Living interdisciplinarity: negotiating identity and practice in higher education

This paper explores interdisciplinarity in higher education as a lived and negotiated practice embedded in everyday (academic) life. Drawing on an 11-month cross-national ethnography of master’s programmes in Denmark and Germany, we examine how students and lecturers mobilise interdisciplinarity in their narratives and interactions, revealing how it shapes identity, belonging, and orientation within and beyond disciplinary boundaries. Through participant narratives and classroom accounts, we show that interdisciplinarity is invoked, resisted, and redefined both as an epistemic orientation and a process of identity formation. Our analysis demonstrates that interdisciplinarity operates as a performative process through which individuals navigate tensions between disciplinary norms and aspirations for openness and collaboration. By linking these empirical insights to debates on epistemic cultures, identity, and interdisciplinary learning, the paper contributes to understanding interdisciplinarity as a formative and transformative practice that is continually enacted, contested, and sustained within higher education.