The literature on democratization uses measures of either ethnic fractionalization or polarization in empirical analyses on the causes of democratic regress; some authors have argued that either of the two complicates democratization. This article detects a conceptual puzzle in this use of the two concepts: when we shift the attention from fractionalization to polarization we are not simply moving along a continuum but rather making an epistemic leap from facts to normative problems. But to treat the relation between a descriptive account of a state of affairs and a normative status as a continuum is a fallacy that remains unaddressed in this literature. This article exposes the limits of analyses that remove normative considerations from the big picture of dynamics of democratization and that narrow their focus to case histories of democratic development. It pleas for a return to normative insight and interdisciplinary dialogue.

This article builds on the Linguistic Society of America's Statement on Race to argue that linguistics urgently needs an interdisciplinarily informed theoretical engagement with race and racism. To be adequate, a linguistic theory of race must incorporate the perspectives of linguistic researchers of different methodological approaches and racial backgrounds and must also draw on theories of race in neighboring fields, including anthropology, sociology, and psychology, as well as speech and hearing sciences, composition and literacy studies, education, and critical interdisciplinary race studies. The lack of comprehensive and up-to-date theoretical, analytical, and political understandings of race within linguistics not only weakens research by erasing, marginalizing, and misrepresenting racially minoritized groups, but it also diminishes the impact of the entire field by devaluing and excluding the intellectual contributions of researchers of color, whose work on this topic is rarely welcome within linguistics departments. The article therefore argues for a rethinking of both linguistic scholarship and linguistics as a discipline in more racially inclusive and socially just terms.

Despite renewed interest in the concept of interdisciplinary research, the social sciences have produced very little evidence for its feasibility or success. Acknowledging the diversity within comparative politics, this article argues that we have scant evidence of interdisciplinarity, some evidence of successful multidisciplinarity in problem-driven research and more frequent examples of cross-disciplinary borrowing, particularly when comparativists have reached a theoretical plateau in capturing new or persisting puzzles. There is little evidence to support the expectation that interdisciplinarity can create a new epistemology that exceeds disciplinary knowledge.

The history of interdisciplinarity in international relations (IR) is not a simple narrative. Initially a transdisciplinary meeting place for scholars from many disciplines, IR developed after the 1940s into a closed sub-discipline of political science, and only after 1980 did it once again engage with other disciplines in a sustained way. This article traces these ‘three ages’ of IR, and concludes with a case study of the emerging historiography within IR.

This introductory article investigates the relationship between interdisciplinarity and the study of politics, drawing on the symposium papers. Beginning with a brief historiography of the study of politics/political science, we then explain what we understand by ‘interdisciplinarity’. Next, we explore the potential benefits of an interdisciplinary approach in political research, and also identify some of its shortcomings and potential pitfalls. Finally, while acknowledging the need for more debate, we give some doubtless partial guidance regarding further interdisciplinary research.

In the UK academics are being urged to embrace interdisciplinarity in their research and teaching activities. In the case of public policy, there is a tension between the epistemological formations from the parent discipline of politics and garnering the benefits of interdisciplinarity. Furthermore, interdisciplinarity in public policy cannot and should not ignore cleavages in existing policy pathways. These concerns are discussed in the article by assessing the public policy of obesity in England and Wales.

Understanding the Bologna Process is important, because its reforms (curriculum reform mixed with funding and governing reforms) have an effect on the discipline through the European Higher Education Area and European Research Area. The article discusses the state of the Bologna Process and its contradictions, the links between education and research and the implications for political science as a discipline.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize society, but realizing this potential requires more than technical effort. Developing effective AI systems involves balancing specialized knowledge within disciplines with the cross-disciplinary insights needed to address complex challenges. It also requires bridging fundamental research, which offers generalizable principles, with applied research, which ensures solutions are tailored to specific contexts. Crucially, it demands integrating expert perspectives with the lived experiences of communities, creating systems that are equitable and grounded in real-world needs.

Our research lab was established in 2020 as a collaboration between academia and public institutions to address these gaps. This article reflects on five years of the lab’s work, focusing on insights from studying the school choice algorithm in Amsterdam. School choice is a pressing issue in the city, and policymakers have adapted the well-known Deferred Acceptance algorithm to match students to schools. However, this adaptation led to inefficiencies, with students often placed in schools far down their preference list. This illustrated how a theoretically robust approach, even one that famously earned a Nobel Prize, can lose effectiveness when misaligned with local contexts.

We found that addressing this issue required integrating multiple perspectives: theoretical insights, practical considerations from community stakeholders, and interdisciplinary approaches combining quantitative and qualitative methods from AI, Economics, and Psychology. To articulate this, we propose a conceptual model that bridges three key dimensions in AI research: theory and application, science and society, and qualitative and quantitative inquiry. This project underscored a critical lesson: solutions rooted in a single perspective fail to address real-world complexities, and truly impactful research emerges when diverse approaches are synthesized.

We advocate for a shift in AI research that prioritizes flexibility and allows for fluidly navigating between our three proposed dimensions. Our experience suggests that such flexibility ensures AI research genuinely serves and uplifts society.

