Interdisciplinarity paves way for sustainability solutions

The increasing investments by academic institutions in interdisciplinarity are not just boosting flexibility and lateral thinking, they are strengthening the ability of universities and colleges to support sustainability worldwide.

That includes helping deliver the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through research publications based on different disciplines; courses that address sustainability and development; as well as participation in sustainability initiatives outside academic institutions.

One higher education leader in sustainability-focused interdisciplinarity is Oxford University Press (OUP), which on 20 March 2025 launched an online series of original, interdisciplinary research centred on the humanities and social sciences, called Oxford Intersections.

It is approaching societal issues from a range of angles, starting with ‘AI in Society’, and ‘Racism by Context’. Each topic, in an anticipated portfolio of over 35 interdisciplinary topics, contains around 300 peer-reviewed original articles from multiple disciplines.

The first tranche includes “AI governance and environmental sustainability: Evaluating SDGs’ impact assessment with a case study on AI integration in the supply chain”, by Francesca Mazzi, lecturer at Brunel University London; and “Anti-Asian racism in US politics”, by Pei-te Lien, professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the United States.

Jacqueline Norton, head of acquisition for the humanities at OUP, told University World News that Oxford Intersections had already engaged “96 academic scholars from every continent but Antarctica and across 28 disciplines”, including traditional and newer subjects, such as environmental humanities.

The programme will run “for a decade or more”, and each topic will be developed for three years.



A framework to solve global issues

“Looking at the way that research is moving, what funders are preferring and what research projects scholars are getting involved with,” she noted, “allowing scholars to get into the same space with other disciplines and to work on real-world challenges is something that is not quite served” by conventional academic publication.

Norton added that, although universities really are investing in interdisciplinarity, some scholars, and “perhaps more with the early career researchers”, might be working with an advanced studies institute within the university that gives them “access to scholars from across their humanities division”.

Sophie Goldsworthy, director of content strategy and acquisition at OUP, added: “A lot of publishers are starting to think about the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We wanted to make sure that by getting outside of those scholarly discipline silos and getting outside some of our own publishing models too, we could make something that was sort of bigger than the sum of its parts.”

Goldsworthy stressed that OUP wants to make scholarly research “relevant to the real world” at a time when “library budgets are reducing, departments are closing all around the world, particularly humanities departments”, lots of universities are struggling with their budgets in different countries, and there is a rise of misinformation and “lots of attacks on education”.

Although “people think the real value is just in the hard sciences and in medicine”, Goldsworthy gave the example of the COVID-19 pandemic in which, while such sciences created a vaccine, humanities and social sciences taught us, for instance, “historically what typically happens after a pandemic to global economics”.

Norton believes that interconnected humanities and social research might encourage a deeper look at present world issues with a longer-term look to “give a more informed understanding of how we got to the challenges that we are facing now” and what responses could be implemented.

Oxford Intersections is designed to also become relevant for policy-makers and decision-makers, Goldsworthy pointed out, explaining that OUP will use an AI research assistant on the platform to “surface summaries that are very much tailored” to policy-makers, and have policy-makers curating “an offering around those summaries”.

“It will have to be very much focused on actions and learnings and very directive for that audience,” she told University World News.

Indeed, Goldsworthy stressed: “There has been a positive groundswell from everybody we have approached, and in academic publishing that is not always the case.” Therefore she hopes that Oxford Intersections will become a pathfinder for institutions “driving impact for their researchers”.

For higher education institutions, besides helping students and especially scholars to find research that usually they ask librarians to provide, Oxford Intersections encourages interdisciplinary thinking, which “particularly people early in their teaching careers find it difficult to articulate to students”, said Goldsworthy.

Furthermore, given that “interdisciplinary masters are being set up across some of the big research universities”, Norton would love to see Oxford Intersections providing a framework for such a teaching offer at postgraduate level.

For instance, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States offers a doctoral programme in history, anthropology, science, technology and society; and a masters degree in health sciences and technology. The National University of Singapore offers a MSc in environmental management that unites six academic units, including law.

Universities called to change their structure

Debra Rowe, president of the US Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development, still sees a long way to go: in interdisciplinarity, “research questions are more relevant to the needs of the practitioners and the policy-makers”, and these groups can inform the research agenda to be more based in the real-world issues.

However, “unfortunately, our universities are usually not structured to assure enough connections with policy-makers and practitioners”.

Rowe stressed that her learning and teaching experience and studies about Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) have shown that students learn better when they practise being change agents in their community and “get feedback from that experience”.

Meanwhile, climate scientists have also realised that to fight climate change, behavioural scientists and humanities researchers are needed to understand “how to help people change their behaviours and shift societal norms”. And interdisciplinarity is just a start – education and research will be “a lot less valuable” if practitioners and policy-makers are not involved.

Rowe also noted that many lecturers want to embrace interdisciplinarity, and over the last decade there have been lots of examples of published interdisciplinary research. In the US and globally, she added, higher education students are also required to take general education courses to develop critical thinking across multiple subjects, in addition to the specific areas of their degrees.

Furthermore, some universities, such as Michigan State University, “put together disciplines and expect them to work together”, and it is included in the interdisciplinary style of the general education courses.

The Disciplinary Associations Network for Sustainability, a network of over 40 academic societies, has an initiative that emphasises including ESD in job descriptions and performance appraisals, and core pedagogies focusing on interdisciplinary real-world projects.

However, Rowe told University World News that “the problem is that too much of higher education is still stuck in an old model of disciplinary silos”, and early career faculty members, in order to get tenure, traditionally have to publish in their discipline.

There appears to be a problem around how interdisciplinary researchers get recognition for the work they are doing, so researchers stick to their disciplines that will fast track them towards tenure.

Steps for universities to become more relevant to the SDGs

As regards promoting the SDGs through interdisciplinarity, Rowe recommended the HESI SDG Publishers Compact Fellows’ Top Action Tips, written by academic societies and publishers, among others, to help academic authors, publishers, researchers and practitioners “to communicate across the silos”.

She also praised the work of Krista Hiser, as senior advisor for advancing sustainability education and the key competencies framework at the US-based Global Council for Science and the Environment, which partners with universities and sustainability bodies, by working with overarching competencies of sustainability, which “should be reinforced in all disciplines”.

For instance, the organisation’s Sustainability in Higher Education programme aims to provide dynamic, context-sensitive guidance for a diversity of courses.

Rowe is also part of the advisory council at the US Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). It helps unite many leading professional associations, such as the American Mathematical Society and the International Society for Ecological Economics, which have been working to integrate sustainability into their fields on “what are the unique and important contributions they can each make” and how they can collaborate across disciplines.

Market requires more green skills

In France, the global sustainability organisation Sulitest provides tools designed to measure and improve sustainability literacy, which is extensively used by students and universities around the world.

One of the challenges of university education is that most people will not use their degree in the subject they got it in. Broader understanding of sustainability at an undergraduate level, which is inherently interdisciplinary, supports the ability of graduates to apply sustainable concepts wherever they end up.

Indeed Tina McKenzie, policy and advocacy chair at the Federation of Small Businesses in the United Kingdom, told University World News that when many small businesses are already taking action to mitigate their impact on the environment and customers “increasingly see sustainability as a priority when making purchasing decisions, skills needed to operate sustainably should be embedded in all employed roles and across businesses generally”.

However, she stressed, there is a gap in green skills, which will be a particular barrier for those businesses in the ‘green economy’ and growing green sectors. Therefore, “teaching green skills in the education system, by embedding climate and sustainability learning in the curriculum and promoting career opportunities arising from the path to net zero, would be a positive step to try to bridge the gap”.