A critical appraisal of interdisciplinary research and education in British Higher Education Institutions: A path forward?

Abstract

This article examines the development, impact and integration of interdisciplinary approaches in British Higher Education Institutions. It evaluates how the concept of interdisciplinarity has become popularised over time and embraced by disciplines such as archaeology. It then explores the extent to which interdisciplinary approaches have impacted research agendas, first, by evaluating the interdisciplinary research calls from 2019 for seven UK-based research councils and then, at a discipline level, using archaeology as an exemplar. Overall, interdisciplinary research calls only accounted for, at best, 11.9% of a council’s budget. Interrogation of the funding requirements of four of the largest archaeological-research funders demonstrated that successful archaeology-themed grant applications are reliant on interdisciplinarity. The influence of interdisciplinarity on British University’s research and education agendas was examined through analysing the strategic plans of eight universities, followed by an analysis of the availability and potential benefits of interdisciplinary undergraduate and research programmes. This indicated that interdisciplinary approaches are interwoven into university’s research aspirations but displayed variation in relation to their educational goals, with only 20% of institutions offering specific interdisciplinary degree programmes. Despite this, the skillset and research outputs produced as a result of interdisciplinary collaboration were found to be highly valued, thereby suggesting that interdisciplinarity will increasingly feature in the research and education strategies of British universities.