This interdisciplinary essay is positioned at the intersection of microbiology and new materialist philosophy, with the goal of challenging the dominant Western narrative of the corpse as inert waste. By drawing on microbial decomposition, human death is reconceptualised as “generative undoing”: a staged, agential process of unbinding and recombination performed by microbial actants. Modern practices of sequestering and sanitising human remains stem from a complex cultural inheritance, where Cartesian mind–body dualism features prominently as a philosophical foundation for devaluing the corpse, a perspective that has since been extended by necropolitical agendas. When an alternative microbial lens is used, the corpse emerges as a vibrant, agent-driven ecosystem called the thanatobiome , where internal microbial partners orchestrate staged decomposition and liberate atoms and molecules for re-assimilation into new life, an activity that comprises a literal, biological reincarnation of substance. How the bounded self can dissolve into distributed, ecological existence is revealed through the Japanese Buddhist art of Kusōzu and ecological phenomena like whale falls in order to explore this ontological transition in depth. Importantly, emerging practices, including eco-friendly burial suits and legalized natural organic reduction (human composting), already align death practices with this microbial reality. It becomes possible to ground a necro-ethics in material reincarnation that is oriented toward the Chthulucene, where ecological decomposition becomes a final act of care and resistance against necropolitical logics, and death is thereby positioned as the redistribution of agentized material selves. By revising cultural narratives and practices the dead can be honored as an ongoing presence and as vibrant participants in the planet's vitality.
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’.
