Interdisciplinary supervision: Neither, nor, or both?

Abstract

Taking an interdisciplinary approach to scientific research holds considerable potential but also constitutes a high-risk project. It might prove hard to coordinate and communicate between disciplines and the results may either lack sufficient scientific depth or anchoring in any of the contributing disciplines. This is especially true for interdisciplinary PhD projects, where the doctoral student is put at disciplinary crossroads: Will the dissertation tilt towards one of the participating disciplines or manage to combine several of them into something new? In this explorative study, we investigate how interdisciplinarity affects PhD students in terms of supervision. We interview two supervision teams with supervisors and PhD students: One within an established interdisciplinary field with supervisors from different backgrounds within the social sciences and one consisting of an interdisciplinary project that cuts across natural and social sciences. The interviews focused on the formation of the PhD student’s, and by extension the group’s, academic disciplinary identity, the dynamics within the supervision group and the PhD student’s future career. As a complement, we interviewed a senior academic researcher with experience from assessing interdisciplinary PhD theses. The results indicate that negotiating or coordinating disciplinary identity early on might be essential to balancing the freedom of working across disciplinary borders with the lack of boundaries from those same disciplines to relate to. This appears particularly important for interdisciplinary projects that lack an institutional framework within an established interdisciplinary context. This balancing act plays an important role in deciding whether the PhD student can draw on advantages from several disciplines or end up with being grounded in neither the one nor the other.