This paper describes and reflects on the imaginaries, knowledge, processes and methods of a new four-year research project called Performing AI (PAI): Governance, Agency and Action – An Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation’s “collaborative and interdisciplinary research” program, the project assembles researchers from three Swiss universities (the Universities of Fribourg and Lausanne and the Zurich University of the Arts) and Japan (University of Tokyo’s General Systems Science department in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences). PAI’s goal is to investigate “AI” from epistemic, ontological, aesthetic and ethical angles, neither taking for granted its “uncontroversial ‘thingness’”, nor assuming received disciplinary frames to fit the purpose. Instead, we address how AI is “performed” – that is, enacted and produced – across different discursive and material sites and contexts. PAI asks multiple questions: How is AI enacted in governmental policy? What does artistic practice do to AI, and what does AI do to artistic practice? How is AI reconfigured in interdisciplinary scientific domains such as artificial life (as opposed to computer science)? How is AI taken up, or reconfigured in the public sphere, including schools, museums and festivals focused on the intersections of art, technology and society?

This position paper chronicles and critiques my attempts to help establish sport as a field of application for applied linguistics. In this way, it is a nontraditional article: a first-person, autobiographical, position paper. As background to this endeavor, the paper first acknowledges the critical role of collaborative publications and the establishment of a research network. The paper then explores the affordances and complications associated with building a sports-based community of applied linguistics, especially given preexisting scholarship in sports linguistics, as well as considerable scholarship in the related discipline of communication studies. The paper then briefly recounts my own research in sports linguistics with the aim of bringing to consciousness my goals and purpose. Drawing on Bakhtin’s imagined audience, I reflect on how these motivations not only shaped my research agenda but, in turn, my conceptions of the relationship between linguistics and sport and applied linguistics. I then turn to Bernstein to further reflect on my classification of sports linguistics – the discipline, its knowledge and knowers – and its influence on my attempts at community building. As a position paper, I conclude with some insights for readers who find themselves engaged in similar attempts at community building.

This article discusses a case of how epistemic friction, discomfort and disagreement can become generative resources for interdisciplinary Responsible artificial intelligence (AI) research in health. Drawing on a four-year collaboration (2022–2026) on Responsible AI for health decision-making between AI Research, Medicine, Humanities and Law at a Dutch University and its University Medical Center, the article analyzes specific moments of “disconcertment” arising from interdisciplinary discussions on three central and interrelated concepts within the research group: (1) bias, (2) ground truth and (3) error. By analytically narrating the epistemic tensions produced by discipline-specific approaches to these concepts, the article shows how moments of disconcertment can create productive spaces for deepening interdisciplinary engagement. These moments may enable participating groups to address epistemological differences and reflect on taken-for-granted research relationships between their disciplines. Building on this insight, the article argues that moments of disconcertment can be mobilized as “little tools of friction” in interdisciplinary AI research more broadly. Such tools of friction support practices of “doing difference together” and may generate new possibilities and potentials for (inter)disciplinary thinking on AI, fostering new directions of doing interdisciplinary AI-based medicine and beyond.

This article offers a critical literature review on the debate on constitutional identity, combining a synthesis of existing literature with a critical reframing of the concept’s theoretical and methodological foundations. While constitutional identity has become increasingly prominent in legal and political debates – particularly within the European Union – its meanings and functions remain contested. The article develops a typology of approaches to constitutional identity, distinguishing two main strands. First, it examines constitutional identity as a legal doctrinal notion. In this sense, identity can function either as a static concept – anchored in an unchanging normative core that limits political or legal interference – or as a dynamic concept, shaped through interactions between domestic constitutional orders and external legal ideas and practices. Second, the article turns to the descriptive use of constitutional identity, understood as a way to explain how a political community understands itself through its constitution. This part surveys key philosophical debates, including how constitutional identity negotiates sameness and difference, how it evolves over time, how it relates to competing conceptions of the constitutional subject, and how it is constructed through narrative, symbolism, and social practice. The article concludes by arguing that if constitutional identity is not a fixed essence but a dialogical and constructed assemblage of identities, then its study must go beyond the legal domain. It calls for a deepening of the interdisciplinary research agenda that includes insights from philosophy, sociology, discourse theory, and literary studies.

This paper investigates a specific culture of interdisciplinarity that has gained traction at the intersection of applied AI and ethics. To address social and ethical harms of AI applications, scholars have suggested importing norms, methodologies and governance frameworks from established disciplines such as the social sciences or medicine. I show how this importation presupposes and endorses a framing of applied AI as a domain separate from established disciplines. Yet, such separation is what initially allows AI practitioners to operate outside those disciplinary norms that have evolved to prevent harms now associated with AI applications. Conversely, if AI applications were understood as situated firmly within these disciplines, practitioners would already be accountable to their norms and standards. Paradoxically, this culture of interdisciplinarity might thus reinforce a problematic disciplinary isolation of applied AI underlying the very ethical issues it seeks to mitigate – fighting symptoms while playing into their cause. In response, I outline three paths forward.

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.

The two cultures described in 1959 by C.P. Snow still haunt the University where he developed his reputation. While the policy legacy of that debate is often reduced to concerns about numeracy skills and the supposed objectivity of quantitative evidence, the class distinctions of sophisticated culture versus lowly trade are again being blurred by social media and generative AI. Working in the other Cambridge, at the MIT AI Lab, Philip Agre advocated critical technical practice. Amid widespread anxiety about the ethics of AI, this is often taken to be an appeal for engineers to be guided by the humanities, and for interdisciplinary centres to focus on the ends rather than the means of AI research. However, in the machine learning era, that agenda can easily become statistically reactive rather than analytically descriptive. In this paper, I argue from the perspective of craft and design, that the most significant distinction, and opportunity for collaborative endeavour, is not between the disciplinary differences between the sciences and humanities, but between interdisciplinary cultures of making and of observational critique.