisciplinary education succeeds not through mastery but through what I call the amateur's advantage - the willingness to stand as a curious outsider across multiple domains. As a classicist and literary scholar by training, I trace how leading programmes that bridged arts and sciences transformed my own scholarly identity, revealing interdisciplinarity not as a fixed pedagogical method but as a disposition towards knowledge itself. The suspension of our successor BASc programme in 2025 prompts reflection on what interdisciplinary education can and cannot achieve within institutions organised around disciplinary structures, and on the fragility of educational experiments that demand students and staff alike inhabit uncomfortable grey areas where established canons, questions, and methods no longer suffice.
This ISR 50th anniversary reflection examines the future of interdisciplinarity from the standpoint of generative artificial intelligence's potential challenge to Heisenberg's open/closed theory distinction, which has influenced modern thinking about interdisciplinarity. The challenge is epitomised by Don Swanson's idea of ‘undiscovered public knowledge’.
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews was established in 1976 by Dr Anthony Rowland Michaelis, a former Scientific Correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, to further interdisciplinary approaches across the sciences, between science and society, and between the sciences and the humanities. Drawing on a long career in international science communication, he had the committed support of a large editorial board, including many close personal friends and colleagues. The subsequent development of the journal is recounted over its first five decades, under its first four Editors-in-Chief, and with a rotating cast of editorial board members, many of considerable distinction in their respective fields. With interdisciplinary discourse in the sciences still in its infancy when Interdisciplinary Science Reviews was founded, this account of the journal's intellectual trajectory also sheds light on the evolving history of the concept of interdisciplinarity itself over that period.
Using the metaphor of interdisciplinarity as the junior dance partner, this article offers a personal perspective on why an interdisciplinary approach is not yet fully accepted and embedded in academic research processes. Over the past 25 years, policy and practice discussions around interdisciplinary research may have moved on from why we should do it, to how to do it, but we still do not have the absorptive capacity to do it consistently well. I argue that we already have the knowledge to do interdisciplinarity better, but without radical changes in funding policy and research cultures, we currently lack the will or the continuity of resources to do so.
In philosophy of education, improvisation is thought of as something the teacher does to improve their teaching or an activity the student does to improve their learning. However, in the light of Catherine Malabou's philosophy of plasticity and ethnomusicological theory, improvisation in education should more rightly be thought of as an ontological feature of education. This article illustrates this with examples from research on interdisciplinary education within the framework of 'academic hospitality'.
In recent decades, plasticity has gained prominence across various disciplines-from neuroscience, biology and psychology to art and philosophy. Typically celebrated as a metaphor for flexibility, adaptation, and resilience, plasticity has been closely associated with life, growth, and recovery. However, as philosopher Catherine Malabou has shown throughout her work, this optimistic reading of plasticity overlooks the capacity for transformation that results not in renewal but in rupture. This paper investigates destructive plasticity, a philosophical concept that questions the limits of form, the stability of identity, and the temporality of becoming. Drawing on the work of Catherine Malabou, G.W.F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, and Martin Heidegger, I explore how destructive plasticity not only reconfigures our understanding of time and matter but also offers a way to think beyond biocentric frameworks. By tracing the historical, etymological, and conceptual development of plasticity, the paper argues that at its core, plasticity is as much about vacuity (emptiness of form) as it is about form. The question at stake is not just how things change-but how they might be irreversibly altered in ways that defy restoration, memory, and recognition.
This commentary, building on the work presented in Iris van der Tuin's (2025) edited volume, reflects on how the conceptual and empirical foundations for interdisciplinary education have been constructed over decades and considers the current epistemological maturity of the field. Recognising the field's current pluralistic ethos and openness to multiple perspectives, the commentary advocates for a more integrative and nuanced epistemological stance that facilitates systemic and context-sensitive decision-making in interdisciplinary teaching and learning. To support this transition, the commentary suggests exploring the potential of integrative and ecologically inspired research methods.
In this comment, I concentrate on the concept of integration , which figures centrally in Key texts on interdisciplinary higher education . After critically discussing the different ways in which integration is used in the volume, I suggest a metaphilosophical orientation that welcomes this diversity as a source of conceptual clarification and innovation.
This commentary reflects on the role and uses of metaphor in Key Texts on Interdisciplinary Higher Education , edited by Iris van der Tuin. It examines how, within the volume's selected extracts and its introductions and analyses, metaphors shape both student and educator understandings of disciplinary structures, integration and epistemic positioning. It emphasises the importance of critical reflection on the historical and ideological freight that can be carried within established figurative frameworks and reflects on the value of more fluid, malleable and reflexive metaphors that embrace complexity, openness and decolonial potential in interdisciplinary pedagogies.
Commenting on Key Texts on Interdisciplinary Higher Education through an analysis of the figures of the Harlequin, the Troubadour, the lens, the jigsaw puzzle and a new Bildung .
Complexity and plasticity are increasingly popular concepts used to make sense of dynamics in the physical and social worlds. These concepts are relevant to a broad spectrum of disciplines, even disciplines where they are not explicitly used. In this article, we further conceptual understanding of plasticity and complexity from different disciplinary perspectives. We also consider how these concepts relate to one another. To do so, we first review how plasticity and complexity manifest at different scales and across our four disciplines: neuroscience, physics, cultural theory and public health. Next, we activate our interdisciplinary perspectives to understand how complexity and plasticity help us understand plant-based diet adoption, a case study that resonates with our different disciplines. We explore plasticity at different scales (neural, individual, network, societal) and how they may cascade. We then synthesise these perspectives to understand how plasticity and complexity may help us understand social change. Most of our disciplinary and interdisciplinary interrogations find that plasticity is an important property of complex systems. Ultimately, this article further contributes to developing interdisciplinary vocabularies of both plasticity and complexity and aims to offer conceptual tools for understanding complex social-physical phenomena.
