The world faces intensifying geopolitical tensions, climate change, widening social and economic divides, and the erosion of international cooperation. It is commonly agreed that these global challenges are the result of a combination of factors and therefore cannot be understood in isolation. Many also concur that these challenges, prevalent in many parts of the world, require international cooperation to be solved. Where international cooperation on a political level is currently failing, education is called to carry on the huge responsibility of cultivating global citizenship, promoting intercultural understanding, and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration in pursuit of shared solutions inside and outside educational institutions.
While the ‘international’ and ‘intercultural’ parts may be easier to address, ‘interdisciplinary’ collaboration remains particularly challenging. Educational institutions and mechanisms value the depth of knowledge and expertise that comes with disciplinarity. They train academics in frameworks particular to their discipline, often casting judgment upon other disciplines’ capability to generate empirical knowledge. There is not enough incentive for interdisciplinary collaboration, despite growing recognition that today’s most urgent problems are inherently interdisciplinary in nature. Indeed, being recognised for engaging in interdisciplinary research is quite difficult, and funding is often limited.
This Forum discussion seeks to address how to foster cooperation in difficult times, and how to best tackle the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration. What structural and systemic changes are needed to promote interdisciplinary collaboration? How can we ensure equitable interdisciplinary collaboration, including tacit and indigenous knowledge? What common ground can we find despite the differences in vocabulary, methodologies, and knowledge generation between disciplines? With delegates representing various disciplines within education, the arts, and the humanities at this conference, the discussion aims to model constructive interdisciplinary dialogue by example.
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