Teachers are at the front line of climate change education (CCE), working to integrate its complex environmental, social and ethical dimensions into their classroom practice. Yet little is known about the barriers to and enablers of implementing interdisciplinarity within CCE. This study investigates Finnish secondary school teachers’ perspectives on interdisciplinary CCE, examining how their practices are shaped by access to resources, training and institutional support. Drawing on the ecological model of teacher agency, we conduct a mixed-methods analysis from a national survey of 243 teachers. The findings reveal a strong commitment to locally relevant and ethically informed CCE, as well as an increased interest in activities in outdoor environments, research-based resources and drama-based resources. On the other hand, an increased disinclination to introducing new content and resources highlights the persistence of structural, epistemological, and ideological barriers. Teachers report relying heavily on self-directed learning and growing interdisciplinary fatigue due to fragmented support systems. These dynamics reveal a need for academic–school collaborations that move beyond top-down implementation and towards the creation of accessible, adaptable knowledge. This study contributes to emerging debates about how to foster critical interdisciplinarity in CCE by centring the voices and agency of educators.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reached memory studies in earnest. This partly reflects the hype around recent developments in generative AI (genAI), machine learning, and large language models (LLMs). But how can memory studies scholars handle this hype? Focusing on genAI applications, in particular so-called ‘chatbots’ (transformer-based instruction-tuned text generators), this commentary highlights five areas of critique that can help memory scholars to critically interrogate AI’s implications for their field. These are: (1) historical critiques that complicate AI’s common historical narrative and historicize genAI; (2) technical critiques that highlight how genAI applications are designed and function; (3) praxis critiques that centre on how people use genAI; (4) geopolitical critiques that recognize how international power dynamics shape the uneven global distribution of genAI and its consequences; and (5) environmental critiques that foreground genAI’s ecological impact. For each area, we highlight debates and themes that we argue should be central to the ongoing study of genAI and memory. We do this from an interdisciplinary perspective that combines our knowledge of digital sociology, media studies, literary and cultural studies, cognitive psychology, and communication and computer science. We conclude with a methodological provocation and by reflecting on our own role in the hype we are seeking to dispel.

This Reflection draws from an ongoing collaboration among the three authors, investigating mutual enlistment between the United States Department of Defense and research communities devoted to the advancement of the AI project. We are interested in the intersecting concerns and resonant sensibilities that draw us together – what we argue is the necessary starting point for interdisciplinary thinking – and in the differences that are the collaboration’s generative possibilities. Among the threads that join us are intersecting pathways between academic and commercial positionings within and against the AI project. Each of us has moved between locations in industry and the university, as researchers, practitioners, and students/faculty. Drawing on these experiences, we explore the possibilities that different positionings afford and what they preclude, how we have attempted to navigate these institutions within their frames of reference, and what has drawn us into relations beyond their putative boundaries. Based on Philip Agre’s call for a “critical technical practice” as a path towards more radical shifts in knowledge practices, we consider how we might weave together our biographical trajectories, disciplinary affiliations, political commitments, subjectivities, and skills into what Andrew Barry and Georgina Born name a more “auspicious interdisciplinarity”.

Ideas about morphological complexity have been used to classify languages and to link complexity to language age and social structure. Creoles and sign languages are often framed as younger and structurally simpler than other languages. Concurrently, sign language morphology has been described as paradoxical, as both simple and complex. This paper is a critical examination of claims about morphological complexity and its relationship to language age and social structure. We show that the theoretical and empirical foundations of claims that sign language morphology is paradoxical are flawed. Specifically, argumentation and evidence supporting analogies between creole and sign language complexity adopt theoretically contested and ideologically problematic assumptions about creoles and uncritically apply them to sign languages. We identify four flaws in argumentation: (i) use of limited morphological data to generate claims about global complexity, (ii) association of binary language categories with categorical complexity differences, (iii) use of language age to motivate predictions about morphological complexity, and (iv) extrapolating from creole complexity to sign language complexity. Based on these flaws, we develop nine theoretical and practical recommendations for working with morphological complexity and discuss uncritical cross-disciplinary transfer of ideas.

Through compositional inclusion or exclusion, the photograph can assert and communicate what belongs in a picture, in a landscape, in an ecosystem. It can illuminate what we deem conservation-worthy, or, on a larger scale, which extinctions are attention-worthy. Photographic practice helps to illuminate the active nature of extinction, and our choices as actors and witnesses within that process. Here, researchers from the University of Leeds’ Extinction Studies Doctoral Training Programme present individual reflections on interdisciplinary practice-led research in the Scottish Small Isles. We consider how photography, as a form of praxis, can generate new forms of knowledge surrounding extinction: its meanings, representations, and legacies, particularly through visual representation. We offer seven perspectives on contemporary image-making, from disciplines including philosophy, conservation biology, literature, sociology, geology, cultural anthropology, and palaeontology. Researchers gathered experiential, ethical, even biological meanings from considering what to include or exclude in images: from the micro to the macro, the visible to the invisible, the aesthetic to the ecological. We draw conclusions around meaning-making through the process of photography itself, and the tensions encountered through framing and decision-making in a time of mass ecological decline.

The elusive southern river otter (Lontra provocax; huillín in Spanish) is critically endangered in the Argentine portion of Tierra del Fuego, and low social awareness may be one of the major threats to its conservation. Our survey of local residents’ knowledge and valuation of the huillín showed that only 14% recognized photographs of the species, almost half did not know that it is endangered and most erroneously thought it was an introduced species. Greater knowledge about the huillín was related to higher respondent education levels. Younger and more knowledgeable residents valued the species more for ecological and relational reasons; its instrumental value was considered least important. More communication should be targeted at older people and groups not directly interacting with nature via informal education methods, including combining positive messages about the huillín and other native species with ongoing outreach efforts warning about biological invasions. Understanding perceptions and valuations of biodiversity can make conservation efforts more effective and inclusive.