Pluralism in Teaching Interdisciplinary Research The Amsterdam Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies Textbook

Immediately after its appearance, we at the University of Amsterdam’s
Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies enthusiastically adopted Allen
Repko’s Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory (Repko, 2008) as it was
the first textbook that offered systematic explanation of and guidance through
the complexities of an interdisciplinary research project. However, several
characteristics of the projects conducted by our students made it an uneasy
match for their needs and ours. For one thing, the Repko text targets students
doing individual research projects whereas our students typically perform
interdisciplinary research in teams. Our students also typically bring more
disciplinary expertise to their interdisciplinary work than those whom the
Repko text targets. And they often undertake empirical research as part of
their projects—and not just the research in relevant literature that is emphasized
in the Repko texts. Feeling the need for a textbook on interdisciplinary
research that would better support students like ours, we decided to develop
our own textbook, Introduction to Interdisciplinary Research: Theory and Practice.
In this article, we describe the version of the research process we present in
our text, emphasizing the many forms of pluralism involved in the process as
reconceived to better suit teams of researchers based in different disciplines,
and sometimes pursuing empirical work which may involve extra-academic
stakeholders.