Most scientific discussions of plasticity emphasize the preservation of a "core identity" across processes of transformation. In neuroscientific accounts of memory, for instance, plasticity is framed as the strengthening or weakening of synapses, while the brain's stability, and thus its enduring identity, is said to be maintained. Even in cases of memory loss, plasticity is described as that which preserves continuity despite rupture. We recognize the value of this view, and certainly, in many cases the continuity of a "core identity" is what makes plasticity possible. However, our intervention wishes to ask what other plastic states become available when the continuity of such a plastic "core identity" is disrupted, or becomes fragile, without being resolved, or recuperated into a new stable and continuous plastic form. It is on these fragile thresholds that we locate negative plasticity, not as a resilient, flexible or adaptable identity, that sustains across transformation, but as a form of negative liminality that possesses a generative indeterminate force of rupture which is irreducible to stable notions of identity.
This article considers the dialectics of plasticity at the intersection of art, boxing, and political ecology. It focuses on the visuality of Black male boxers in Jean-Michel Basquiat oeuvre. I explore how Basquiat viewed the struggle of artistic expression (art’s plasticity) as akin to prizefighting. I draw from the critical aesthetic maneuvers of the French theorist Georges Bataille, and the realist painter Gustave Courbet in order to show how art’s plasticity rivals the political ecology of global capitalism, by tracing a common root between economy and ancient martial arts. I consider the recent boxing match between heavyweight champion Oleksander Usyk and former champion, Tyson Fury as a capitalist spectacle of sacrifice and consumption that serves as a form of ‘sportwashing’. The article culminates with an exegesis on prizefighting in relation to the concept of extinction, one of the marker horizons of the global oil economy. While the connection between prizefighting, extinction and war may not seem obvious, I reference the financial alliances animating the global media apparatus that underpins the visibility of today’s martial arts. The article is organized in 12 rounds, with each round encompassing a particular move or strategy of striking (with art).
The so-called ‘internet novel’ has been predominantly analysed in relation to social media, fragmented online discourse, and identity formation in the virtual realm. While these themes persist across a range of internet novels, from speculative fiction to recent literary prose that mimics the internet itself, less attention has been given to the genre’s engagement with the production of increasing quantities of personal data online, otherwise known as datafication. This article examines Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021) in the context of datafication, language, and the effect of the internet on human subjectivity. The article takes up Deborah Lupton’s concept of ‘data selves’ and Legacy Russell’s theorisation of ‘glitch’ to consider the aesthetic, affective, bodily, and subjective critique of datafication in Lockwood’s novel. It argues that contemporary literary fiction is not only a site for representing and imagining the implications of datafication, but that it can also function as a self-enclosed intelligent system that is indispensable for understanding how the internet is fundamentally changing the way we speak, write, and think. Keywords datafication , subjectivity , internet novel , , , Patricia Lockwood , social media , surveillance
Among the most widely promoted examples of fossil folklore is a supposed link between the Central Asian horned dinosaur Protoceratops and the griffin, a gold-guarding mythical creature combining features of lions and birds. First proposed in the 1990s, this geomyth postulates that tales of Protoceratops fossils were transmitted westward along trade routes from Asian gold mines to inform griffin lore among the ancient Greeks. An evaluation of the Protoceratops –griffin link, however, finds it uncompelling. Not only does it ignore established histories of griffin art and myth, but no convincing connections occur between Protoceratops and central aspects of griffin lore, such as gold guarding. In fact, Protoceratops fossils occur hundreds of kilometres from the nearest gold deposits, subverting suggestions that they inspired the griffin's association with gold. Interpretations of ancient literary references to griffins as pertaining to Protoceratops are unconvincing, and suggested anatomical similarities between griffins and Protoceratops are selectively identified. We regard the Protoceratops –griffin link as an ‘ex post facto geomyth’: an effort to find significance in superficial, inconsequential readings of geological phenomena and mythology. We posit that the allure of ancient cultures sharing our modern fascination with dinosaurs has denied this idea due scepticism. Keywords geomythology , mythology , , , griffin , fossil , folklore , dinosaur
In this paper I present the well-known German literary giant Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) as a heterodox thinker in palaeontology. In Britain, Goethe is best known as a poet, playwright and man of letters, despite producing substantial and detailed scientific studies to which he occasionally attached highly controversial interpretations. In his scientific studies and perhaps especially in palaeontology, Goethe was at times orthodox and at other times highly heterodox. His fundamental project was to comprehend the unifying principle within all nature and in that respect he was one of the early, great holistic thinkers. Goethe proposed a theory of a dynamic unifying ‘type’ for both plants and animals, working together with an inherent creative drive, which he believed was present in all nature. Here I show how he used this model to interpret the morphologies of extinct Plio-Pleistocene mammals such as the aurochs and giant sloth, and also demonstrate how Goethe's dynamic thinking led to some tentative pre-Darwinian transformationist (‘evolutionary’) propositions. Keywords palaeontology , Megatherium , giant sloth , Johann von Goethe , Pander and D’Alton , history of science , metamorphosis , Goethe’s morphology
